#rat_game dev_diary game_design game_development

[rat-game]

Update 10/2020

I haven’t posted in a while so I’d like to talk about what I’ve been up to. I’ve been working on rat_game every single day though

Programming

In the past few weeks I’ve been refactoring my old stuff, the problem with doing something you haven’t mastered yet is that by the time you finish, you’re already better at it than when you started and everything suddenly seems sub-par. That happened a lot for my programming stuff but I’m confident that this time I’ve chosen far better software-design that hopefully future-proves my code. I’ve commited thousands of lines to my github in the past few weeks, I try to start work around 14:00 and stop at 20:00 and then maybe do some art-stuff at night. I’ve had a lot of personal stuff go really bad recently and having something to focus on that is fun was a huge help for me. I’ve also started working with GLSL which is a shader language and doing that was incredibly interesting, it’s a completely different paradigm than both functional and object-oriented programming and the fact that you can literally see what your code does because it translates to an image is incredibly rewarding. By learning shaders I’ve tried to face one of my biggest weaknesses knowledge-wise which is geometry and while I very much have not gotten any better at that I’m now able to create any effect I’d like in GLSL making the world of visual possiblities for rat_game gaining a new horizon.

Fig. 1: My IDE showing of the dozens of files and thousands of lines of code

Art

So I was looking for a gif of an earthbound background for reference and I kinda ended up scrolling through the google images recommended picture, it was all mock-up- and fan art of earthbound fights an seeing so many of those I couldn’t help but be very conscious of the least common denominator of all of them and I kinda felt like my vision for the rat_game was... very much also that. Obviously earthbound is a huge inspiration but I’ve tried with both the story and mechanics to not just be an earthbound romhack. That also means not looking like one visually though so I made the decision that I don’t just want static sprites of enemies sit in front of an often-recycled background. Instead I think I will aim to give each enemy encounter it’s own unique background, for example a spider enemy could have a giant net in the background or maybe there’s even an enemy that is bigger than the entire screen so you only see parts of it. I will also try to consider more animation, at the very least I’ll have 3 sprites, one for undamaged, one for damaged and one for dead or knocked out. I don’t think I have the resources to animate every enemy myself but if I end up having enough money to hire an animator that is totally something that’s at the top of my wishlist. I know this is all kinda abstract but I’ve been creating demo textures for my engine so I have something to render and just doodling random shit I’ve come to be more and more comfortable to not just imitate earthbound sprites but do my own thing.

Fig. 2: A random spoder enemy I doodled in like 5mins but that I’m surprisingly attached to after staring at it for 2 weeks while debugging (no pun intended)

Story

I mentioned before that the story of the game is done, it’s all in my head and partially on paper but I still feel like I don’t have that good of a plan because all this story is mostly irrelevant for what happens in the demo which is the main objective right now. I’m currently thinking about giving the demo it’s own scenario kinda separate from the main story, here’s a quick elevator pitch for that:

Prof being a scientists he leads the party to an abandoned research lab. It’s build inside of an old resident-evil mansion but rather than being a functioning mansion it’s mostly just a ruin that proper lab-equipment has been build into. Imagine someone found an uncharted level and decided to not bother modifying it unless absolutely necessary so one wing might be falling apart while one room over is decked out in science equipment. This lab is where the source was created and by exploring it I have the chance to slowly feed enough exposition to create intrigue via scattered diary entries research papers and correspondence (I’m kidding, it’ll mostly be environmental story telling, remember that one of my design prerogative is to use the minimum amount of text necessary). A nice thing about this lab being the demo scenario is that I can go wild with the enemies, I need to stretch rat_games entire hidden tutorial fights into a 30min demo that still delivers on story and world-building so having the freedom to not care about strict theming like I do in the main games chapters is a huge help. Tl;dr: imagine the pokemon mansion on cinnabar island from red/blue/yellow but it actually has stuff happen rather than just having a few statues onto which mewtwos story is written with crayons.

So yeah, I’ve been keeping myself busy. I tend to listen to music when I work and I had it a few times now where i enter this “flow state”, kinda like when your jogging and serotonin and your brain stem takes over and your body just moves, instead I’m programming or drawing. I don’t mean to humble brag rather I’m trying to illustrate that I really, really enjoy doing this and if I had a wish I’d wish for 20k€ so I can just do this full time for 2 years but alas that will have to wait.