hatimbcaptsone

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 14 - march 23rd

I've implemented a lot of changes to my demo, which are summarized in my feedback paper. The major ones include the inclusion of a pause menu with sound and control settings, an improvement (though still not working properly) of my save and loading system, an overhaul of the way I handle dialogue to make it more efficient, save changes, and be able to have more than four dialogue options, adding water to the second level and changing the sprites for the fog, adding sound effects and screen shaking, and starting work on more music tracks.

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 13 - march 16th

I released the demo, which can be found here. I also made a feedback form to be filled by my playtesters. Below is a video of a playthrough of my demo at the stage it was at on March 2nd. Things I've had to work on for my demo since the last devlog include: sprites for the plants in limbo, lilypads to walk on, scrolling background, black fog objects, text for the god of passage, the transition between level 1 and 2, footsteps, re-made UI elements, sitting animation for the hero and the priestess.

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 12 - february 18th

This week, I made a more concrete plan of what I plan to include in my demo:

-Meeting the God of Passage -Being taken to the priestess -Convincing her to open the gate

I hope to have it finished by next Thursday. I started working on a piece of music (out of 2) for the demo, and I worked on more of the Sprites I needed, including a walk cycle for the god and a portrait. I’ve also prepared a Google Form to receive feedback from my playtesters.

I’m not really worried about my capstone, I think it’s mostly on track, but I’ve been worrying a lot lately about job hunting and it’s been getting in the way of me working on my stuff. I hope I can get more work done this week.

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 11 - february 9th

This week, I wrote more dialogue for presenting certain items to the priestess, and I started work on the Sprite for the God of Passage. I also started thinking about making a playable demo soon and what to include in it, and I’ve contacted another student to help with video editing for my game trailer.

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 10 - february 2nd

Not a lot to share this week. I was busy with other projects including a cartoon for the Gazelle and making a game in 48 hours for a global game jam. I also had my first Pixel Prototype Studio class yesterday with Bennett Foddy (creator of QWOP and Getting Over It), and I liked him a lot, so I’m considering trying to meet him to talk about my capstone and see if he would be willing to join my defense panel.

 I did write some more dialogue though and scripted some events, including the first scene where the hero meets the priestess and gets her to let him in the temple. I’m hoping to get more work done the following week.

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 09 - january 18th

Winter break is officially over, so I will use this blog post to reflect on what I’ve been up to. Not having to do two other classes on top of capstone allowed me to spend much more time on it, and I’m grateful to have had a longer break than usual, which allowed me to get quite a bit of work done (which I probably won’t have the luxury to do in the Spring since I have to catch up with a lot of requirements in addition to dealing with graduation and finding a job). 

The first major thing I did was sort out the exact story of the game. Until this break, the story was very blurry and I hadn’t really gotten to flesh out the details until now. I won’t write down here every thing I’ve come up with since that would take way too much space, but here’s a link to a (very messy, meant for my eyes only) doc for the whole story I came up with, including the specific puzzles the player encounters everywhere etc.

After writing all this down and doing some more work on programming and making assets for my game (which I’ll detail more further down), I figured that I had to scale down my capstone if I didn’t want to compromise my vision. So for now, I have decided that I will only focus in making the first spirit encounter (the priestess) (as well as the introduction and a conclusion where the hero meets the God of Passage) as opposed to having all three spirits (in other words, I’m only executing one third of the story I wrote down). I still plan to work further on this project after graduation and maybe even expand the story beyond, but for my capstone, I think it would be better if I just focus on this snippet and try to polish everything as much as possible.

In as short as I could describe it, this is the story content I plan to adapt for my capstone:

The hero receives a prophecy telling him he’s the chosen one. He faces a monster and immediately dies. He goes to limbo and meets the God of Passage. He strikes a deal with them. He’s sent to meet the first spirit he’s supposed to help, in the destroyed temple of the Goddess of the Hidden. The way to the temple is barred by the protective spirit - a priestess at the temple - but she lets him in after he makes it clear he doesn’t mean harm. She tells him about the massacre that took place there. She worries that people will forget about her culture. He offers that she gives him a rundown on the temple’s activities so she can perpetuate her knowledge, and she accepts. From finding objects, combining them, and showing them to her, he finds out that there were children who lived in the temple. He discovers that some of them escaped with one of the priests before the massacre, which angers the priestess for failing their duty. The hero summons the Goddess of the Hidden by reconstituting her statue. The priestess is initially in awe, but becomes upset that the Goddess had the power to appear at any moment but didn’t when they needed her, and she rejects her. She understands now that the religion doesn’t matter as much as the community they formed, and she’s glad some of it is still alive somewhere, so she forgives the priest that escaped with the children. She moves on. The hero meets the God of Passage again and they talk about his experience. He’s then sent to the next spirit. To be continued.

Finally, I had another breakthrough. After thinking about the story and why I wrote it the way I did and having conversations about it with my friends and my therapist, I identified a theme central to my game that was there all along but that I couldn’t bring myself to admit; religion, and the loss of (religious) faith. Last Fall, I stopped considering myself a Muslim, but I wasn’t ready to address it explicitly then; yet, I still wrote about priestesses that reject their gods, gods that don’t really exist, and characters that find fulfillment outside of organized religion. I think I understand a little better where my inspiration came from, and now that I’ve identified this theme, I hope that my direction going forward will be clearer and more focused (both in terms of game dev and essay-writing).

As for doing actual work on my project, it’s been a lot of drawing assets, writing dialogue, and fleshing out interactions with the game world. I also made portraits that display the emotion of the speaker when they’re talking, and I made an (imperfect for now) save and load system. Here are a few screenshots:

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 08 - november 17th

This week, I developed my project on GameMaker. I re-implemented a dialogue and inventory system, but I tweaked them from my original prototype so that they work better (although they’re still kinda buggy). I also added dialogue choices, the possibility to use objects and to combine two of them together. For the UI organization, I took inspiration from OneShot, an indie game with similar mechanics. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the best way to write the dialogue and parse through the files in an efficient manner with as little copy pasting as possible, and after talking to my advisor Michael, I figured that the easiest way to go about it is to make them in google sheets, export them to csv, and parse them on gamemaker as included files. The code for parsing the files is here: https://github.com/hatimbenhsain/capstone/blob/main/scripts/textFunctions/textFunctions.gml .

My project is now hosted on github: https://github.com/hatimbenhsain/capstone

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 07 - november 10th

This week, I started building the project again on GameMaker. I haven’t made a lot of new content, but I started working on a dialogue system.

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 06 - november 3rd

This week, I worked on fleshing out the concepts of my game a little more. I decided to reduce the number of spirits that the player helps in my game to three, so I can better explore their individual stories, and to structure the parts (and characters) of the game based on the five stages of grief:

- Denial: the Hero, his death and meeting with the god.

- Anger: the Priestess and helping her move on.

- Bargaining: the Couple and helping them move on.

- Depression: the Robot and helping him move on.

- Acceptance: finding out the truth about the God of Passage and moving on.

I’ve also thought a lot about the mechanics of my game, and I started toying with the idea of a spirit world where the player can pass through (but not interact with) objects, and a physical world where they can touch things but not talk to other spirits. I also started trying to come up with puzzles for every spirit. Finally, I made some more concept sketches to finalize the appearance of the characters:

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 05 - october 27th

My most recent prototype: https://hatimb00.itch.io/spirit-guide

Reflection:

My capstone is a video game. The premise is as follows: you play as a fantasy hero that is destined to save the world, except that they immediately get killed. They then go to limbo, where spirits with unfinished business linger, where they strike a deal with the god of passage: if the hero helps enough other souls move on to the other side, they might get back a chance at life. 

When I made my first prototype, I hadn’t settled on an idea yet, so I mainly tried to get what I wanted to make the game feel like, so I threw together some top-down sprites and music that I liked and set it in some sort of a mysterious forest. The reactions I got from my classmate were promising, but I realized that if I were to continue on this route, I’d have to tone down on the size and amount of details of the sprites, since the main character sprite took almost a whole weekend to make, and I’ll have to make a lot more of them. 

My first prototype.

During the following weeks, I came up with my game idea. I was inspired by several works that also deal in some degree with the afterlife and gods, including the musical Hadestown, the games OneShot, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, and MegaTen games, the comic The Sandman, etc. From these sources, I started doing research outwards. First, by playing more games. I played Doki Doki Literature Club, a visual novel horror game that plays with the genre’s tropes to subvert the player’s expectations, and I just started Disco Elysium, a detective role-playing game that centers on dialogue choices. Secondly, I’ve done and am still doing readings on the subject of the afterlife. I’ve read a paper on the psychological reasons behind our afterlife beliefs, a fiction book that imagines 40 versions of the afterlife, and a book that goes through the similarities and differences in concepts of the afterlife in myth. To help with my research, I’ve met with the librarian Beth Russell. Before the end of the semester, I plan to read more books, and look at some of the past theater capstones that interest me. 

After getting the initial game idea. I started thinking about the details of the story. I’m still in a brainstorming stage and I haven’t quite organized or filtered them out yet, but here are some of the thoughts that I gathered so far:

- The hero helps around 4 different spirits, and the game is divided into chapters for each spirit. Their past lives, reasons for staying, and resolution are what drive the story. 

- One of the spirits is a robot. He’s not sure if anything awaits him on the other side because he’s a machine and is surprised he’s even in limbo. 

- Another one is a priestess. She dies after humans destroy her goddess’s temple and slaughter the monks, in an effort to erase their religion. The priestess stays because she feels she has to protect the temple from further desecration, but ends up moving on after realizing her goddess didn’t care enough to save them in the first place.

- Two other ones are a couple that believe that nothing awaits them past limbo, so they do not move on so that they can stay together. The hero gets them to break up, leading them to want to move on so they don’t have to see each other anymore.

- In addition to the spirits’ arcs, the hero and the god of passage also go through their own development as the stories affect them. 

- People in the living world believe less and less in the gods, causing the god of passage’s potency to fade, which is why they need the hero’s help in the first place. The hero eventually realizes this, and they realize that even if the god wanted to revive them, they don’t even have the power to. At the end, the hero also accepts that they need to move on.

For my game’s characters and setting, I’m reusing a lot of concepts that I came up with before, but the god of passage is something new that I’m currently working on. For their design, I’m taking inspiration from the work of Kazuma Kaneko, and depictions of other mythical psychopomps (Charon, Anubis, etc.). 

Sketches I’ve made for the god of passage. They travel via an elevator that they’re chained to, they have a face covering, and a cape that swallows recalcitrant souls.

For my Intermediate Game Dev class with Gregory Heffernan, I had to make a 2D midterm game of my choice using Unity. While I plan to use GameMaker Studio for my final capstone game (which I now have access to thanks to Logan Clare at the NYU Game Center), I still decided to use this as an opportunity to further prototype my game. In my midterm, the protagonist encounter both two spirits in a more simplified version of their storylines. The robot is a janitor that used to work in a mall. The protagonist convinces them to move on by assigning the robot’s past job to a Roomba, ensuring his succession. The priestess is upset that her temple was destroyed. The protagonist convinces them to move on by picking up pieces of her goddess’s statue and restoring it, ensuring that the religion will live on somehow. The game works by picking up items, talking to people, and showing them the correct items.

Screenshots from my Intermediate Game Dev midterm https://hatimb00.itch.io/spirit-guide

Overall, I was satisfied with what I achieved aesthetic-wise. I liked the sound effects, music, sprites, and world I came up with. However, one problem I encountered during playtesting was that it’s too simple, gameplay-wise. As it stands right now, I’m not sure if the mechanics are engaging enough to work for an entire game. One of my main concerns right now is therefore trying to find some sort of gameplay element to add that would make the experience more fun, but without detracting from the main idea.

[hatimbcaptsone]

devlog 04 - october 6

this week, i figured that i should do some research about representations of the afterlife in mythology, the arts, and fiction, so i scheduled a meeting with the librarian beth russel to get some help with my endeavor. the meeting was pretty fruitful and i was able to borrow a bunch of books from the library that deal with the subject. hopefully, this will also help me look a bit less at screens. here’s a list of the books i have right now (which i’m not necessarily all going to read):

avant-garde videogames

death and the afterlife in japanese buddhism 

the denial of death 

entertaining judgment 

heaven 

monstrous forms 

sum 

tales of lights and shadows 

your digital afterlives

as part of my research, i also downloaded the paper on imagining the afterlife by k. mitch hodge. it’s about the psychological reasons people tend to believe in the afterlife, which is related to our links with people, and the way we think and speak of death as an absence rather than an annihilation. pretty interesting read.

i also started thinking more about the storyline of my game and the characters in it, and i made sketches in an effort to design the god of passage. i think that i landed on a somewhat final design in the last few pages; a thin, masked, pale figure with long, sharp hair and a sort of cloak with teeth and eyes that eat rebellious souls.  

[hatimbcaptsone]

artist bio

hatim benhsain is a comic-maker, a game developer, a 2d visual artist, and a music composer. he attends nyu abu dhabi where he is pursuing a ba in interactive media with minors in computer science and music technology. he has also studied game design in the game center at tisch in new york and japanese at waseda university, tokyo. he has worked on satirical cartoons, a library field guide, and a web-based street food-themed comic delivery system. currently, he’s working on his senior thesis project, a 2d adventure game about mythology, grief, and navigating the afterlife. in the past, he founded a band and played the keyboard and made illustrations for the nyuad arts center and a book about tourism in japan. his inspirations include the works of kieron gillen, jack stauber, neil gaiman, shu takumi, lena raine, toby fox, worthikids, anaïs mitchell, and masaaki yuasa.

artist statement

i write and draw comics that take place in fantastical sci-fi reflections of our world where cryptids cohabitate with mortals and robots have angst, but things are otherwise pretty much the same. by stretching out panels and playing around with composition and layouts i like to defamiliarize and emphasize the weirdness of the mundane moments of everyday life. in one of my last comics, a janitor robot originally built for war seeks a therapist after finding itself obsolete and struggling to find a purpose when peace is resolved.

i also make video games, which are, most of the time, 2d adventure games that borrow jrpg elements. while i use comics to explore life and the way we feel about it, my video games are usually reinterpretations of our interactions with the world we live in and the ones we dream about. to express this, music is a powerful tool. i like music that shifts, speeds up, and repeats to alter the gameplay, imply story elements, and form a more complete experience. recently, i reimagined the myth of orpheus in a game where you play as a ghost who goes to free their friend from prison. there is no combat involved, but if you meet one of the pig-bat guards, they may let you through if you sing beautifully enough to them. i wanted the music to play an important role, so i also made it the mechanic to choose dialog options, and i made the ghost (and the pigs) sound differently depending on which part of the background music is currently playing.

my stories take on many topics, and i rarely stick to just one. sometimes, they’re about food, our attachments to it, what the way we prepare it says about us, and the reasons we do. they often involve folklore, mythology, and strange characters that only exist because of the people who believe in them. i take interest in death, rebirth, our different conceptions of the afterlife, and why we choose - or not - to imagine them. most of all though, my stories deal with the stories that we tell, the power that they hold, and the blurry lines between reality, media, and the media within. 

every few weeks, i ask myself why i chose this path. i could be doing something more useful; an engineer, a doctor, or a firefighter. i fall into anxiety, hopelessness, and depression about what the future holds for me. but then, i read, play, or hear a story i enjoy, and life becomes slightly more bearable. when i create my characters, i always give them one or more of the struggles - the existential dread, the ennui, or the general human struggle - that i deal with. by sharing them with the world, i hope that i, too, can help others feel slightly less alone.

[hatimbcaptsone]

Devlog 03 - September 29

This week, I made another Unity prototype, this time looking more at how the game would actually work. In this prototype, the hero has to talk to a janitor bot’s spirit to convince them to move on. To do so, they must present a roomba character an item that can be collected and talk to the janitor again.

Another thing that I experimented with is making simpler sprites than my last prototype, since I know I’ll have to make a lot of them.

Another way I made progress this week is talking to Logan Clare, a man in charge of equipment in the NYU game center, who agreed to give me a license for GameMaker for the semester, so from now I’ll probably be using that instead of Unity.

[hatimbcaptsone]

Prototype 2

Last week I tried to prototype a game experience with a feel that I’d like to have in my game. For this week, it was harder to build on top of it without having a concept idea, so I decided to focus more on brainstorming to find a direction. I’ve come up with a main story and system for the game, but I still have to figure out the gameplay specifics. But for now, this is my pitch;

The protagonist (for now referred to as the Hero) starts out as a standard fantasy chosen one kind of character, destined to save the world from evil and fight monsters. Except that in their first encounter with one, they get killed. The Hero then travels to Limbo, where they meet the Goddess of Passage. The Hero can’t accept that they’re dead, and they desperately try to get another shot. The Goddess sees an opportunity, and she implies that if the Hero were to help other souls who, like the Hero, can’t move on, she might bring them back to life. 

Throughout the game, the Hero meets spirits of other deceased people. I’m thinking of having between 3 and 5 of them. By talking to them, presenting items, and (maybe) solving puzzles, the Hero gets to know them and eventually convinces them to move on. Through their stories and the Hero’s own journey, I hope to explore themes such as grieving, denial, loneliness, acceptance, and rebirth. Another concept I’d like to explore is different people and cultures’ views of the afterlife, and I would like to do this by having each character talk about their own beliefs. As for what really happens after “moving on”, I’d like to keep it vague. By the end of the game, the Hero will, too, accept their death.

The following are some concept sketches I made along with descriptions:

1. Scene from the beginning of the game where the Hero dies to a monster. The player will be equipped with some sort of a weapon, but won’t be able to use it. In-story, the Hero is thrown into battle too early and they don’t know what to actually do in the field.

2. The Hero plunges into limbo, represented as sinking underwater. I imagine the limbo as looking a lot like the normal (fantasy) world, but distorted, with washed-out colors, flickering lights, and a general underwater vibe.

3. The hero meets the Goddess of Passage. Like I discussed in the previous week, I might use the pantheon I came up with before as a base to this world’s mythology, although the Goddess of Passage would be a new character.

4. Besides the game’s main story, I’d like to include some sort of playful elements that allow for some more creative input. One of the ways I’m thinking of incorporating this is giving the player character an instrument that they can play at any time, just for the sake of fun. I’m also thinking of giving every main character their instrument of choice, which they could use to accompany the background music in significant moments. This idea is mainly based on the music game I made last semester, projectOrpheus: https://hatimb00.itch.io/orpheus. This game was also rooted in the same lore and explored similar afterlife themes.

5. An idea I have for telling every spirit’s individual story before dying is comic book panels that appear to summarize it, kind of like the way characters are introduced in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The character here is a robot, mainly cause I thought it would be fun to have one of the spirits be a robot and the questions it raises. Actually, maybe I’ll make every character a robot. For the Hero’s own life story, I’m thinking of telling it by snippets through their interactions with the spirits and keeping it vague.

6. An example of an interaction between the Hero and a spirit. The player offers the old man an item that has some sort of significance to their old life and eventually helps them move on.

Besides the talking to people, finding objects, and playing instrument, I’d like to incorporate another gameplay element to make the game more fun. I haven’t come up with one yet though.

[hatimbcaptsone]

Prototype 1

https://hatimb00.itch.io/rainagame

My first prototype. Ideally, I would have made it in GameMaker Studio, but I currently don’t have a license, so Unity had to do. 

My demo doesn’t include much in terms of functionality/content (since I still don’t know what my game is gonna be about), but I tried to make it feel like the vibe I’d like to go with. I tried to include most of what I’d like to have in my final game; 2d animated sprites, a fantasy setting, some sort of exploration, and music that I compose. There’s of course a lot of things missing though (text, interactive sounds, collisions, etc). I didn’t think a lot about the glowing fruit tree and the destroyed columns, but I tried to convey a mysterious eerie atmosphere that I’d like to have in my game.The character I used is Raina, who is part of a fantasy world I created. I’ve been thinking of using that world as a setting for my game but I’m still not sure about it but I might scrap that and go with a totally different story. 

For now, I hosted the game on itch, but I’ll probably make an .exe file for my final product since I encountered some speed and sound issues with html in the past. The resolution also didn’t look great with some artifacts but that’s probably because I don’t really know how to use Unity.

A major issue I encountered is that I underestimated the amount of time it took me just to make the sprites for Raina (I didn’t even have time to make sprites for a back-facing running animation). If I need to include a lot of characters in my game, I’ll probably have to scale back the size, maybe a little more in this style (I made this for a scrapped platformer project):

Here are some screenshots along with some sprite sheets: