#ask: game dev

[just-a-carrot]

hey carrot!! i'm working on my own vn and i was curious how you built the story for yours? like did you have a storyboard or something??

I built it...... in my head!!! 😃 LOL

honestly tho I didn't have anything like that, I just had visuals of key scenes in my head and then when I sat down to write I'd attempt to connect those scenes. having said that I'm not saying that's a good way to do it lol. I think a storyboard or at least some kind of outline would be really helpful for planning out the story! particularly if it's longer or if you want to have a variety of story branches. you could do an outline for the story and then create small storyboard images to plan your CGs or scenes or however it is you want to set up your VN. that would help you plan out the work a lot better I would think

[celestial-games]

Have you done any paper wasps yet?

I've made 8 paper wasps! :]

[abby-howard]

Hello hello! Out of curiosity, do you have an estimate of the number of drawings that make up STP?

You are such an inspiration, thank you for all the work you put into your incredible art! :)

I think there are about 5,000 assets in the game!

And a lot of that comes from every image in the game having several layers for the parallax effect, so the files are split up like this:

Which comes together into:

There are also talk variants of almost every sprite:

And of course the occasional:

That being said, it was still a lot of work lmao (PS they're all the saved at the aspect ratio of the game so they can be placed exactly where they're meant to be, this is part of how we're able to have sprites move around without getting overwhelmed!)

Another couple separated layers under the cut:

[meo-eiru]

DUDE I JUST PLAYED THROUGH THE GAME, WHY IS IT SO SADDDD😭😭😭

and why is he hot

Starling went through quite a few redesigns through the entire development process so let me talk about it a bit :3

It all started with this notes app drawing I made with my finger

Right from the start we knew his tail would be made out of tongues but figuring out how many and placed how was quite hard, I really had to girlmath my way thru

This was the first actual drawing I made of him. The story wasn't complete yet but I went ahead and designed something anyway. Here he was definitely "scarier" and his scar was also placed differently. He had gills on his neck but as you will see I changed their location to under his arms later on. We were actually considering not giving him a tongue of his own so I wanted to make his mouth terrifyingly big and empty.

Here I tried giving him bigger eyes like a fish. This was when his playful and childlike personality had started shaping as you can see from the expressions. I definitely liked this direction better but it also wasn't perfect just yet so I went ahead and did a few more changes

I slowed down on trying to figure out his design a bit after that and instead focused on how his sprite would look. He is a merman after all, he can't just stand straight like a lot of the other visual novel characters. This stage was PAINFUL.

These were the first ones I sketched, we ended up deciding we liked the 3rd one the best.

I carried that 3rd one over to another canvas and started playing around with how we could place his tail, we started entertaining the idea of having him sit on a big rock

This is when his pose really shaped up. The animated Little Mermaid movie was actually a big inspiration, I sat and rewatched the entire movie and studied how they animated her tail

And after that I finally finalized his design. We decided to change the end of his tail to be more eel like for aesthetic purposes (normal tail shape looked weird with tongues)

And for anyone wondering this is what Maelyn looked like at first. Since the story wasn't complete yet I thought it'd take place in a more modern setting and designed her with that in mind but we decided to have the story take place in 1800s so I changed the design based on that. I did a lot of research on glasses and corsets to make the design as accurate as I could.

Yes glasses! We didn't use the sprites in the main story but Maelyn does wear glasses and looks very pretty in them if you ask me. You will be seeing more of it in the bonus episodes!

[insertdisc5]

hihi!!! i absolutely adore isat and it inspired me to start making my own rpgmaker game, so i had a quick question for you! if you haven't talked about it before, how did you personally go about finding a publisher? im pretty early in my own development process but it just seems like a daunting thing to find one :o

i hope you have a wonderful day!!! :3

I'm so good at bideo game that they came to ME (sparkles) thanks start again a prologue for showing publishers I can do game good

Here's some advice for finding publishers tho (source: I have eyes, and I've taken classes about this):

-first, ask yourself: why do you need a publisher? Money, marketing, producing, all of the above? There are lots of options out there that aren't getting a publisher. You can just hire a producer (like my producer Dora Breckinridge <3)

-have a pitch ready!!!! you can find examples of pitches online, but I highly recommend looking at the Bear & Breakfast one for example. At the very least you should have concept art, if not mockups of what the game could look like, if not actual screenshots

-making a good pitch is art. Highly recommend having someone look it over. Rami Ismail has consultations available just for that purpose and he knows his stuff (all the advice I have comes from him! I took a great class of his a couple months ago)

-once you have a pitch ready, email it to literally every publisher out there. yes I know you're making an rpg and this publisher is only looking for platformers, but send it to them anyway. They will not blacklist you for this lol, worst case scenario is that they won't look at it.

-if you get zero answers, redo your pitch. If you get a couple, that's the ticket. Look at their offers and take the best one. Only say no to the others once you got that shit signed. If you get a BUNCH of answers, it means your idea rules and you could probably self publish it and don't need a publisher. But take one anyway if you want (especially for your first game!)

-having a vertical slice is always good for pitching, but not always needed? (AKA a slice of your game that shows off the story, gameplay, etc... aka shows you know how to do this)

-once you get a publisher contract, ASK A VIDEO GAME LAWYWR TO LOOK IT OVER. NOT JUST A LAWYER. A VIDEO GAME LAWYER. ITS YOUR BABY!!! FUCKING DO IT

-you should probably add a clause about if the publisher goes down. Reminder also that the video game industry is in shambles right now. Manage your expectations

-you can also self publish. It is a thing you can do. Patreon is here. Kickstarter is here. You have options!!! If you can't get a publisher it's not the end of the world!!!!!!

-I'm just a humble dev and those are my own humble thoughts as someone who got very lucky with their publisher. Armor Games was very good to me during the dev of isat!

[deerspherestudios]

I’m super curious about Atom!!!! Firstly, they’re so cute :(((( I would be so nice to them right off the bat. I could match that energy (maybe not the…liquefying people part, but I can Definitely meet the upbeat “get to know you” energy!!!!)

But I’m also curious about their little “worm transform-y” ability. There are a TON of implications to what they said about it, and I’m very interested to know which of those implications are true

So maybe I’m taking Atom too literally, but I’m pretty sure at one point they said “I can make your air.” Which, they WOULD need to make MC air, if they were to keep you in space forever. Air is limited.

But you can’t breathe in worms. So that means Atom’s worm (body?) transformation legitimately BECOMES whatever they will it to. Not just imitates. That dog food wasn’t worms, it was dog food. And the air isn’t worms, it’s air!!

And then that stretches into other questions. Could Atom take any form they wish? What would happen if they transformed all their worms? Can they feel when their worms (body??) are being transformed?

You don’t have to answer that slew of questions at the end lmao—maybe I’m reading too much into it. But!! I LOVE Atom and all the implications that their existence holds. I had a lot of fun playing the game :DD

Aaa I'm really glad you like Atom as much as you do!! I don't know if it's just new blorbo energy but I get excited to talk about them, especially in detail like this haha! I'll try to explain below the cut about their ability to create things (tw// it's long!!) but to keep it short, you're actually correct!

TLDR: Atom reconstructs their worms into different forms of matter (whether solid/liquid/gas) to produce whatever you need to survive. Because, uh,,, science. <3

Here's the lengthy explanation of what Atom can do. I'm not smart enough to explain it but I'm stealing this from another website:

Transmutation or nuclear transmutation is a process that involves a change in the nucleus of an atom. When the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom changes, the identity of that atom changes as it is turned into another element or isotope.[1] This transmutation process can be either natural or artificial.

Simplifying it further for my character, when Atom talks about being better than a planet, they kinda are! They can make anything as long as they know what it is (I've yet to come up with 'how' they discover new elements,,, it's implied in-game but I wanna flesh it out more; ask me again later keheh), and the worms that make them up is an unlimited resource/material for those exact transmutations. And if something turns into waste, like the rejected dog food, they just crunch them up to be re-used all over again.

Remember what they said about being your 'angel'? Not to be too on the nose but in a way they turned the Bidadari into your own personal terrarium, with it being the ecosystem keeping you alive in space. Which, in my personal opinion, makes the ending much more terrifying.

Here's a lightning round to answer your questions because I don't know when I'll get these kinds of questions again!!

Could Atom take any form they wish?

Nope! They're still just worms! When they 'make' something it's no longer a part of them.

2. What would happen if they transformed all their worms?

Highly unlikely to happen, but let's say for experimentation's sake Atom is forced to use up all their worms and the end result is separated from it so they can't absorb it back into themselves like the dog food. It has to leave one single organism behind, but it can't really do anything. That single organism eventually will multiply all the way back to its former (mass wriggling) glory.

3. Can they feel when their worms (body??) are being transformed?

Nope! They don't really feel anything, at the most they feel pressure and temperature changes but that's it.

THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TEDTALK HAVE A NICE DAY! HERE'S YOUR REWARD <3

[rosesrotofficial]

gluttony gods ronin vs killer chat ronin

because people have been asking! hope this clears some things up :)

[vynnyal]

OK, fair warning to the few people I actually managed to convince to try the game??

Rain world does NOT play like hollow knight, and you'll get your butt kicked if you approach it like that.

It's really hard. Like, really hard. Instead of the game literally giving you abilities in the form of power-ups and damage buffs, the only abilities you gain is from what you learn and your own ingenuity. You're a rat from beginning to end. If you just beef your way through it, it's gonna suck and you're gonna be confused and frustrated all the time. But if you pay attention, take it slow, and learn how the ai works and how everything interacts with each other, you can consistently get through and dominate situations you thought were impossible to do so when you first began. Now get out there, kill some lizards, and bully some old computers!

[blueskittlesart]

*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?

tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.

[aru-art]

t4t misery

[just-a-carrot]

hi this is the aspiring game dev who sent that other ask. Yes I am hoping to create a visual novel in the future :3 any advice on where to start with that?

i see i see

well what i wrote in the other ask still is extremely relevant, so i would so that's still my top advice in general

but as for specifically VN stuff i would say:

Don't try to do a ton of complicated coding work right off the bat; start off very simply just trying for instance to do a scene that you've written with perhaps some placeholder assets just to get started, then expand from there; you can slowly add more complicated code and polish as you get more familiar with the engine you're using (i use ren'py for instance, which is very easy to jump into, and you can use the tutorial game to start out learning some basics and go from there!); this is why for instance my later arcs of OW and my later games in general are all a bit more polished coding and scripting-wise, because when i was just getting started, everything was brand-new, so i was just trying to keep things simple to keep moving, which is a good thing actually, because as a beginner it's so easy to get stuck in the mud and overwhelmed and it's so easy to lose motivation if you hit a lot of snags this early on; also for instance i don't even touch things like GUI until i've got at least part of the game itself coded, etc

Write a good chunk of your script first before diving in so you have a lot to work with once you start working in the engine.

Think about music like you're scoring a movie rather than like you're picking songs for a game. What I like to do is go out and just start listening to lots of music from the music sites I've used while thinking about the story and potential scenes. I download a bunch and just live with it for a while. Sometimes I'll listen to a song and know right away a scene it's perfect for, or it'll inspire something for a scene. Other times I really like a song but am not sure what to use it for yet so I'll just live with it for a while and see if eventually my head pairs it up with a scene. Other times I already have a scene and am looking for a song specifically for it. I feel like listening to and paying more attention to scores in movies and TV will also help you get a bit more of an ear for how to work with music in VNs.

Playtest a lot!! Again and again! You can insta-reload in Ren'Py with your new saved changes. I do this constantly when working to test out how my scenes look and feel. Even more so when working with more complicated animations as I need to ensure my numbers are correct and everything looks right lol.

[racheldrawsthis]

I'm curious, was Dead Plate inspired in any way by Hannibal (2013)??? :3

Surprisingly not at all! Both me and my co-dev (@ekrixart) haven't seen the show- the game was mostly inspired by The Menu (2022) and two korean media we liked which were Burning (2018) and the webtoon Strangers From Hell :]

[meo-eiru]

Do you have any tips on starting a VN is really wanna make one but have no idea how to actually start I have a few ideas but the writing and planning out is what overwhelms me and starting things is always a struggle how did start the process on your VN?

Well I'm no pro by any means so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I'm sure everyone has a style they find more productive but I'll talk about how I personally go about it as an artist who prefers drawing over writing (I'll be using the stuff I made for a now scrapped vn idea)

I usually like to draw a simple storyboard to get a gist of exactly where I'm planning to start and the story I have in my head. It's a very simple and quick step and don't be afraid to make some changes on the first version you drew.

For example here I have the start of the story and the 3 endings with the main diversion of the story line.

Then once I'm done with that I make a more detailed and longer storyboard of the actual game. I decide exactly where the options appear and where they lead to. This one is important, I usually go back to check what I decided on quite often, don't think "oh I can remember this no problem", you probably won't. Write down notes.

Once that's done I basically dive into writing the actual script, while following the story line I had decided on beforehand.

Visual novels are quite easy to code but they are very dialogue heavy, and dialogue writing is very different from writing normally. You can't just go "he said she said", you need them to come directly from the character. Don't be afraid to spend as much time here as you need.

As I said I'm not a pro, for example Sel is a writer and not an artist and I know she just immediately starts with the script after some planning, writes an overall script and adds in more details every time she goes over them.

There are no strict rules to making vns, there isn't a schedule you're forced to follow. See what feels easier to start with and go from there

[insertdisc5]

I forgot if I asked this last time your inbox was open (though even if I did, you never answered it) but how long did you have the ideas for ISAT in your head before you started the development process? I've had this idea for a game for 12 years and haven't coded a single line. I'm writing the story first. Is that a bad idea? I know it's not a race, but I feel like I'm behind my fellow mid-20s creatives. I also can't draw for shit, nor can I afford to commission a thousand or so art pieces. Do you have any advice (other than replaying your game, which I plan to do anyway) for an aspiring indie dev who has felt like giving up but hasn't actually done it?

writing the story first is never a bad idea. however i think you should start actually making the game where you know stuff like "so im gonna have this boy and he's gonna become a jedi to fight the emperor and then the emperor is gonna be his DAD and then he saves the galaxy", even if you don't know what happens in between those cool things. aka when you know your beginning and end.

the reason you should start actually making the game then is because while making the game, you will realize the strengths and weaknesses of the software you're using. which means you'll realize you cant make this cool moment with a thousand enemies. but you CAN add little scenes every time the player uses a specific item. and knowing the intricacies of the software will make your game cooler

tldr: just start da gaem already!!!!! u can do eet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[eggwishing]

More !!! Im really fond of the two stitched looking things on the right. I want to design more of them. I’m feeling super inspired by Kanotynes …..

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Wangxian goes to horse jail for their crimes against equines.