Well, May has come and gone, which is sadly to say that I missed the regular deadline for Indiecade. In my young naive eyes however, hope springs eternal; the late entry deadline extends to the end of June, so I’m not out for the count. Plans haven’t really changed, they’ve just gotten a bit…bumpy.
There is, I have to admit, still quite a lot of work left to be done, and I fell quite short of my optimistic estimates. But the deadline did keep me honest, and I managed to accomplish a lot. The character art is coming around the home stretch, the tilesets for mapping the game environment are done, I’ve cut into the writing, the AI pathfinding/movement has been smoothed out…and I’ve finished implementing another important aspect to the game that I haven’t really talked about yet. It’s a bit hard to describe in short, but it was a major goal that I’m happy to have behind me.
There’s a lot more to say and quite a bit to show, but for now I’ll end by just laying out some tile art, which is used to generate the rooms in the game. It’s not the flashiest kind of art asset to show off by itself, so I’m just dumping a lot of it at once to make up for that. The image isn’t exhaustive, that is to say there are a couple tilesets not shown that will be in the game, but this is more than enough to get the idea across!
I feel I’m a bit overdue for an art update, so here’s a twofer; two new characters in one post!
I’m not sure I want to go into great detail about each character whose art I finish, since I think a big part of the game will be figuring out about them as you play. And a lot of times they won’t be at all what they first seem, so it’s a bit hard to come up with non-spoiler descriptions.
First up is Xu:
Second is Marcurio:
I’ve already tried to mix up the pace/mood of the characters’ walk-cycles, so hopefully the animations are still clear. It definitely makes things more interesting, and I generally walk away from each character having learned something new about animating.
Also, here’s the typical spritesheets for both games, old and new, side by side.
Today I’d like to show the art behind one of the characters in Why Am I Dead 2, and use it as a bit of an example for what can be expected in the sequel’s art.
Meet one of ten major characters in the game, Alton.
As you can see, I’m sticking with the Earthbound-esque style of the previous game, which means bright colors, strong outlines, and simple shapes. However, I will be putting much more attention to detail in each sprite, making presentation better all around. This particular sprite above is the result of many iterations, and a lot of time spent learning more about pixel art. I’m generally not so concerned about visuals, but I really want to cram as much personality into each sprite, since the game is so character-centric.
But the part I take most pride in is the considerable improvements that all animations will have. In the first game, every walk animation had four frames, but with the huge caveat that two of them were just the regular idle frame. Doing that saved a lot of time, but it’s poor form and looks really shoddy. To demonstrate, let’s revisit the character Cricket from the first Why Am I Dead.
These animations served their purpose at the time, but would be a huge limitation going forward. You can probably notice that the legs come together and apart in an unrealistic way, which is the cost of recycling frames — and overall it’s a bit choppy. All of the new animations, however, will use six frames rather than four, and all of them will be unique, and they will have full-body animations, not just moving hands and feet.
(There will also be some bonus animations that I shall not be posting yet, but which will be in game!)
The one thing that the previous game did have going for it was that all of the animations were done ground-up for each character; I never used character templates to speed things up, which means that every character had a different walk, as choppy as it was. Quite a few people pointed this out, as it gave each character a different feel, and brought out their personality more — some ran, some hobbled, some sauntered. Well, that is a practice that I fully plan to continue for the sequel, as time-consuming as it is. So, expect to see more characters in the future, each with their own strut!
I was hoping to have an update sooner than this, but programming goes at its own pace and no one else’s. This should be the first, and last, major WAID2 update that lacks any visual or audible component, as I’m wrapping up the nuts-and-bolts development and moving into art and writing.
I’ve been on the fence regarding how early I actually start uploading material from the game. I’ve decided recently that I’d rather hold off until I’ve moved past art/writing/assets that are “work in progress” (or worse, place-holders!) before I do so — any benefits of a greater sense of progress for me are outbalanced by the risk of making a poor first impression.
So, sadly, you’ll just have to take my word that all of the following have been done:
Completely rebuilt how dialogue is handled, which means…
Writing dialogue is way easier for me to write, and for others to read (hopefully)
Looping dialogue; before, all dialogue options inevitably led to an end. Now some options can loop back around to previous parts of the conversation; convenient for menus or for revisiting information.
In-dialogue variables (eg. <player> tag in script will be replaced with whichever character the player is controlling)
Save / Load Function! This would have been useful in the first game, but is a necessity for the second!
Game “props” (such as doors, tables, beds, etc) have some extra attributes…
They can initiate dialogue when you try to talk to them, as sort of an “examine” function
They store information about which character can “use” them. For example, some doors will be locked for certain characters, and open for other characters (who presumably have a key).
Some props will have different dialogue results for different characters. One character might be bored by an object, and one might find it of great personal significance.
New possession ability mentioned earlier: some characters can be “fully possessed”, which allows you to talk as the Ghost through their body, opening up different sets of dialogues and effects!
Completely rebuilt how collision detection is handled, which allows for both smoother and more efficient movement.
Finished character AI, adding safeguards that should drastically reduce unwanted emergent behavior.
I think that’s all the major stuff, though there were some minor background changes that are much more boring. Sorry this update is so colorless, but I wanted to get it out anyway.
Well, so much for expanding the content of my blog and frequency of posts–it’s been nearly a month since my last update!
Oi. I blame it on holidays.
For anyone sticking around, I figure it’s about time I put in concrete my next major project. I’ve alluded to it pretty strongly before, and you’ve probably figured it out from the title, but just for clarity’s sake: Why Am I Dead 2!
I wouldn’t normally jump at the opportunity to do a sequel to something; I’ve got enough ideas for new content that I’m itching to make. So when I say that I’m making a sequel, that comes with the implicit statement that I believe the original left room for either improvement or further exploration, or, in this case, both. And, of course, that comes with the implicit statement that I’ll be aiming to make a sequel that substantially improves or expands the original, or, in this case, both.
So with Why Am I Dead 2, I’m raising the stakes. The game will be considerably longer and have higher production value: better graphics, better writing, better audio. A mostly new cast with lots of characters that I think you’ll love (and/or hate). Instead of approaching it as a side-project, as I did with my last game, I’ll be approaching the development of this game as its own full-time job.
How I imagine myself about a month from now
As a result of this, the game will not be free. This is mainly just to support the time I spend developing the game–the original Why Am I Dead, although I enjoyed making the ever-loving crap out of it, earned a laughably small amount of money. Which is fine, of course. And that doesn’t mean I’ll be charging a lot–I don’t have a particular price worked out yet, but you can be assured that it will be very very cheap by anyone’s standards. I’ll definitely be releasing a long-ish free demo as well, so you can try the game out and get a good idea what it’s all about first.
(Note, this doesn’t mean I’m done releasing free flash games forever! I just think that for this project, that model doesn’t really make sense.)
I know what you’re probably thinking now. When on Earth is this coming out? I want to give you all my money!!! Okay, I may have embellished your thoughts a little bit, sue me. Still, the basic time-line that I have for development is about 2 months of full-time core development, and another 2 months of full-time buffer, which means taking into account things not going as planned (because they never ever do), beta-testing, and polishing. So that puts me at 4 months of full-time work.
But regardless of the exact timeline, when I release the game it will be polished and tested to death; I have no plans to repeat the stormy release of the original.
During this time, I’ll be hoping to market my game, which is something totally new to me. I may even do little teasers and release info about the cast, story, and gameplay in episodes. Who knows.
I’ve been talking a lot about Why Am I Dead recently, mainly because I’m pretty sure 90% of my readership is now coming from people who played the game. Of course, I’ve been doing other stuff this whole time, but before I move on to other things I want to comment on some of the most common comments/questions regarding WAID that I’ve gotten.
1. Are there alternate endings?
Yes and no. When I was originally making the game I wanted to have at least two different endings. However, I cut a lot of stuff out, so the original release only had one. But after I saw this question repeatedly, I frantically whipped up an alternate ending somewhat similar to what I had been planning before. So, yes, there are currently two endings to the game.
2. The end leaves so much unanswered! Who’s the (spoiler)? And what’s the (spoiler)’s (spoiler) all about?
This was partially because I rushed the ending. But some things were intentionally left up to the player to figure out based on hints scattered through the game. I’m not a fan of keeping people guessing for its own sake — generally everything that’s brought up has a canonical answer to it, and not some cheap “Ooh we’ll never know!”
3. Why doesn’t the ghost influence people more, especially at the end?
I had always imagined that the ghost merely pushed people in more subtle ways, rather than completely possess them. In hindsight, I didn’t communicate this to the player well enough.
4. Why don’t you remember why you’re dead?
You have just been turned from a living, breathing grown man into a floating piece of cytoplasm. You don’t have a brain anymore. Memory loss, to me, seems kind of inevitable.
5. The game was/is glitchy as hell!
Yeah, it was/is. Sorry about that. I think I got most of the major bugs by this point. However, some portals may be using older versions of my game.
6. It should have been longer, or there should be a longer version of this concept!
Good news! I very much plan to make a sequel that will be a longer version of this concept.
So, GDC China just ended. I had a great time, met some great people, and listened to some fantastic talks.
But that’s enough of that (at least, for now). Because, you see, the first morning of the conference was the day MochiAds accepted my game Why Am I Dead. It was also the day I was allowed to put my game on the bigger flash portals. I just sort of did this without any real expectations for anything, except for maybe a transient increase in ad impressions. Mentally, I had already finished the game and made it public. This was just a little footnote.
I was so, so, so stupidly wrong.
With such a promising mechanic, I hope WAID ends up being more of a proof of concept for a bigger project… As a standalone game, Why Am I Dead? has flaws, but it’s still plenty fun enough to justify sinking 30 minutes to an hour into it…
Clearly at the moment, the developer has a greater amount of skill at constructing an effective mystery than depicting it in Flash. However, it is an ambitious, atmospheric work reminiscent of Hotel Dusk or Colonel’s Bequest, and it has quite the killer ending. This marks Peltast Games as a designer to watch out for in the future.
It got the daily first spot on Newgrounds on 11/17/12 with about 9,500 views
…and is continuing quite healthily on the “Popular Games” section with, as of now, over a 4 star rating
Also got included on FreeIndieGam.es, a web-blog that I am a big fan of
I don’t know how all of the above looks to people who are not me. After all, a lot of the praise is qualified with good criticism, and there are Daily winners on Newgrounds every, well, every day. So, perhaps none of this shocks or awes you, the audience.
As for myself, however, well. I. It’s just. Ahem. Forgive me as I pretend that I’m on Tumblr for a moment.
There’s a lot more to say on the game as a whole and I may write up a post-mortem in the near future. As for now, there’s still a lot of work to be done on the game regarding bugs and APIs and whatnot and I should be doing all that and not posting on my blog!
First off real quick, after work with a graphic designer I know, I have a new logo which you’ll see emblazoned at the top of this blog. I’m quite happy with the result! With this new logo in hand, I redesigned my home website once again. The results, before and after:
The result is a brighter design with way more space, and a quite sexy logo if I do say so myself! I also used a bit of JQuery in this version of the site, which was nice to dabble in.
The main thing I’d like to talk about in this post, though, is that I put up a game prototype on my website. I’ve been working on it for about a month and a half alongside preparing Why Am I Dead for its release into the wild.
Of course the big issue with it is that there’s no tutorial, so it may take some patience to actually understand what’s going on. I wrote at length about the rules and how they work in that page, so I’ll not do the same thing here. Instead, I’ll talk more about the technical side of things, and why this prototype took over a month to make. Sure, it doesn’t have immediate visual appeal, but that’s not what prototypes are about. And frankly, I did some stuff that I’m quite satisfied with.
1: Menus in menus in menus in menus
The game is turn-based, and, as with most turn-based games, it centers around picking from a range of different options which are on a menu. Some actions may have further options related to those options, which require some other menu. Think about typical RPGs. You can attack, defend, cast a spell, and use an item. But if you select Spell, what spell do you pick? And then, who or what is the target of that spell?
In my case, the details get way, way more complicated. For instance, the actions you can choose from are often restrained by temporary effects. Get hit in the legs, and now you can’t pick Move or Dash. Even more, you can select two actions per turn and sometimes these effects will go away in between those two actions, thus freeing up new actions mid-turn. So, the result is that there will be menus in menus in menus, appearing and disappearing, switching around and changing all the time.
One of my main priorities was to make this as easy and intuitive to program as possible, so that when game mechanics inevitably get changed as the game is refined, actually implementing those changes is painless and straightforward. To that end, I think I’ve succeeded; just about any change in the player menu, no matter how big or small, can be accomplished in several lines of code on the client-side.
Good thing none of this is confusing!
2: Customization!
After I got the basic game mechanics in, I decided to implement something I’d only been toying with beforehand; full equipment customization! That is to say, every piece of equipment or weaponry would be represented on screen in battle, and move alongside your character when he attacks and defends, and so on.
The thing that made this a bit more ambitious for me is that I don’t use Flash Professional, or really any tools that might make this easier; I am working in FlashDevelop 100% of the time. Still, it was pretty straight-forward for the most part, if more time-consuming. One of the most vexing issues, to be honest, was making sure that the equipment had the correct rotation and positioning when I flipped the bitmap for the opponent.
And again, I’m pretty satisfied with the results. The work behind making new equipment, as well as swapping between pieces of equipment, are trivial. And though the prototype doesn’t have flashy animations, the poses behind each action are convincing enough to make this effect, at least to me, visually impressive.
Yes, it’s kinda choppy. Yes, vectors would rotate better. But bitmaps have more charm!
So that’s about it. I’d love any feedback on my li’l prototype, since it’s still in an early and flexible stage. I’ll actually be taking a break on this project in order to handle some real-life stuff and other things I’ve been juggling around, but I definitely like the direction this is going in, and fully plan to return to it in the future. With a tutorial, an equipment screen and some kind of metagame, I think this could be a really deep and fun game.
I got off extremely lucky compared to many other North-easterners regarding Hurricane Sandy. In my area there were power outages and the occasional tree falling on some poor sod’s car, but no floodings or fires or what have you. I wasn’t even one of the people who lost power, I just lost internet for several days, and I’m pretty grateful of that.
And not long after my internet returned, my first game is now online!
As my first game’s launch, this is kinda how I feel right now:
yeah
The image is taken from this article written by Derek Yu, which mirrors my thoughts and feelings on finishing a game in a myriad of ways. I mean, I had kinda already finished Why Am I Dead a long long time ago, but only sort of finished it. This time, I finished finished it. And it feels good. Oh, here’s another image from the same article that seems appropriate:
feels good man
Anyway. With all this excitement, it’s pretty much impossible for my standards of success not to be met.
“This game is too short!” == My game left people wanting more. Success!
“This game confused me.” == My game got people thinking. Success!
“This game was impossible to beat.” == My game was ambitious. Success!
“I absolutely hate this game and I want to injure you.” == My game, uh…created an emotional response. SUCCESS!
…On a more serious note, I’m looking forward to getting feedback and growing as a developer/designer from the responses I get. And of course, other projects are in the works, one of which I’m very overdue on talking about!
I was planning on making an update earlier, but my laptop unfortunately broke and was out of commission for about a week. I managed to survive this grueling experience but it slowed me down a bit.
It’s been a pretty long time since my last update, and while I really wish I could say that Why Am I Dead is 100% finished, I’m still holding onto it to beta-test and tie up loose ends. Again, my goals for the project have shifted and become more ambitious: I only get to release this game once, and I’d like for it to be as finished and polished as possible.
I don’t think it would be space or time efficient to explain thoroughly everything I’ve done with WAID since the last update, so here’s a list:
Wrote dialogue. Lots of it. There are 9 characters in the game that can be talked to, 8 of which can be possessed, and each character combination results in a different dialogue. 8 x 8 = 64, plus any additional dialogues which are unlocked in the progression of the story. So far I’ve written about 90-95% of the base 64 dialogues, and about 70% of the additional story dialogue.
Finished graphics of the game, which involved making a couple more characters and lots of various props/scenery. A quick look at the completed cast (some of which were in the last demo):
A professional pixel artist I ain’t, but I try.
Overhauled how external assets were used; originally I loaded them ingame, but it’s far better for distribution to have them embedded into the .swf file. This occasionally was a bit involved, since embedding can’t really be done procedurally; it’s all copy+paste. In one instance I had to change how I used my tile sets to create maps.
Created a pre-loader and main menu.
Minor fixes with dialogue graphics, such as including word-wrap, making sure options don’t overlap, adding a name-box for the player, prompt to hit ‘E’ when text is done scrolling, etc.
Yet again, tune-ups with collision detection, trying to make things as smooth and precise as I can.
Other miscellaneous stuff, like having NPCs turn to face you when you talk to them.
A very, very small peek into WAID’s dialogue.
Now for something completely different.
When I started moving into the final stages of development, I allowed myself to begin considering ideas for my next project(s). Then when my computer was being repaired and I couldn’t get any real work done on WAID, I took the opportunity to develop one of my ideas a bit more. And despite what bad practice it was, I used my iPad to write some code for the framework of the game, even though I couldn’t compile it. I’ve since compiled it and smoothed out any problems, and so I can say that I’ve begun working on my next project.
Since I’ve already got a lot in this update, I won’t talk too much about it. It’s a turn-based strategy game going for a more strategically complicated Risk-style game. Two major reasons I’ve decided to work on this next:
1. I spent a ton of time on Mandate, which has much, much more complicated strategy and simulation components. It would be a nice change of pace to make a strategy game that has a very narrow and understandable game mechanic, but which can still add something new to the genre.
2. Perhaps more importantly, work on something like this is more about programming than it is about writing or art. Not that I dislike the latter two at all, but again, the simplicity of it is refreshing; getting the game mechanics done is really going to be 80-90% of the work. I won’t have to create a cast of characters or write their dialogues, I just have to implement things.
So, that’s what I’ve been up to. The next post will hopefully include me linking to the final version of “Why Am I Dead”!
peltastsoftware.blog 