7DRL over, I didn’t finish a game!

OK yeah so I might have been a bit too ambitious, but honestly I’m still really happy with what I managed! Two weeks ago I kind of got an idea for a game and a world the game could take place in and now it is actually kind-of taking shape!

That shape being, a tabletop RPG that (if you want) you can play with the computer being your GM, so it’s both TTRPG and a roguelike. And I know what you’re thinking “Sophie that is exactly the same as the project you were working on when you started your patreon.”

And you’d kind-of be right, BUT I have a much better idea of what I’m doing now, I’ve gotten over my absurd dislike of dice (Which you might have noticed since I am now a designer of dice?????)

honestly, my older rogulike approach was mostly to just take the *aesthetics* of a TTRPG and just make my idea of a roguelike, this is much more about cool role-playing in a cool world. I’m just, way more excited about this. Plus eventually all the cool stuff about that project (like different characters/AI having their own mental picture of the dungeons ~as they appears to them~) can be part of this project too. And for now I’ve done away with stuff that can leech a bunch of momentum and development time like 3D models and stuff, now it’s all crappy drawings and little plastic stands to hold them. If I want 3D models I can add them later (and honestly, I do want to add them, I love modelling cool 3D fantasy stuff)

anyway I should probably talk about what I did and didn’t manage to get done for the jam. Stuff I did and am super happy with are a character creator (automatically fills out your character sheet!), properly implemented all the main systems (objects/characters, properties, actions, map tiles, GM, UI), you can move around the map and perform basic actions, there is some simple procedural generation, I even learned coroutines and got them in at the last minute so an action can pause and wait for you to roll your dice IRL before it continues.

So that is all really cool, and I’m super happy I managed to get it all implemented within a week… buuuuuut of course that is an absurd amount of stuff and so I couldn’t do other things as well as all that, things like enemy AI, a looting/trading system, and even weapons don’t… do anything yet. Honestly I’m still thinking about how I want them to work in terms of the action system (specifically, should each weapon have one attack action, or should some have multiple, eg a sword that you can use and choose between a slash and a thrust?). Point is, there is still a lot left to do.

Anyway, I’m not done with this yet! I’ll be taking things a little easier to recover from pushing myself so hard over the last week, but I’ll keep working on this and it will probably be this month’s WIP build, if anyone is interested in that 🙂

oh and I even started work on a Player Handbook type deal because I’m a huge fucking nerd 😛

Hope you’re well <3

Spooktober 1st – Character Concepts

So, yesterday I finished plotting out all the story & puzzles for my halloween game, which meant today I could make concept art for all the characters, including our protagonist Enid:

I have (brilliantly) opted for all the characters to be skeletons, that way I only need to model one and just tweak it a little/add clothes for each new character – and I managed to make a start on the skeleton model today too (you can see the skull above; the skeleton from the gif I shared last post was one I downloaded online, not really something I can use in a game and it has a BAJILLION vertices anyway.)

Tomorrow I’m hoping to finish modelling the base skeleton, and having a modelled/rigged/animated Enid walking around in unity 🙂

Hey, wanna hear about my November?

Sorry it’s taken me so long to make a post this month, the main reason is I buuuuurned myself so hard last month pushing to get Dead End finished in time (which you can see in the vlogs I posted at the time), and then when I knew I couldn’t do that I pushed myself to make Pumpking and was literally working right up to midnight to get it done on time.

The plan from then was to take a break which… I super failed at. I kept working on Pumpking to add extra fixes and features (like two extra boss stages nobody asked for D:)

I did take a few days after I was definitely done with Pumpking to chill but the honest truth is my momentum was gone. I got some of my energy back but getting back to work on Dead End has been really difficult for me. Sure I make a little progress here or there but I keep getting distracted by ideas I can’t put down like planning a fantasy console equivalent to PS1/SegaCD, or starting work on Dusk Child 2;

or experimenting with a vector art/animation system for pico-8 (also probably for Dusk Child 2);

All in all, I have gotten a lot done, but I’ve not been able to focus on any single thing for long so I’ve felt pretty unproductive – I have done loads! just… it’s loads spread across several projects. So yeah, when I feel unproductive it makes it difficult to talk to you, I feel like I don’t have anything to show for your support so I worry about letting you down…

Anyway, I am gradually making progress on Dead End – I don’t know if it will be done this month but it ~will~ be done and as I originally said, all patrons will get it 🙂

Also I want to make a little level of my Robin Game for $5+ patrons since that won the monthly build vote and I want to give a little more than just the test level it already has. I should have that ready this week 🙂

Also also I do want to say thanks for your support, I know I’m kind of… scatterbrained (that’s the word right?) at times and find it difficult to focus on one thing, but your support means I can just keep going until one of the things I’m poking at gets finished 🙂

Monthly Build 2017/9 – More Roguelike!

Here’s the build for September. It’s the roguelike again but now with better action cards, digging, multiple floors, a log, new map tiles, and seeded generation.

The windows/mac/linux downloads are attached, and I talk through this build a little in the video above if you’re interested.

Thanks so much for the support, I hope seeing this game come together a bit at a time like this is interesting to you. 🙂

$300 Goal Met! Halloween Dev!

My first major patreon goal has been met and it’s a HUGE deal for me! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR SUPPORT! you’re really helping me out in a huge way and I don’t think I can thank you enough <3 <3 <3

You might have noticed that I said on twitter that if I hit $300 in time for October then I’d make a Halloween game for all my patrons (in addition to the monthly build of course :D) so – that’s a thing I’m gonna do!

It took me a little while to nail down what I want to make but I’ve decided on an old idea that I never really developed but always wanted to. The pitch is basically; Adventure game, you play someone who died recently and finds themself in a city full of dead folks. In my head it’s kind of landing somewhere between Grim Fandango and Monkey Island, but will probably have some daaaaaaaaark stuff too.

also I started experimenting with shaders for it today 😀

Given the limited time, I want to be able to make assets quickly and a good way to get away with that is skipping all unwrapping and texturing of fancy details and just letting shaders do the heavy lifting. The bonus for this strategy is things tend to get a consistent look across a game and people credit you for committing to a unique style (because they don’t know you’ve just been super lazy :P).

I did something similar with Planet of a Poison Past and I expect I’ll take a lot more from that game too tbh (maybe even most of the code?) given that too was made to be finished in a similar amount of time.

I think that’s everything except to say the working title (and probably final title) for the game is “Dead End”.

I will of course be posting updates about the game whenever I have them!