skeljack-devlog

[skeljack-devlog]

Log #3: First Steps

Hi all! This time we’re finally taking a look at some of the stuff we’ve been doing in Unity. Since this is our first game, we’ve had to do a lot of experimentation and learning, especially since the C# language is entirely new to me. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished so far, though!

Here’s our placeholder sprite, whom we’ve lovingly dubbed Flat Sam, showing off our own 8-directional billboard sprite system.

In-game is on the right, where you can see that the sprite is always facing the camera, but switches out between different angles as you rotate the camera. On the left, in the game editor, you can see that the sprite is both rotating and switching.

We were going for a look kind of like the PS1 game Xenogears, which had a similar hybrid system of a rotatable camera and billboard sprites. This sort of way of doing 2D characters in a 3D environment isn’t very common, I think, but it ends up being the best of both worlds when it comes to the sense of place that a 3D environment gives and the sense of expression of 2D character sprites.

We’re also working on the battle scene, which will ultimately be a grid-based system. Here we’re testing out some early code for moving the character to a new square. As you can see in the gif, Flat Sam is sticking to his grid squares, which unfortunately are invisible at the moment.

You can probably guess from the way we’ve set things up here, but the game’s battle system is going to be turn-based and tactical, something like Into the Breach or a miniature Divinity: Original Sin (but with hexes). But since this is also a character-driven RPG, each party member will have unique combat mechanics and will synergize with other party members in ways that relate to their relationships in the story.

But I’m getting ahead of myself there! We have a long way to go before we get to any of that.

See you next week!

-Dex

[skeljack-devlog]

Log #2: Meet Jack and Fox

This week, instead of looking at code, we decided to share some art of our main cast! This is Jack (right) and Fox (left), childhood friends who grow up to become two of the game’s main party.

This is Jack as he’ll look in the game. He’s the player character, and as such has a lot of different directions his character could go over the course of the game, but overall he’s a pretty chill dude. As stated in a previous log, Jack is actually a skeleton despite looking like a human - his parents put an enchantment on him as a child so that he would appear human to others. Ostensibly, this is because child skeletons are relatively uncommon.

However, Jack encountered another child skeleton, Fox, and the two grew up together.

This is Fox now. As you can see, he found a new head and drastically changed his fashion sense. Fox is a bit of a jokester, and something of a class clown. He’s more of a passive trickster, though, tending to poke fun from the sidelines instead of enacting pranks himself. But he’s no stranger to schadenfreude if he thinks someone deserves it.

The two of them are best buds by the time they enter Salem Academy, and are practically brothers. In fact, the Winthrops (Jack’s family) unofficially adopted Fox and allowed him to live with them until he got his bearings in the world.

That’s all for today, see you next week!

-Dex

[skeljack-devlog]

Log #1: A Normal, Magical World

Hi all! Dex here. This week, I wanted to share a bit about the world we’ve crafted for this game.

Like Ave stated in the last post, this game started off as a dream, so the surreal aspect of the world is something that we wanted to maintain. But we didn’t want it to veer off into nonsensical dream logic, just keep a strange tinge to everything. A mix of the familiar and unfamiliar.

The setting is urban fantasy, with an emphasis on the everyday. This direction kept us grounded in how we wanted to portray the world: this wasn’t a world where sweeping fantasy epics could easily happen, but instead one where your cell phone is powered by arcane energies and you have to call pest control to exorcise the spirits that infest your microwave. Magic has seeped into every aspect of this world, but it’s a relatively normal-feeling one. One where you can believe that people live normal, relatively comfortable lives, just with the added wonders and problems that living in a world full of magic might bring.

That’s not to say nothing big ever happens in this world - under the surface there’s still ancient evils and strange occurrences, but it’s blended in seamlessly with this everyday world. You don’t notice the seal of the dark lord when it’s just there above your head every day, and the war against him doesn’t really faze you when you read about it in history textbooks.

Another aspect of the world we wanted to emphasize is that magic is relatively new, historically speaking. Instead of settings where magic has always been prevalent and technology was simply built on top of an existing fantasy world, in this world magic became prominent during the Industrial Revolution alongside electricity and steam power, changing from something scarce to something much more common. This meant that the majority of “early magic” is actually more industrial magitech, which then transformed gradually into the more pervasive, everyday magic in people’s daily lives. This lends it to be less like some kind of ritual practice passed down through generations and more like an extension of technology itself.

This also means new magic is constantly being developed and sold by large corporations in ways that we in our capitalist society are familiar with - and all the baggage that brings. You can walk down the street and see a billboard ad for “teeth whitening runes” or have to suffer through a pop-up video for essential oils infused with “spiritual energy” (except these actually are - not that they’re any more effective though!).

One way this world differs significantly from ours, though, is that rogue spirits are a common danger, and entire industries and cultural practices have developed around keeping spirits in check and protecting people from spirit attacks. We’ll go more in depth about spirits in a later post, but this is the reason why schools like the Salem Academy of the Arcane exist - they’re meant to teach people self-defense against this common threat, among other things.

Anyway I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the world we’ve created! Take care, and see you next week!

-Dex

[skeljack-devlog]

Log #0: Starting Out

This is the first of what will be weekly devlogs about Skeljack (working title), a game in early development by a very small part-time dev team. I’m Ave (professional software engineer and code-from-scratch enthusiast) and my partner-in-crime is Dex (artist & sound designer, fledgling developer, and repository of good design knowledge). 

SJ quite literally came to me in a dream - the basic premise is this: Skeljack is about Jack Winthrop, a student beginning his first year of college at a university for mages. You follow him throughout the school year, making friends, completing quests, passing classes, solving mysteries, and fighting weird and unusual monsters. He is also a skeleton, but don't tell anybody. The game is a turn-based RPG with life sim elements, set in a very colorful, spooky, and eccentric world with a mix of strange magic and modern technology. And also skeletons.

We’ve actually been working on SJ sporadically for a few months now, but haven’t had anything truly visual to show for it. This post won’t be visual either. It’ll outline the kind of progress we’ve made in coding, worldbuilding, and storybuilding, and next week’s post will contain some concept art and a gif or two. 

We initially started this game with an ‘unofficial game jam’ (work on getting a prototype down in 72 hours), where we managed to get a working dialogue tree up and running using nothing but HTML & JS. This was really encouraging progress, and Dex ended up writing some several hundred lines of dialogue just to showcase this system. 

When we started to move into the actual display & gameplay, we ran into a bit of a wall. We originally set out to do 2D and had chosen Phaser.js as our engine, but after playing Bug Fabl-es and discussing the pros and cons of different styles a bit, we settled on 3D with billboard sprites. 

Moving to 3D necessitated moving to a more robust game engine, because while Phaser.js does support 3D it’s fairly finnicky to work with and has no native support for any 3D modeling or scene creation. We ended up choosing Unity because - well, why not?

Since then, we’ve created our own way of handling moving 3D billboard sprites and have started on scene transitions (more on that next week). Unity’s a lot easier for less experienced coders to work on and has allowed Dex to contribute to coding work as well. 

Story and characters will be covered in a future devlog as well, but we can say that a significant portion of our time has been spent making a robust and in-depth story outline and fleshing out characters. We’ve been using Kanka.io, a very very new website that has a similar role to Campfire Pro or World Anvil. It’s meant for tabletop RPG campaigns but works very well for any kind of worldbuilding and character/story creation. Since this is a very character- and story-driven RPG, we need to make sure that this is reflected in all of our development, from level design to mechanics. We’ve been feeling optimistic about how all this fits together, and will dedicate devlogs just to that. 

That ends the brief intro summary and the devlog for this week.