mrvanderpants

[mrvanderpants]

Getting back to the project

I have been working at my current job for just over a year now, and I finally felt like continuing the project. It has probably been over a year that I last worked on it, but I’m really motivated to get back on it again.

So the main reason I wanted to start working on this game again was the fact that I got a new idea for a battle system I wanted to try out. And since I was still looking for an alternative on the current implementation I figured to give it a shot.

The second thing I figured needed an update as well was the UI. I previously tried designing a very clean, flat interface, but it just didn’t really fit with the artstyle. So I ended up redoing the interface as well. It’s a bit of a large chunck of work to replace all of the interface (mainly because I need to refactor almost everything). I made the interface more pixelated and added a bunch of colours and textures to the interface elements, which in my oppinion fits the game far more then the previous version.

Finally, I’m really happy to be back working on this game again, even though the progress is slow. Having worked as a programmer for a year has really helped me improve my programming skills and I’m really looking forward to getting to apply that with my pet project of the last few years again.

[mrvanderpants]

About this blog...

To those people who actually have taken the time to read through my blog, I’d like to say thank you. Due to me getting a full-time job as a front-end web developer, the game has been on the second place in my mind. I’m programming 8 hours a day at the moment, so I don’t really feel like working on my game because of that. So I’m writing this massage to tell whoever is reading this that I will stop working on this game until I’m a bit more settled into my new job and have some more free time. I feel like forcing myself to work on the game will not do the game any good, so I’d rather postpone it and start working on it again when I feel more like doing so.

I do have an idea for a app/ game that is a little lighter, development-wise, so maybe I will post some updates on this blog about that project (If I feel like actually working on that as well). So to everyone reading this: Thank you for your time, and I hope this blog was/ is of some use.

[mrvanderpants]

Leveling things out...

During the last few months since the last post, I have been overhauling my overworld setup. The game was completely broken while I was working on the system, so I hadn’t really anything to post on this blog until it was completely finished. And it currently is. Well… It’s not really finished or polished or anything, but the game can be walked through to some degree right now and my hair didn’t grow grey so I guess I can count this as a succes.

So what have I changed to my overworld setup? To answer this, I might want to explain how my previous system worked, because I didn’t really touch that topic before on this blog I think. And for good reason, because my previous overworld wasn’t really something to write home about. It was a plain classic four-directional RPG overworld and wasn’t very interesting to walk around in. The levels were too large and just felt like a drag to walk around in, even during my quick playtest sessions, so I decided to fully overhaul the system and re-implement it. Also while playtesting the game on my phone, I stumbled across a second reason to overhaul the system. The game was laggy and sluggish and was just way too large.

So first thing I decided to do, is to make the levels feel more relevant to the player. Before, the levels felt empty, but I found a few ways to counter this. Firstly, I decided to make the level designs smaller by either splitting them up, or just place the relevant level objects closer together. By making the levels smaller, it’s easier to make the game more mobile-friendly and it gets easier to theme the various levels. Because that was one of the issues I had with my previous levels, to give an example, urban themed levels just felt like a collection of buildings which didn’t really have any logic behind them. They were just there to fill up the area. But with the smaller, more compact levels, it’s easier to convey a certain idea to the player.

A second thing I found while playtesting my levels was that the transition between the levels felt a bit odd. Before, you would just walk towards the edge of the screen, and you would just pop out on the other side in a new level. Due to the long loading times on mobile, it just felt really weird for some reason. I can’t really explain why, but it did. Because of this I decided to create an old school level select scene in between the various levels. I already had savepoints implemented in all my levels, so I changed their function to save/ fast-travel points. By interacting with these points the player will get transferred to the level select scene, and can choose where to go next. In the level select scene the player can also change his or her team, and look into the quest progress of that level.

That last part, the progress bars per level and fast-travel really give the game a more ‘game-y’ feel to it, which I find to play better than the old empty levels, so I’m really happy I made these changes. So for the next couple of weeks I will be adding more levels to the overworld and off course, I still have a crazy amount of bugs I have to fix before I can actual start to playtest te game.

[mrvanderpants]

Gather arround kids...

After finishing up the main UI pages and main game mechanics, I started working on the different storytelling mechanics that are going to convey the story to the player. I am a huge fan of the story telling in Dark souls, but since this is a 2D RPG it really needs some kind of storytelling to tell stories that the art and environment can’t in its limited format. With the current pixel-art art style it’s impossible to go into too much detail because the art might get unreadable.

Instead of conveying the story mainly through the art and environment, I’d like to use a more traditional method of storytelling, namely telling the story by text. But telling a story by text is easier said than done, because of the current trend of displaying less and less text in games. And for a good reason. Because of the ever-evolving technology it isn’t really necessary for game designers to tell their story through text only anymore. Modern consoles and PC’s are capable of handling HD video’s and in-game cutscenes to the point that just reading about a story feels old and boring.

So how am I going to convey my story without boring my players you ask? Well I am going to use the same basic design principles I used when designing the games concept. So the writing has to be easy to understand, interesting and as relevant to the game as possible. Which seem to be some obvious principles, but still a lot of games fall in the trap of displaying too much text in a short amount of time, so that the player will skip most of it out of boredom. To prevent this, I am going to spread out all the dialogues between good chunks of gameplay, and make sure that these dialogues are as compact as possible.

Anyway, I chose three ways to convey my story in the game: cutscenes, dialogues and some simple pop-ups. I was planning to implement two types of cutscenes, animated ones and static ones with a nice piece of art in the background. With the animated cutscenes it’s possible to show the player pieces of the story without actually needing to display any text, while the static ones do display text, but have something nice to look at as well. These scenes are going to explain large chuncks of the storyline with as little words as possible.

The dialogue boxes are going to show a small bit of text directly linked to the role the character the player is having a chat with has in the story. Is it a merchant? Is it a quest giver? Or something else? Anyway I want everything the npc’s have to say to be of direct relevance for the player. So that the player doesn’t need to talk to twenty npc’s with twenty dialogue lines each to get a curtain piece of information. I’m also going to make sure that the player can only interact with the npc’s with relevant information. So the player doesn’t need to talk to every npc in a crowded street, but just walks past all the “useless” npc’s.

And finally the pop-ups. These pop-ups give the player info about how curtain things work in the game, like how to build a team, or how the battle system works. These pop-ups are only going to show up once in the game, and can be red back elsewhere when the player wants to look something up. And the pop-up pages are going to contain only an image a one or two lines of text each, so that the player doesn’t get flooded with information.

To round of this post, I’m honestly not sure if these storytelling ideas are even going to work. I’m just going to implement these features and just test it over and over again, to see whether it’s appealing or not. Wish me luck.

[mrvanderpants]

Interfaces, interfaces and even more interfaces

So my update schedule is everything but consequent, but this time I have a decent reason. I think. I’ve been working on various UI pages the last few weeks, like the team inventory page and the teambuilder page. All of these UI pages took me a lot of effort to create, because let’s face it, it’s not the most fun part of developing a game. Nonetheless it’s necessary for a strategy game to function. That’s why I just kind of had to keep plowing through the UI work mindlessly, so I didn’t really have something to post up until now. Because I’m in the process of finishing up most UI work at the moment, so I thought it would be a good moment to update my devblog a little.

So the two most important UI pages where I have been working on are the inventory page and the team builder page. These are the two pages which the player uses to manage his or hers items and team, and mixing and matching the team members and items is one of the most important core mechanics of the game. So it’s really important that those pages work well, and are easy to navigate. Below are two screenshots of what the pages look like at the moment, but I haven’t tested them yet with my target audience. So I might overhaul these pages later on. Hope I don’t have to though, I’ve spend enough time on these pages already.

Now, how do these pages actually work in the game? The image above, the team builder page, is the page where the player selects his or her team members which will appear in battle once a battle starts. This page can only be accessed by savepoints to prevent players from switching teams too often. I’d like to limit the player that way, so that the player really has to consider which units to bring into the dungeon and which moves to equip on them. The team members held items are displayed on the bottom of the interfaces, but cannot be changed or switched here. The items that units can hold during battle can be changed in the inventory page. The inventory page is a page in the central game menu, and is accessible in almost every part of the game.

[mrvanderpants]

Yeah I forgot again ._.

I wanted to keep my blog updated, but I forgot yet again. At least I forgot to write some new posts because I have been busy working on the game. I’ve made some huge progress the last couple of days and it seems like a good time to write a new update, since I remembered to. Since the last post I added a bunch of new features into the build like an inventory system, a quest system and a dynamic battle scene. All with new in-game interfaces and functionalities. This was also the first time I’ve used some editor scripts to enhance the Unity inspector, so that took a fair amount of getting used to as well. I created some custom interfaces for the other team members with no coding experience to make it a bit easier to add quests and npc’s to the scene without having to put in any new code. Finally, I’m working on some early balancing and fixes at the moment, as well as some basic sprites and animations for the new weapon system I want to implement next. I’m not too sure how this weapon system will work out, so I guess I’ll dedicate a whole blogpost to that system next time. If I can remember to that is.

[mrvanderpants]

The Level Editor

So I started working on the level editor last week, and it’s finally starting to shape up a little. It’s still far from useful but our level designer can finally start working on some of the basic stuff like creating some basic tile based levels.  While I’m writing this the level editor is able to fully rasterize all the objects in the level, snap new tiles to existing ones and setup complete new levels with all the objects that are needed for the level to function like the player and the camera controller and such. But as I said before there’s still a lot of work to be done to the editor. Mostly because this is the first time for me even making some sort of level editor, so the progress I’m making right now is slow. But we’re getting there. These are all baby steps toward a first alpha build.

Anyway, I feel like a lot of team members are starting to lose interest in the project because of other obligations they have to attend to. To counter this I decided to start working towards a new demo build in which the first custom overworld level is playable and a basic battle can be triggered.  I’m also planning to implement an expansive audio controller in this build as well, just to make the demo feel more complete. With this demo, I hope to be able to motivate the other team members a bit more by showing them that we made some big steps already. And I guess I’ll start thinking of a name too. Naming projects usually helps me to get more invested in my personal projects, so that might work on the other members as well.

You can see the level building in progress in the gif above by the way. You can see that the tiles are already placed by the level editor, and a floor is generated underneath. The purple block is a battle trigger placeholder, since we don’t have any enemies implemented yet, just like the Toon Links in the graphic when the battle starts. These link sprites will be replaced with larger player sprites later on.

I’ll keep you updated!

[mrvanderpants]

Leveling some things out

It has yet been some time since my last blogpost because I decided to take some time off to work on different projects, just to keep my mind off of things. The progress on the game was so terribly slow that I had to put it aside for a bit, just to keep myself from going crazy. But I decided to start working on the game again a couple of days back. I just waited a bit before writing a post again to make sure that I had something to write about.

So I decided to start working on a system for my level designer to create fully functional levels in. Because he has not that much experience with the Unity engine I decided to make it a bit easier for him by giving him access to some prefabricated objects that can just be dragged and dropped in place to create a level, without having to really dive into the Unity engine components. I added a script to those objects that will take care of the more technical aspects of the level design, like snapping to a grid, collision checking and various other functions.

Unfortunately I don’t really have much too show right now, because I’m still figuring out what I want to put into this system and whether or not I need to add an custom interface to make everything work. So I hope that I can share some more visuals next time.

[mrvanderpants]

It’s been a while

So it’s been some time since the last post, mostly because I just forgot to write a new entry. I primarily have been working on the battle system all this time, and it’ll take another while to finish it I guess. I did manage to fully implement the UI I designed a while back, including pop-ups and such. The UI may be fully traversable, but it’s still not fully linked to the system itself. Loads of buttons aren’t working yet, so I’ll be going to fix those buttons the next few days I guess.

The other thing I’ve been working on is the battle scene’s art. I made some basic idle sprites for the different classes, put a background in, and made some small tweaks in the UI lay-out. The gif below is just an early peak of what the battle scenes are going to look like. There are still loads of tweaks and changes to be made before I’m really happy with it. Like the background for example. There is a label on the bottom of the screen when a character attacks, which is black, but it isn´t readable because of the dark road in the background.

Lastly, I´ve been looking to add some programmers into the mix. We have two programmers on the team right now besides me, and the last week we came to the conclusion that this just isn´t working out. Mostly because the progress made right now is just way to slow. I asked a couple of friends whether they want to team up, but no success yet. So I guess I´ll just have to keep looking. I´ll keep you updated!

[mrvanderpants]

I’ve been working on the UI implementation for the battle scene the last few days. The gif above shows the progress I made up until now, and I must say, I’m pretty happy with it. This is only the second time I’ve worked with Unity’s new UI system, so it took me a while to get used to it.

Anyway, the difficulty in designing proper UI’s for RPG’s lies in the data display. What data do you show? What data does the player need? When does the player need this information? These are all questions one needs to ask him or herself when designing an UI. Because RPG’s use a lot of data you need a proper UI to make all this data clear to the user, while trying not to make the player feel overwhelmed.

So the gif above pictures the attack selection screen, where the user can select a move that the active unit has to perform. In this case the black unit is the active unit (he’s normally blue) and can choose from the bottom three moves. I personally like the move display because it gives priority to the data the player needs at that moment. Take the move title for example. The title is huge, because the player probably knows which moves he or she equiped on the character, and only needs to get a quick confirmation of which move is located where.

The move stats are displayed a bit smaller on the bottom of the move button. The reason behind these bits of data being a bit smaller than the title is that these stats aren’t really needed as much while playing. It´s more ment as a reference of sorts.

There´s still a lot of work to be done on this interface, so I’ll keep you updated!

[mrvanderpants]

So, what’s next?

We have been working on the game for about 4 weeks now, and we haven’t worked on the prototype itself that much yet. We have mostly been working on the concept of the battle system up until now, but after 4 weeks, we all have a pretty good idea about what’s that going to look like. I have been working on the overworld game design since the last couple of days, but I don’t think that will take that much more time because we already have a pretty solid idea about the setting. And I don’t really have any idea about how much the setting will sell the game to the player. I guess we will have to find that out later on in the production process.

Anyway, I started this post because we are mid way between the concepting fase and the production fase. The difficulty here is that I don't really now what I should be doing right now. I don´t have the knowledge to work on the prototype, but there isn’t that much time and space left to keep working on the concept.

So what I decided to do is start implementing a test world, in which the programmers can build the new functionalities. This way all progress made in the protoype will be visible for all teammembers, and I hope that this will motivate everyone to keep working towards a more coherent product.

[mrvanderpants]

I just finished up these city tiles. The level designer wanted to make the city look really modern, but place it on top of an older foundation, like it was build on an older civilization. I still need to add a load of additional buildings and folliage and such before we can really implement them in the game.

[mrvanderpants]

Introduction

I just got the idea that it might be usefull to keep a blog going while I work on this game. Anyway I’m dutch so please disregard any spelling or grammar errors. It’s the content that matters. My name is Sjoerd, a game designer. I only just graduated from from college, where I majored in media and game design. I’ve been working on my protfolio since I graduated, but it’s been lacking substantial content. I wanted to finish at least one big project so that I’ll have something flashy to show on my portfolio. So I got this idea for a turn based strategy battle system a while back, which was way to complicated for me alone to develop. That’s why I pitched this idea to a couple of friends, who got really excited and wanted to help me in my epic quest to finish this game. The only downside is that most of them don’t have any technical knowledge of games. That’s the thing that characterizes this project the most: inexperience. One might ask, what do the other team members do? We got a city planner to do the level design, a biologist to do the creature and character design and a writer to create the storyline for the game. I work on this project as the creative geek, which means I work on the game design, art and audio. So who is going to develop the game? Well I got two of my programmer friends just as excited for the game as I currently am, so they are going to help me out during the development face of the project. And how far is the project right now? Well we have been working on the games concept for three weeks now, and we got most of it worked out right now. There are still some loose ends in the overworld that need to to be connected but we’re pretty happy about the progress that we made thus far. Everybody is super hyped and got loads of ideas for the game, so we’ll keep you update on the project!