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[vertebrae-entertainment]

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[vertebrae-entertainment]

I am developing a gay hookup app with roguelike and deckbuilding elements

[vertebrae-entertainment]

4/5/2024 - Fangst animation rework!

Hi again y'all, Hauk here! If you've been peeking at our discord channel lately, you might have noticed I've been posting a lot of animation WIP's. Thats because I'm in the process of reworking some of the oldest sprites in the project- walking and jumping!

It can take me up to a year to nail how I draw and animate a character. For our protagonist the thing that has taken the most time is definitely line stylization, proportions and leg silhouette. He's gotten bigger and bigger during development, not to mention spikier! Honestly its not that smart to design a tall character for a platformer, and there's a reason most platforming type characters have a very square hitbox. Its just easier to design challenges that way!

But i'm not changing gears now!! I wanted Fangst to have a tall handsome man as a player character, and i'm gonna stick to it!!

Here's a peek at the new walk animation. The arm holding his fishing rod is a static, separate sprite that is basically glued to the player with code for gameplay reasons.

We needed a smart way to change and add bounce to the rod without having a million variants of every sprite. Here are two iterations on how a static arm could be anchored to the player. I want him to carry himself with a confident sway, as though the whole world is his catwalk- so perhaps the full bounce of the second one is too much!

Speaking of bounce, the double jump animation! Right now he has the very placeholder double jump solution of turning into a small rotating orb sonic style, and its been a frustrating disconnect seeing as the hitbox ordinarily is quite big.

My goal for this animation is that i want him to do a sexy, elegant backflip. I started with a version with an upside down split, but after some iterations we agreed that the simpler one would be more readable and use-friendly. But an upside down split is kinda iconic... maybe we can use it elsewhere?

A platformer player will spend most of their time jumping around, so nailing a satisfying, easily readable jump is important in both animation and feel. Characterization is also important here- i want it to be obvious that our player character is athletic and elegant, and that these acrobatics cost him little effort.

However, i'm expecting a bit of a pickle implementation-wise. See, him turning into a sonic-style orb made the walljumps feel practically seamless. Will a fully animated backflip be equally friendly? The sprite will be a lot bigger. Truth is, a character turning into a ball is just really easy to design around.

Here's the current in-game sprites, featuring his old jumps, idle pose and miiildly disconnected placeholder arm with a smaller fishing rod. As you might have noticed, he's also a bit softer looking, and his boots are way smaller!

I think the newer sprites will make him have a more stylish, cool and recognizeable silhouette. It will be worth it to update these old things- after all, inbetween all this technical game design stuff, its just also really important to me that the player feels like a cool and professional monster hunting fisherman!

Thanks for keeping up with our project, we're doing our best to make Fangst a proper quality "You: A Hot Man, Kill Monster!" experience!!

-Hauk

[vertebrae-entertainment]

im normal about his walk sprite i promise

Check out the dev blog for our transgender and gay as hell fishing game -> @vertebrae-entertainment

[vertebrae-entertainment]

3/22/24 - Level design

Heya! I’m Silver, and I’ve been working with Vertebrae on various things related to the game, such as sound, interface and most recently, level design. I’ve been here since around august 2023, mostly in the background, but today I thought I might take a moment to talk about some exciting new developments coming to Fangst in the near future!

Some of you may not be aware, but during the last few months we’ve been hard at work shaping the world of Fangst into something playable. The first island of the game, Svikøy, is mostly complete, and is only lacking in decoration and other visual diversity, so now is maybe a good time to talk about the process and how we got here.

So let’s talk level design! I feel I need to begin by saying that I have no formal experience working within this field, so most of my insights are things I’ve accumulated mainly by playing a lot of similar games.

Recently, I’ve had an opportunity to play some great “metroidvania” games (or “search-action” if you prefer that term) to take inspiration from, mainly Grime, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Metroid Dread. I’ve been careful not to get too heavily inspired, as I wanted the levels in Fangst to feel uniquely suited to its style of progression and gameplay.

In most metroidvanias, you get to explore a mostly seamless map whose distinct areas are only gated by ability upgrades and loading zones, and sometimes narrative beats. In Fangst, however, the game is broken up into different islands that you will need to be given access to in order to explore. That makes it all the more challenging to make an interesting level that feels like a metroidvania map, but without certain things players would come to expect from other games of its ilk.

With the game’s first level, Svikøy, I attempted to explore different avenues of rewarding exploration, creating fun platforming sections and incorporating distinct visual and environmental identities to sections of the map which I could hopefully learn from and implement better in later maps. So with all that said, why don’t we take a closer look at the (mostly) finished result.

Planning

When I first sat down to try and plan out the map, I knew I wanted it to have areas that felt separate, yet part of a greater whole. I was initially spurred by input from the rest of the team about what they pictured the island to look like and features they wanted. They had already done some preliminary research into the kind of environment it should have, such as flora and remnants of the old world, and the kind of purpose the island served the community that lived nearby currently.

Narratively, Svikøy used to be the home of a lumbering operation, however, now that it was mostly abandoned, nature had grown out of control and attempted to reclaim the island. In the present, locals from other islands use the lumber mill to process logs into usable building materials, but the environment is hostile and dangerous due to the mutated wildlife. So with that in mind, I knew I wanted the island to feature certain things like a lumber mill, a giant tree, and a section in between where the mill and a tangle of roots are “fighting” for dominance.

Another thing that was important to me was to give each area an identity. The easiest way to do so felt like planning out different styles of terrain. For example, the tree should feature round, organic shapes and winding platforms, while the initial shoals and cliffs should have angular, hard corners that feel weathered by erosion. Mostly, the latter was heavily inspired by a wonderful piece of concept art that Hauk made when exploring the game’s visual identity.

Progression

Once the layout had been planned out, I began by looking at sections to gate off behind ability upgrades. I ended up with making certain shortcuts and optional treasures locked behind a walljump ability which I intended for the player to acquire around halfway through. The walljump would grant access to the top layer of the giant tree after a slightly more challenging walljump-focused platforming section. Subsequently, the rest of the map would open up with it, save certain small secret areas that require abilities which you can only get on other islands.

To keep my options open, I also opted for having every platforming section being completable without the double jump in case it was decided to also keep that as an ability unlockable. If not, having platforming sections not be too difficult would only serve the map well regardless, as it is supposed to be an introduction to the game’s mechanics and not an arduous trial meant only for the most skilled.

Incentives

Now that the map was starting to take shape, I spent some time adding some hidden nooks and crannies for the exploration-minded players to discover and placing chests at the end to reward them with something for their efforts. These secrets escalated from small alcoves above or below the main route to entire platforming sections hidden below floating islands that you could only find by jumping off the edges of cliffs. Having these small areas made quite a big difference when just running around, and I’m sure will be even better once we figure out some more interesting rewards than eggs and milk.

Lastly, it wouldn’t be a fishing game without some fishing. I made sure to add some spots around the map where fish could swim around. Most importantly, I wanted to have some lakes that were hard to get to, but that would contain rare and exotic species to incentivise players to travel there each day to see what they could catch. Ideally, these locations would be the only place to catch certain species of fish for those players who wanted to fill out their fish encyclopedias.

The map I have created is by no means perfect, but overall, I believe it to be a worthy first level. Three more islands remain, in addition to some other locations that I won’t spoil here, so I feel there is much room to improve and expand on ideas that had to be cut for time reasons. Hopefully, the map will make it to the hands of players in the form of a demo sooner rather than later, but no date has been set in stone for when this might happen. Keep your eyes on this space for more updates to come!

-Silver

[vertebrae-entertainment]

Red Salmon Mutant from Kamen Rider Black ep. 33

"The River of a Father and Child's Love"

[vertebrae-entertainment]

This year for Global Game Jam, our group made Circus Dimension- an infinite runner where you play as a clown.

Help Zimbello escape the neverending laughter and whimsy! Try it here:

[vertebrae-entertainment]

Here's a development snapshot from Fangst! A lot of things are coming together right now on our little action fishing game... very exciting!

[vertebrae-entertainment]

23.01.24 - Environments

Hey y'all, happy new year! Things were pretty much busy from the get-go for us, so we haven't had time to post a proper update. But now we're here, and here's whats up!

This is a reference picture my partner took for me on one of our trips to my hometown of Stavanger, Norway a couple of years back. Stavanger has been a great influence of multiple of my games, mostly due to a love-hate relationship, complicated nostalgia and pride. Its a gorgeous town with lovely nature and bustling culture, but it is also full of rich jerks and elon-pilled right-wingers. Thats what the oil industry will do to you!

Anyway, thats neither here nor there- i think anywhere you grow up, you have a complicated relationship with.

If you've been peeking at our discord (hey, come hang out with us!) lately, you might have noticed that i've been posting a bunch of mockups for environment art and i thought i could give y'all an insight into how important dirt is to me!!

Environments have been on the backburner for a long time for me, mostly because im not an environment artist and i am pretty intimidated by the task ahead. My task is: portray post-apocalyptic Norwegian society and nature, and make it so that Fangst wont be mistaken for just any other game. It needs to be both unique and also very deliberately reflect real world locations. That's no small task!

But i've made some visual breakthroughs lately, and that has made me able to grasp the task much easier. Its been in the art recipe for this project all along, the key words being impressionism, brutalism, texture! The trick was combining it in the right way.

Here is a mockup i posted earlier this month. The angled texture on the rocks is strongly inspired by brutalist concrete sculptures, with a thick outline to show the player what is and is not a platform. Overlaid is a real-world picture my partner took of some algae and plant growth on rocks close to the sea.

The background is impressionist, clearly distancing it from the lens and 'player space' by taking on a different artstyle. We have mentioned earlier that we're inspired by the work of Munch, and have earlier tried to replicate the sun from this piece in-game.

The characters are also modernist, but in a different sense- taking inspiration from the UPA revival movement most famously seen in early 2000s cartoons such as Dexters Laboratory and Samurai Jack. I suppose this could make them a third, separate layer of modernist art!

Right now some aspects don't fit as cleanly into the formula- plant life is proving tricky, and remains semi-realistically styled. UI is deliberately made to look like real-world objects, because i think it helps it stand out against the other layers. Readability is my primary concern right now, i have a tendency to soup that away in the hunt for exciting art direction.

Next time, i'll be talking about a whole separate beast again- architecture. Nothing is more norwegian to me than dingy little wooden houses along a coastline, so you bet your ass im putting effort into it! But also, GLOBAL GAME JAM IS COMING UP- so i might also talk about that :3 We'll see.

Have a good one! -Hauk

[vertebrae-entertainment]

Happy holidays, folks!

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Please somebody buy her sardines its all she has!! :(

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the look he gives you when he has picked every berry on the island and he is going to sell it to you at 500% price

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Folks in our discord are excited for a certain fishing equipment store npc getting a major overhaul! ...perhaps a little too excited-

(Psst, you should totally come hang out with us, we post updates in here regularly)

[vertebrae-entertainment]

13.11.23

Hiya! Sorry about the radio silence, work on Fangst is continuing somewhat according to schedule and we definitely have new things to show off when time allows it! However, production has hit a bit of a snag in the funding department, and we've been needing to focus on non-fishing game work to stay afloat.. keeping the lights on and all that!

Its a general pattern in indie games these days that funding is hard to come by- luckily we're used to the cockroach strategy of development. Scrap & build, staying afloat, etc. These days Åge is collaborating on an agricultural sustainability game with another company, while i'm directing more efforts towards my game education job and helping organize the local Global Game Jam event in Hamar. (biggest registered GGJ event in the nordics multiple years in a row, btw!! :p)

But! Even with production slowing down, 2024 is looking promising as the year we release the Fangst demo to the public. With the current plan, we're aiming for a summer demo drop for PC on Steam. With some luck, a full release wont lag too far behind!

Right now i am working on full illustrations of side characters. I feel like i have finally nailed the balance on Alta's design. He's proving himself subtly tricky- he needs to look effortlessly but intentionally beautiful, but like he's both trying and not trying at all. At the same time he should look comfortably feminine, but not too dainty. Like he enjoys both a skincare routine and long walks in the forest foraging for mushrooms and berries.

Is he dressed a bit nonsensical for a hike? Yes, but i think he wants to look better than everyone else, no matter the situation- and that means wearing a crop top to go foraging. I think that's kind of powerful, and a statement in itself.

Fun fact about Alta: He's a vegetarian, not for any moral or health reason, but because its just *sooo much easier* for him- he's just that good at his job.

Take care! -Hauk

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Fanart wall update <3 Thank you so much for your continued support!

Featured here are artistically inclined members of our Discord community- you're of course more than welcome to join us here! (We're soon to hit 100 members!!)

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Yesterday we had the honor of being invited to Lillestrøm Library for a little 'author interview' for Fangst, and we were able to talk a little bit about our origins as developers and the narrative themes behind our project! (its queerness and having a transgender main character, fishing and its connection to traditional masculinity, etc.)

The interview is in Norwegian and available through their website here:

[vertebrae-entertainment]

he do be swinging!!