pigeonstick-blog

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DOG TYCOON: COMPLETE! (10/8/19)

Hello, we are excited to announce our game is coming out today. We are releasing it onto itch.io! So what is the final product of the game? I can’t really say. The only thing I can tell you is...you will fall in love with these dogs. At least I did. (Love me dog-senpai) 

I think you are wondering, how do I feel about the game? How about my teammates? Let me speak for them and myself, that we love the child that we have created. It is not everything that we wanted out of our project. We wanted so much out of it. If we had the time, I think we would have. However, the death march has to end at some point. That means both the project and the team as of now. If we choose to come back together for a second project or finishing this one, I wouldn’t hesitate for any reason. 

Besides the project itself, I am going to miss the team. Everyone was very sweet and understanding of everything that we are going through to make sure the game is a success. There were some good hilarious moments that I can’t forget. 

I want to thank everyone who supports our game and it’s development. That includes the people who have playtested our game and given us all the advice for how to progress with our game. That includes fixing the grammar mistakes, telling us when characters should be displayed on our screen. Even pointing out when you were confused about how to progress onto the next passage (don’t worry, I was there too). There was also one person who made some of the soundtracks for the game. 

I want to also thank Kiara, Greg, and Avery for dealing with me for the past  7 weeks.  Thank you for giving me some laughs. Thank You for showing me a project that can be absolutely fun. Thank You for also agreeing with me on one point: “Twine Sucks!”

My name is Hoang Nguyen. Hopefully, you will see another post from Pigeon Stick Studios. See you next time.

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Playtesting: Getting Closer!

10/03/19 - Kiara Munz

As our release date rapidly approaches, the Pigeon Stick Studios team continues to rigorously bug test and play test! Last week we did formal playtesting of the polished first part of the game, and it was a huge success! During the alpha testing, we got it to work, but we failed to portray any fun in the game. During the playtests, the testers were full of smiles! Our first test has some major bug problems, so thank you to the testers who went through that, but the later ones were smooth as butter. The dog puns and ui were all functional and beautiful. Bones had expressions, music almost always worked, the UI didn’t shift, the choices went to the right places, it worked just as intended! This performance was limited to the first part of the game. Our testers who Bones actually hired and had the time to go onto the second date know that our polish still needs to be extended into later parts. 

But just because something works as intended never means it is important. Now that we have our main design goal hit we still need to tweak minor transitions, grammar, and overall pretty preferences to tailor to our audience. Our testers really helped with this! One tester suggested to change the title screen to make sure we suggested the right mood. Others pointed out small grammar mistakes. One even broke our choosing name function by putting in an image link! (This will be fixed soon pesky hackers!) 

Example of long name breaking and auto-linking with an image as the name. A 15 character limit and string limiter will be put in place.

Not all the testers agreed on what they liked and disliked, so the developers are currently sorting through feedback to make sure we choose what the players as a whole will like best. All these lessons for the first slice of the game will be carried over to the next parts of the games, and some generous testers are already testing certain slices to make sure our current broken designs can be rapidly iterated upon for an efficient and quality release date.

New Title Screen for the Game. Previous uni-color black background made the game look a little too much like a horror game. The city background hopefully solidifies the noir theme, as well as the addition of the logo and the other dog.

On a different note, we have some good news! Although last week we announced we had to cut an additional dog to the game, we are happy to announce that music and sound is going to much better than predicted previously! We will have a couple sound effects from important parts of the game and additional music themes throughout the game. They are being implemented as this is being posted. 

We hope to see you all this tuesday on itch.io to play our game! We sincerely thank everyone’s support so far.

[pigeonstick-blog]

9/28 Hello Everyone, Greg here with another update on Dog Tycoon!

I am happy to announce the official release date for Dog Tycoon: October 8th at 10:30 AM on Itch.io, where it will be free to play!

As we plow into the last few weeks before release, time is becoming more and more of a luxury. Unfortunately, because of this, I’m sorry to announce that the game will only feature one business dog path. Bones will be the only potential business partner; however, you may or may not be able to meet Max and Clawdius under different circumstances.  

In hindsight adding in three dogs was a massive stretch goal considering how long the story for Bones alone has turned out. If you are reading this before October 8th, chances are one of us is working on importing any of the 25 pages of the writing for the game. We feel the story will be a fundamentally intense, in-depth experience despite there being only one potential business partner and despite the silly/pun sense of humor we . 

This past week has been action packed for Pigeon Stick Studios. I would say that this week has been quite crunchy, but more is yet to come. This week we added in the full introduction of the game, made and imported several new art assets, added several of the music assets, playtested the minimum viable product of our game twice, and fixed many, many bugs. We are also planning on running more play-tests this weekend, so stay tuned for next week’s complete update post on testing.

Despite getting so much done this week, Pigeon Stick Studios is currently still experiencing the looming crunch. Before the playtest we ran on Tuesday, we had to sprint to finish the introduction to the game and its UI on time.

The UI for the start of the introduction is slightly different from that of the base game 

Naturally, the speed at which we flew through the text and image importing, UI creation, etc. has introduced several issues: some as simple as an image that isn’t aligned properly, and some as critical as the name entering box causing such errors that made most of the game unplayable for a bit. But do not be alarmed, the bugs are mostly gone, and if more pop up, they will be removed. Crunch is not powerful enough to stop us from testing and polishing our game. 

After all, crunch is common in the game development industry - and to such an extent that nearly every studio ever is subject to its grip, at least according to almost every interviewee mentioned in Inside The Video Game Industry by Judd Ethan Ruggill, Ken S. McAllister, Randy Nichols, and Ryan Kaufman. All it means in our case is that we may not end up including some of the minor details of the game or some of the more minor choices the player would otherwise get to make. However, one thing is sure; we will finish this game by 10:30 AM on October 8th.

Stay tuned, and have a good one!

Greg Klimov

The dog in the UI demo: https://pixabay.com/photos/shiba-inu-dog-doge-meme-1134954/ The doge in the UI demo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Bellini_-_Ritratto_del_Doge_Leonardo_Loredan.jpg

All else: Avery of Pigeon Stick Studios

[pigeonstick-blog]

The art looks lovely. I particularly like the idea of using the blurred effect when a character pops up. Will we be seeing the art of any of the actual characters soon? And where on the screen will they be: will they slide in, pop up, just appear, something else? Greg Klimov

Art Update!

What’s up, gamers? Ta-Dah! Games! is back again with another dev update!

A lot of our recent posts have focused on the story and programming aspects of Growforth, so today I thought I’d update you guys on the artistic side of things.

Personally, I’m still pretty new when it comes to digital art, so creating the backgrounds has taken a lot of time. However, as I’m getting used to the process, I’m moving quicker and learning new techniques. First, I usually start by sketching on paper some of the key elements of whatever background I’m creating. For example, in the cave scene, this would include the crystals on the wall and the stalagmites/stalactites. I’m much more comfortable drawing on paper, so this step makes it easier for me to then have a reference to look at when I’m trying to replicate it digitally.

Here’s a sketch planning out the design of some of the mushroom trees in their scene.

Next, I open up Clip Studio Paint and start sketching the outline of the background, usually beginning with the player’s path and building around that. In certain areas, such as forests, it’s VERY important to make use of the layering tool. This makes it much easier to erase certain parts of objects far in the back while keeping the objects in front intact. It also allows me to select certain parts of a layer and move it around to see how it fits in different areas. Layering is also very useful for the next step… painting!

A WIP sketch of the mushroom forest. The basic outlines are there and painting has begun. Further sketching for trees in the way back is done later.

When painting, I start at the front and work my way back. In the beginning, I first focus on trying to get the right base color for whatever is being painted. Once that base color is filled in, I start messing around with textures, gradients and shadows. This usually takes quite a while, considering I have little previous experience doing so, so it’s very much trial and error. 

After the key elements are colored, I switch to the ground and the background of the background, for lack of a better word. At this point I usually start with a base color for the background and outline parts of trees from there. This may sound a bit backwards, but it’s much easier for me to know when there’s no white space left, and saves me from drawing an endless amount of trees. Then, I add a layer to the very bottom of all my layers and fill it entirely with a base color that’s used to make all the colors more uniform and further ensure I have no white space left. In the cave scene, for example, this color would be a dark gray. 

Once everything is outlined and colored, I clean up the outlines and save the background, but it’s not done yet! I then make a copy of the background and add a blur effect to it. This blurred background is used in place of the original whenever something appears on screen, such as an object or a character, making them stand out more. 

Here’s an example of both final backgrounds for the bridge scene.

As someone who entered game development as primarily a programmer, getting the chance to improve my art skills is both incredibly awesome and quite a challenge. However, I really enjoy this process and look forward to further improving my skills in future games!

- Clarissa McCarthy

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Art and Narrative Update

Hey all! It’s me, Avery, here again with some new updates! I recently started pouring all my time into the narrative because the art work is basically done. So I thought I might share some snippets of story and art with everyone!

Last time we looked at the full body images for the dogs, but now I’ve got some even cooler stuff such as sprite artwork and ending cards.

I find that making different emotive sprites is very important for a narrative game like this. It allows the player to get a better understanding of the character’s emotions and how they are reacting to player choices.

And here’s a little preview of what you might see if you do well in the game...

Pretty dramatic, right? I tried to make it resemble Baroque painting, which relies on dark backgrounds and heavy lighting for dramatic effect. It’s very different from the rest of the art in the game, but it’s supposed to be a special piece.

I’ve also been hard at work on the backgrounds. I’m not drawing every individual background, but it still is time consuming to edit images to my liking. Here’s a few you might see early on:

The last one is especially fun because it was originally such a brightly colored image, but making it black and white has caused it to be almost dramatic in a way, even if it’s just a fire hydrant.

Now let’s take a look at the story! I can’t really share too much, without spoiling, but I thought I’d share one of the really important choices in the story!

Pretty major, right?

Well, I hope you’re all as excited as I am to see this game come to completion! We are aiming to have it done within the next week. Stay tuned!

- Avery Rynkowski

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A letter to Programming... (New Updates)

Hello, this is human Hoang reporting on the progress of the game thus far, particularly the sound and the UI of the cover of our game. (Let the pain begin.) The cover of our game has a very standard look to another dating sim. The characters are displayed in the background and with the title, all edited within google docs and then transferring the image onto discord. This image is overlayed into the screen with room in the image to have the “play“ and “credit“ button located on the left. These buttons also have one stupid special effect: when you are hovering over the choices the text enlarges by 150% and with a transparent highlight to them in the background. Isn’t that great? Both processes in total took about an hour to complete. (That is a lie...there was so much more work that had to be done to make everything function.)

[ Before clicking on the choice. Notice also on the left the Sugarcube given debug window. A different one at the bottom right.]

[ After hovering over the red text (Yes, this is worth the hype) ]

Let's start off with the highlighted text. The effect that I mention was the only meant for the title screen of the game, and nothing else. If the effect was to continue throughout the game with long dialogue choices for the player, the screen would glitch trying to adjust to the new text size. The spacing between the words would also increase tremendously. It was through google searching that I solve this issue....which redirected me to the documentation of the program I was using. Great... Regardless after incorporating the code into the game, it all worked out. What we had to do was assign a class to the “block” (referred to the program as “passage”) and then give that particular property: the effects that I mentioned above. (One problem done...onto ROUND 2...FIGHT!)

[ The cover for our game ]

The second issue is how to install the background image for the cover into the game. Initially, I thought this was going to be an easy task (as you can tell....this was foreshadowing the misery that I must endue on the quest to not slam my head against the desk figuring out this problem: over-complicating the process leading back to what I initially did.). I initially set the image as a “background-image”, and thus the text appeared on the top. Great! Success. However, after playing with the game and clicking on the left of the screen (which was the UI that was part of Sugarcube and not an asset that we made into the game...all for debugging) it shifted the text to be not aligned with the background image. In order to solve this issue, I went and looked at the rest of the game as inspiration for a solution. (The only problem...no COMMENTS! WHY! WHY would you do this to another programmer who has to work with you and try to understand the knowledge that took you the start of the development process to learn in under 2 hours. HOW? What monster does this to another human!?! *Cough* *Cough* Jokes aside...)  I copied the code over into the passage I was working with. To no avail did any of the code translate well. This was something that I stayed too narrowminded in within the development of the game, something that did not help anyone. It is only a day later that the main solution was getting rid of the Sugarcude UI on the left side, thus keeping the UI that we made stationary within the screen. That means the background image could work without issues. Sucess..yet again.

And lastly, (yes there is more...sorry) is the audio that we had incorporated into the game. The audio is weird within Twine and requires more work to be accomplished. (Yaaaaay) The music assets need to be in a file close to the HTML game code and then needs to be updated to be able to be audible within the game. The audio sadly can not start at the very beginning of the game, because for some reason, the player has to enter the title screen for the song (or audio tracks) to start playing. This was achieved with the debug tool within Sugarcube’s UI. (The only time I will call it useful.) I choose to start playing the song in the following passage, which gave more consistent results. 

Solving these issues deserves not a treat nor a bone as our game would say. These issues would normally arise within our development, but took so much of my time because I didn’t communicate with the rest of my team. If I asked people how I should handle the task, then these teammates may be able to direct me to the right solution. The time that I solved them all by my lonely self could have been used to make a better game for you all: with more content that is relevant to our main goal of a witty and pun-filled game. That being said, I have to do better as a programmer for our team. (...Don’t forget speaking up Hoang. :D ) Otherwise, everything else is okay. 

Along with my issues, there are also other assets we have been working on. After our initial test run with the game, the dialogue was redesigned to give the characters more “personality.” Once it is integrated into the game, we should not have the same type of disaster from our last playtest, and hopefully, these characters that you will be interacting with remain memorable. As for the art assets, it is coming seemingly to a close. (This is from a person that is blind to the visual work that still needs to be done, using only what has been finishing as a comparison of what to come. Take this idea with a grain of salt.) Most of the characters are finished and the backgrounds are being selected and formatted as we speak. The “...” choice has been removed with an arrow that looks far better than “-->”, allowing the players to progress through the story with ease because of a good UI. Otherwise, our development of the game is closing in on the most basic game we can make. 

Thank you human for listening to this discussion (/rant) on our game. We hope you keep an eye out for the progress of our game.

[pigeonstick-blog]

Alpha Testing Round 1 Complete…

... we have discovered, yet again, we have a lot of work to do. Sadly, we found that the first round did not portray our game vision.

Above: Play tester, Kirsten, taking a stab at the Alpha V1.

When entering the test, the developers intended to just check if the basic functionality of one meeting. We wanted to make sure that proceeding through the blocks of text each day never skipped lines, that the question choices lead to correct counter values or response, and that the basic layout of the UI was consistent. We found most of these things were completely functioning! Clicking links always worked, counters and choice worked further as intended. The UI was almost always consistent, which I will expand upon in inconsistencies later. But the most crucial part of any game was missing: Fun.

The writing in there was completely dummy writing, just pieces of texts from an outline that were intended to be fleshed out later. Because we anticipated changing these lines anyway and just wanted to capture basic story and mechanics, it wasn’t double checked thoroughly. Thus, one player could not focus at all because of typos that popped up. Others felt like there was no meaningful choice because the text was so bland. We did not capture in our play test the joy of playing a dating sim: character connection. Through all the telling and no showing, the players felt like they were just clicking around for no real reason, never real connecting with their partner. Players never got to see how their actions affected an ending or future dates because we limited the game to one date. We can pat ourselves on the back for not breaking code, but the full experience of this test was not near what we want for Dog Tycoon.

In terms of the UI, yes it was functional, but players found in ineffective. Since we never changed the background or the business partner sprite, the players only real stimulation was changing dummy text! The UI moved around a bit because of how the twine engine reads in white spaces, which seemed fine to the developers, but not the players. Having the scroll or move your cursor a ton is not what players want from a dating sim. The arrow for proceeding through text was also quite small and transient, so it was harder for players to move through the game at the pace they wanted. And the cherry on top was the fonts and colors made the game look bland.

Above: Alpha tested UI with feedback notes.

Obviously, if you were looking forward to the game, hearing all this must be angering or depressing, but Pigeon Stick Studios will not let this stand! We are planning on running a second round of alpha testing this weekend with re-vamped UI and writing! The player’s feedback will not be forgotten as we continue this development. More puns, more color, more dogs are yet to come. We go further and add music, a story redesign, and a better introduction/ ending, so players get to feel the effects of choices better! We plan on reversing every single line of negative feedback to better display a joyful game. During and after Alpha V2: Fun Edition we plan to develop tests of a week and a full dog’s gameplay with dummy text (which will be used internally, we won’t be subjecting more players to the pains of boredom). There will be a couple smaller tests of these with player, but once those are developed, we will move fast to making the first draft of the full game so we can get to real playtesting. Launch day is coming up soon and we will definitely not disappoint. 

Finally, we would like to thank all players so far for their open an honest feedback. Without these negatives, we would have never made the right game. If you plan on testing a gaming, use your voice for good. Every piece of honest truth you share, good or bad, will change everything.

Be speaking again soon!

Kiara M

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First Look at the UI

Hello everyone, I’m Greg Klimov, UI specialist and (mainly) programmer at Pigeon Stick Studios. Today I wanted to share our adventure in designing and creating the UI template in Twine for the fledgling Dog Tycoon! 

Meet our new GUI template:

A template for each game slide with inserted sample images.

    Believe it or not, you are looking at a product of hours of evolution and improvement; the Twine engine and my lack of significant experience with Twine introduced much complication. We initially wanted a fullscreen background image with the bottom third covered by a text box with a semi-transparent background. However, all elements in twine are auto indented by about one fourth of the page (measuring from the edge of the white/gray box on the left). Furthermore,   

the background setting on the HTML Header element didn’t reach the right edge of the screen. The Header element in the above image is set to have the city image as a background; notice how it is automatically limited to the space described above. Because of this, we decided to limit the play area to a smaller resolution outlined below. (Warning: not to scale)

The original sketch of the plan for the Twine-adjusted template.  

Our next problem was that the backgrounds only worked with images published on the web, but we were able to work around this because images sent through Discord are automatically uploaded to the web (without too much security concern). This allowed us to just send any image through Discord, copy the link, and use the picture. I drew some basic scribbles, sent them, and the whole team could instantly use my code and images because none of the image references had to be changed.

Introduction of images with Discord and a transparent box

At around this time, we realized that we wanted to have an image of the dog the player is speaking to on screen. This made the transparent text box idea obsolete because the image of the dog’s head floating above the textbox would look almost as ridiculous as my scribbles above, so we separated the background image from the textbox entirely, and arrived at our clean and simple UI design as seen in the first image.

In all, the Twine engine affected our UI design almost as much as our notion of the average dating simulator UI design. I’m sure we could have come up with a way to force Twine to do our exact bidding, but given the limited time resources, my sub-par expertise, and the fact that our UI template looks (I think) appealing as is, it would not have been a good use of our time. Besides, this template is only the backbone for the art and writing of the game. It cannot and should not define the game. So even if it does not look exactly like what we first intended, it will still serve its purpose of delivering a quality game.  

(Pigeon) Stick with us as we accelerate into the next stages of the design process. We can now start importing the game’s text and events into Twine and begin alpha testing! 

-Greg Klimov  9/14/19

Image credits:

Fig 1)

 Dog: Avery

City:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3rd_Ave_looking_northwest_from_University_St_showing_the_Denny_Hotel_in_the_background_and_the_New_York_Block_to_the_left,_1890_(WARNER_320).jpeg

 Fig 2)

Pug:https://www.petmd.com/dog/conditions/digestive/c_dg_diarrhea_acute

Wolf Dog:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfdog

 Fig 3)

Both: Greg Klimov

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First Look at the Artwork

Hey everyone! Avery here, I’m the head (and only) artist at Pigeon Stick Studios. My first task has been to design the main characters of Dog Tycoon! This boils down to the dogs from the two initial roots, and the one from the stretch goal third route as well. So how about we get a little introduction to these dogs!

Our first dog is Max, the happy-go-lucky golden retriever and owner of T-Bones! He’s a very friendly nice guy, and just being around him seems to make your spirits rise! He makes his living selling T-bone steaks, his favourite food! He is currently looking for someone to help him manage his business. Do you have what it takes to help out with such a genuinely good guy??

Our second dog is Bones, the surly and mysterious Doberman Pinscher, and owner of the local Paw Shop. No one seems to know anything about her, not even her real name! She buys and sells in all manner of doggy goods, both legal and not. She is looking to hire her first ever employee at her little roadside shop. Can you worm your way into the heart of this tough doggo and come out alive?

And finally, we have Clawdius the Saluki and manager of the city’s dog parks. He’s very well put together, and always has business on his mind. He’s rich and fancy, but not all unpleasant. Some might even say that he has a heart of gold underneath his silvery hide. It’s Clawdius’ duty to make sure that all dogs are safe, sound, and having fun at the park, and he’s looking for a little help to make sure things are running smoothly. If you think you’re good enough for his tastes, you may be able to make it bit with Clawdius!

And there you have the main stars of this dog show! I hope you like these pups, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of them in Dog Tycoon!

- Avery (@Orangejuicearts/Orangejuicearts.tumblr.com)

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Paper Prototyping is Successful!

We are excited to announce that we have reached our second round of paper prototyping! 

During the first round of prototyping, we looked to see if the mood and basic mechanics of the game where enjoyable for players. We had an introduction, selection of dog to meet, and one date, but not much else. This boiled the dating sim format to it’s bare essentials, so with a sprinkling of dog puns and some printed picture, we hit the nail right on the head. Most players got some good laughs during our tests with other Game Design students, so we decided to keep this game and move onto ironing out more details. 

Obviously, a dating sim is never just bare essentials. First off, it is never just one date with one person. We needed a better timeline. We have decided to make the game three weeks long, one week for “interviews” where you have access to all the dogs, then two weeks for real business meetings from with favorite pup.We decided against allowing players to work for more than one dog at once for simplicity purposes. If you don’t get to work with your pup for those two weeks, don’t fret! We are currently working on formatting two city events that happen in all routes so you get to interact with all the dogs in each story line, although you won’t get their ending that play-through. The second paper prototype does not have a full second week, but the first week has a better loop to talk to all three dogs. We will implement the second week with full endings once in engine because the second and third weeks require full fleshed writing to get their message across.

Finally, one other important thing we added was the contact mechanism. All dating sims have some contact points where you can ask to meet with someone again like a cell phone or a computer. Our dogs are not quite up to date with technology, so we opted for something with more personality: your gruff friend the Pigeon. Currently with the working name Buzz, his thick New York accent and street knowledge give the environment more humor and coherence. After meetings, the player will whistle for their pall Buzz and we comes swooping ready for the sitch. He will set up meetings for the next day and let you know about what is going on in town. His insertion into the second prototype was well received by players, so you will be sure to see him for your play through.

Now we the core mechanics and feelings ready for insertion into the real game. From here on out we are planning to start creating in engine prototypes of the cycle and start overall development. We still have a lot of work to do on story, art, ui, and pretty much everything, but we know through passion and balance we will get it all done soon.

More to come soon!

- Kiara

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General Design

Hello Humans,

Our game is going to be based on the Twine Engine. This engine is used for text-based clicker games, using HTML as the base. If you have a computer, you can absolutely play this game. On your smartphone...maybe. Our game will incorporate dating sim mechanics into a business setting, similar to Hatoful Boyfriend such as branching storylines and a relationship meter (whether that is shown to the player is still being discussed). Otherwise, our goal is to make a witty game experience for you (...and stick as many puns in the game as possible. Who can resist when they have this much creativity?). Currently, in our pipeline we are hoping to complete 2-character plot lines. Maybe later we could see 3 plots sketched out.

Keep following us as we continue to send out new info.

-Hoang

[pigeonstick-blog]

Announcement

Hello and welcome from Pigeon Stick Studios. We have only known each other for a short period of time yet we have already gotten along, finding pleasure from sharing so many ridiculous ideas. It is because of those concepts that we would like to announce that we are starting a new project. Please support us as we share with you all the progress of our game. It isn’t much right now, but let’s see what happens.

Currently we are in development of a game. Hint: It’s about dogs, business, shenanigans, and noir. More info to come!

Members: Avery Rynkowski (Artist), Kiara Munz (Writer), Hoang Nguyen (Programmer), and Greg Limov (Programmer)

-Hoang Nguyen