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big scary monsters
Sep 2, 2011

-~Skullwave~-
I've been enjoying The Roottrees Are Dead but I feel like I'm pretty stuck at this point. 45 blood relatives found and I'm pretty sure I have 3 out of 4 complete but I can't find a picture of Ernest Madsen anywhere. The only thing I think I have to go off is his father's involvement with Hunchtop House, which doesn't seem to go anywhere in the web search or the 5 periodicals I have access to. Am I missing something obvious?

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FuzzySlippers
Feb 6, 2009

j.peeba posted:

Awesome. Bought it on iOS! It feels fun and I can tell that there's going to be a lot of learning to do to figure out some better tactics for bigger combos. I'm looking forward to playing more!

I just put up a Steam page for my cave exploration game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2676110/The_Crevice/ :toot:

https://twitter.com/antti_tiihonen/status/1722168803524595785

I think I'm starting to figure out what I want the game to be. It's going to be a roguelite with focus on exploration and survival. Instead of an endless grind I want the game to be a tight package with a short gameplay time, relatively speaking. It'll have some metroidvania flavors with gatekeeping the player from sections of the world and figuring those things out and coming up with the resources to do so will provide the player with goals to strive towards. Or at least that's the idea for now! I don't mind steering off course during the development too if it happens.

Looks very cool. It looks like the focus is on exploration and platforming rather than the enemies? There have never been enough games focused on caves as terrain rather than just a generic background to whatever else you are doing. Noita did do a good job of making the caves an interesting space, but I was always just so terrible at the combat I could never get really into it.

Years ago after I read a bunch of books on caving expeditions and cave diving on a whim it made me fascinated by the idea of a roguelike focused on caving expeditions. I wanted to come up with a way to gamify in a non-tedious way the process of slowly building up caches and ropes to support a deep push. That concept of prep before the push felt like it could support an interesting game loop and I piddled around with some prototypes, but I never solved it even in concept. Another idea from real caving is that often you are limited by the time of year when the caves aren't completely filled with water, and I thought maybe instead of a normal food clock water slowly filling up parts of the level could be the timer. It'd be a soft clock since you could deal with but with increasing difficulty. My idea was zero enemies and just a moody game dealing with these kinds of problems, but I wasn't a good enough dev to figure it all out.

Superrodan
Nov 27, 2007

big scary monsters posted:

I've been enjoying The Roottrees Are Dead but I feel like I'm pretty stuck at this point. 45 blood relatives found and I'm pretty sure I have 3 out of 4 complete but I can't find a picture of Ernest Madsen anywhere. The only thing I think I have to go off is his father's involvement with Hunchtop House, which doesn't seem to go anywhere in the web search or the 5 periodicals I have access to. Am I missing something obvious?

The person you're asking about is not in the right place.

EDIT: Because I don't want you to not have help if you need it, here is an additional thing I'd be curious about :
First, does a diary entry called "Clark" still have an unexpectedly high intuition number on it? If so, there's a major piece of the puzzle you are missing. If not, then I'd look at Lauren's second diary for a description of what went down at the major family event.

Feel free to DM me or join the discord if you'd like to chat in real time.

Superrodan fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Nov 9, 2023

big scary monsters
Sep 2, 2011

-~Skullwave~-

Superrodan posted:

The person you're asking about is not in the right place.

Interesting... I think that makes sense, thank you.

e: I feel a little silly, I had a feeling something wasn't quite right there and now it seems obvious but I got a bit too stuck on what I thought I knew already.

big scary monsters fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Nov 9, 2023

Control Volume
Dec 31, 2008

Two days into having gameplay and Ive realized my concept doesnt work how I imagined. Im probably just going to recreate Block Dude from the TI-83, put the big ideas on ice until I want to tackle a tile-based game again, and move the gently caress on before the irresponsible part of my brain convinces me to add light bridges and lasers

Mouth Ze Dong
Jan 2, 2005

Aint no thing like me, 'cept me.
The progress on my loop-hero clone/auto battler idea so far is a game loop that plays itself.

Now I'm adding in the user interaction and menus and loot and such.


No idea if that was the right way to do it, but everyone's first game is full of mistakes :v:

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

Control Volume posted:

Two days into having gameplay and Ive realized my concept doesnt work how I imagined. Im probably just going to recreate Block Dude from the TI-83, put the big ideas on ice until I want to tackle a tile-based game again, and move the gently caress on before the irresponsible part of my brain convinces me to add light bridges and lasers

This happens sometimes, and is why it's so important to get a playable prototype as fast as possible. Novel game concepts basically never actually work the way you envision them working, but oftentimes you can adapt the concept into something that has a similar spirit, even if the mechanics are very different.


FuzzySlippers posted:

Years ago after I read a bunch of books on caving expeditions and cave diving on a whim it made me fascinated by the idea of a roguelike focused on caving expeditions. I wanted to come up with a way to gamify in a non-tedious way the process of slowly building up caches and ropes to support a deep push. That concept of prep before the push felt like it could support an interesting game loop and I piddled around with some prototypes, but I never solved it even in concept. Another idea from real caving is that often you are limited by the time of year when the caves aren't completely filled with water, and I thought maybe instead of a normal food clock water slowly filling up parts of the level could be the timer. It'd be a soft clock since you could deal with but with increasing difficulty. My idea was zero enemies and just a moody game dealing with these kinds of problems, but I wasn't a good enough dev to figure it all out.

My first thought was "sounds like a Death Stranding kind of game", i.e. the game is about the minutiae of traversal, and balancing efficiency vs. safety. Needing multiple trips to build up caches is a problem that could be solved either by eliminating it, or by changing the caves, so that the experience of traversing a given path changes over time.

I think it's a concept with legs, but it would live or die on its environments and controls, and that's a tough spot to be put in as a solo dev.

FuzzySlippers
Feb 6, 2009

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

My first thought was "sounds like a Death Stranding kind of game", i.e. the game is about the minutiae of traversal, and balancing efficiency vs. safety. Needing multiple trips to build up caches is a problem that could be solved either by eliminating it, or by changing the caves, so that the experience of traversing a given path changes over time.

I think it's a concept with legs, but it would live or die on its environments and controls, and that's a tough spot to be put in as a solo dev.

Yeah, you are totally right that Death Stranding is in the vicinity of what I imagined. Especially the interesting multiplayer side of building up routes that players could do cooperatively. That could be expanded into a fine single player experience of prepping routes by itself. It is definitely a difficult path to take for a solo project and if it can be pulled off it'd be by a solo dev more talented than myself. Beyond the art/fx it's hard enough just getting a game to work properly without inventing new ways to interact with mechanics.

j.peeba
Oct 25, 2010

Almost Human
Nap Ghost

FuzzySlippers posted:

Looks very cool. It looks like the focus is on exploration and platforming rather than the enemies? There have never been enough games focused on caves as terrain rather than just a generic background to whatever else you are doing. Noita did do a good job of making the caves an interesting space, but I was always just so terrible at the combat I could never get really into it.

Years ago after I read a bunch of books on caving expeditions and cave diving on a whim it made me fascinated by the idea of a roguelike focused on caving expeditions. I wanted to come up with a way to gamify in a non-tedious way the process of slowly building up caches and ropes to support a deep push. That concept of prep before the push felt like it could support an interesting game loop and I piddled around with some prototypes, but I never solved it even in concept. Another idea from real caving is that often you are limited by the time of year when the caves aren't completely filled with water, and I thought maybe instead of a normal food clock water slowly filling up parts of the level could be the timer. It'd be a soft clock since you could deal with but with increasing difficulty. My idea was zero enemies and just a moody game dealing with these kinds of problems, but I wasn't a good enough dev to figure it all out.

Thanks! There's definitely a greater focus on exploring, climbing and just learning about the challenges in the environment and figuring out solutions for them than in roguelites in general. Dealing with the enemies (not necessarily by always killing them) is likely going to be like 50% of the experience, even though I also have briefly thought about concentrating on just spelunking alone. Like you said it's a pretty hard concept to turn into an engaging game by itself and I suppose having some creepy monsters is always good for a wider public appeal too. I want to keep the enemies fun, physical and somewhat generative too to fit with the feel of the rest of the game and to make it stand apart from all the other roguelites out there. Right now in addition to the physics-based locomotion the centipedes have random lengths and it splits in two autonomous parts if a middle section is damaged. I have some more ideas for other enemies like amoebas, slugs, earthworms and spiders who could have fun physical and procgen abilities and properties that shouldn't be too hard to pull off. If anyone has some ideas for fun but simple underground creepy crawlies I'm all ears!

If you have any "fun" caving books to recommend I would be interested in checking them out! Some of the horror stories about cave rescues have been absolutely dreadful and some spelunking and urban exploration videos I've seen make my skin crawl even though I'm not at all claustrophobic. Lovely but terrifying stuff!

Jabor
Jul 16, 2010

#1 Loser at SpaceChem
Just finished Roottrees. Very enjoyable overall. Was totally puzzled about the last 4 people until I figured out how to search for the last clue that revealed them all. I wonder if you could add other collage-like minigames in elsewhere - as is it's kind of a weird that you do it in this one place and nowhere else.

I never found volume 1 which perhaps should have been an obvious thing to look for, but managed to get the final mystery even without it.

Grace Baiting
Jul 20, 2012

Audi famam illius;
Cucurrit quaeque
Tetigit destruens.



FuzzySlippers posted:

Yeah, you are totally right that Death Stranding is in the vicinity of what I imagined. Especially the interesting multiplayer side of building up routes that players could do cooperatively. That could be expanded into a fine single player experience of prepping routes by itself. It is definitely a difficult path to take for a solo project and if it can be pulled off it'd be by a solo dev more talented than myself. Beyond the art/fx it's hard enough just getting a game to work properly without inventing new ways to interact with mechanics.

I'm envisioning such a game being about building out a fast-travel network, where each teleport network node/edge has a specific max capacity that must be upgraded through gameplay. Heavy or unwieldy upgrade components would need to get trotted out by foot, with different large items imposing different penalties on the player's platforming capabilities and mechanics, and where gathering materials to construct those components and then preparing the specific route between nodes would constitute the major pieces of the gameplay loop. So e.g.
  • a large but light component (a big bundle of pipes?) prevents wall-climbing, so you'll need to first build ladders up to various ledges
  • some delicate circuitry would be fried by electrical discharges, so any electric-type maneuvers (electric SFX double jump? Electric attacks?) would be forbidden
  • a volatile energy cell would enable fall damage (or make it deadly / force an expedition restart), so you'll need to traverse downwards much more carefully, and also avoid any buttstomp move or explosive attack (should they exist)
  • an ultra heavy component prevents jumping at all, so you'll need to place bridges across any gaps along your chosen route
  • ...and so on!

I'm just an Ideas Gal but it sounds kinda cool and maybe feasible, as a fun game idea at least! Even if I did drift a bit away from the more realistic spelunking buildup that you were discussing!!

Superrodan
Nov 27, 2007

Jabor posted:

Just finished Roottrees. Very enjoyable overall. Was totally puzzled about the last 4 people until I figured out how to search for the last clue that revealed them all. I wonder if you could add other collage-like minigames in elsewhere - as is it's kind of a weird that you do it in this one place and nowhere else.

I never found volume 1 which perhaps should have been an obvious thing to look for, but managed to get the final mystery even without it.

Thanks for playing! The collage like minigames were honestly me thinking "There's a lot of sameness in the core game loop of finding evidence and reading things let's add a bit of weirdness now and then. Not anything difficult, but rather something that's just kind of a tiny distraction" The original music sort of comes from the same place, where I wanted interacting with some of the evidence to be more than just reading it. If I were to ever make a sequel I'd definitely want more small things like that.

FuzzySlippers
Feb 6, 2009

j.peeba posted:

If you have any "fun" caving books to recommend I would be interested in checking them out! Some of the horror stories about cave rescues have been absolutely dreadful and some spelunking and urban exploration videos I've seen make my skin crawl even though I'm not at all claustrophobic. Lovely but terrifying stuff!

The enemies sound interesting. Always cool to come up with ways to use procedural generation on more content than the levels. It was a number of years ago, but I recall liking Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth by James Tabor. I also tried to read fiction books with caving and was surprised to find very little where caves weren't just a background location to set a story. They rarely engaged with it. Best as I remember was The Descent by Jeff Long which wasn't very good, but at least its underground locations had a real texture to them. Kinda like As Above So Below a found footage horror movie that's not very good either, but it takes a common boring location (underground labyrinth) and makes it interesting.
 

Grace Baiting posted:

I'm envisioning such a game being about building out a fast-travel network, where each teleport network node/edge has a specific max capacity that must be upgraded through gameplay. Heavy or unwieldy upgrade components would need to get trotted out by foot, with different large items imposing different penalties on the player's platforming capabilities and mechanics, and where gathering materials to construct those components and then preparing the specific route between nodes would constitute the major pieces of the gameplay loop. So e.g.
  • a large but light component (a big bundle of pipes?) prevents wall-climbing, so you'll need to first build ladders up to various ledges
  • some delicate circuitry would be fried by electrical discharges, so any electric-type maneuvers (electric SFX double jump? Electric attacks?) would be forbidden
  • a volatile energy cell would enable fall damage (or make it deadly / force an expedition restart), so you'll need to traverse downwards much more carefully, and also avoid any buttstomp move or explosive attack (should they exist)
  • an ultra heavy component prevents jumping at all, so you'll need to place bridges across any gaps along your chosen route
  • ...and so on!

I'm just an Ideas Gal but it sounds kinda cool and maybe feasible, as a fun game idea at least! Even if I did drift a bit away from the more realistic spelunking buildup that you were discussing!!

These are actually great and you are on a way better track than I ever was. I struggled not to be very literal with mechanics, but you are coming up with great ways to distil the essence of the idea into much more gameplay friendly elements. What you are describing makes me think of maybe a scifi spelunking game which could be quite cool.

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."
Roottree was really cool! Played it through yesterday with my partner in basically one sitting. Some great eureka moments and the locked area was well set up and made sense in context.

I somehow missed the Silver Screen periodical and guessed that RR was a screenwriter based on the family history in the entertainment industry.

As a little quibble the main quest scene always had a very high Magnifying Glass number but that didn't seem helpful (unless I missed something?).

Superrodan
Nov 27, 2007

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Roottree was really cool! Played it through yesterday with my partner in basically one sitting. Some great eureka moments and the locked area was well set up and made sense in context.

I somehow missed the Silver Screen periodical and guessed that RR was a screenwriter based on the family history in the entertainment industry.

As a little quibble the main quest scene always had a very high Magnifying Glass number but that didn't seem helpful (unless I missed something?).

Thanks for playing!

It goes from 7 to 0 once you find The pictures of the younger generation from following the path WRTD -> Roottree Curse -> ChrisRaff75. As a small piece of trivia, that's actually the only reason that the entire "main quest scene" exists in your evidence the first place, to serve as that very specific reminder. Without it, there were a lot of people that would never revisit the first part of that chain and then would miss the rest.

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Superrodan posted:

Thanks for playing!

It goes from 7 to 0 once you find The pictures of the younger generation from following the path WRTD -> Roottree Curse -> ChrisRaff75. As a small piece of trivia, that's actually the only reason that the entire "main quest scene" exists in your evidence the first place, to serve as that very specific reminder. Without it, there were a lot of people that would never revisit the first part of that chain and then would miss the rest.

That was the actually last major thing worked out (aside from pinning down some spouses). We'd worked out who chrisraff75 was but hadn't thought to type in the address as a search term by itself.

Jabor
Jul 16, 2010

#1 Loser at SpaceChem
I ended up searching for Prodigee which then tells you how to proceed.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Oh yeah I forgot to post this here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKOjlgNLsQc
https://tunicate.itch.io/barkley

TW0
Oct 31, 2022

The figure that still lies asleep in the Fantasy


Perfecting Unity’s Billboard Shader for 2D Characters – Part 2

This article is about how I wanted to bring pixel art into 3D, as well as some advice on how to improve the way the shadows work and fix clipping issues.

Aryoc
Nov 27, 2006

:black101: Goblin King :black101:
Grimey Drawer


Goblin Camp really feels like A Game ™ now. It's an interesting thing how it seems that there's this special point in a game's development where it no longer is just a set of features mashed together but actually one thing that is fun to play. For some games you get there immediately, particularly if it's more arcadey or something with an immediate control that is fun, but for games like this where it's a complex simulation it can take quite a while to get to a point where it all starts working together.

I was expecting to still have to work a bit longer before I'd get there but I was pleasantly surprised that I got hooked playing my own game already. There's so much stuff that's missing or temporary or super in-progress but it's fun now so I'm happy.

DancingMachine
Aug 12, 2004

He's a dancing machine!
What a huge milestone, congrats!

Superrodan
Nov 27, 2007

Aryoc posted:



Goblin Camp really feels like A Game ™ now. It's an interesting thing how it seems that there's this special point in a game's development where it no longer is just a set of features mashed together but actually one thing that is fun to play. For some games you get there immediately, particularly if it's more arcadey or something with an immediate control that is fun, but for games like this where it's a complex simulation it can take quite a while to get to a point where it all starts working together.

I was expecting to still have to work a bit longer before I'd get there but I was pleasantly surprised that I got hooked playing my own game already. There's so much stuff that's missing or temporary or super in-progress but it's fun now so I'm happy.

I like the look of this. I'm curious, can you zoom in or is the camera fixed at this distance?

Aryoc
Nov 27, 2006

:black101: Goblin King :black101:
Grimey Drawer
You can rotate and zoom the camera, you can get down fairly close to see what your goblins are up to and to enjoy the scenery:

https://goblincamp.com/assets/images/screenshots/20231117-zooming.mp4

Superrodan
Nov 27, 2007

Aryoc posted:

You can rotate and zoom the camera, you can get down fairly close to see what your goblins are up to and to enjoy the scenery:

https://goblincamp.com/assets/images/screenshots/20231117-zooming.mp4

Awesome! I love it!

j.peeba
Oct 25, 2010

Almost Human
Nap Ghost

Aryoc posted:

You can rotate and zoom the camera, you can get down fairly close to see what your goblins are up to and to enjoy the scenery:

https://goblincamp.com/assets/images/screenshots/20231117-zooming.mp4

The tiles really tickle my brain in a good way. I know there's some good clickin' to be had when a game looks like that.

I'm working on a new type of monster for my game. Amoebas! They come with a varying amount of nuclei and (once I implement it) when damaged the amoeba will go through mitosis and split apart! That's how unicellular lifeforms work like, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef35625h4Z4

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
I've been working with an artist (MightyDubz) to design the protagonist for my game. My goal is to have a character that can help sell the game, someone that will look cool and vibe-y. This art will also be used as reference for the sprite artist, but of course they're gonna get significantly reduced because the in-game sprites are 24x32 pixels.



I'm curious what y'all read from this character, and what conclusions you draw about the game based on this design?

(colors are temporary, just the artist playing around with different options)

5TonsOfFlax
Aug 31, 2001

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I've been working with an artist (MightyDubz) to design the protagonist for my game. My goal is to have a character that can help sell the game, someone that will look cool and vibe-y. This art will also be used as reference for the sprite artist, but of course they're gonna get significantly reduced because the in-game sprites are 24x32 pixels.



I'm curious what y'all read from this character, and what conclusions you draw about the game based on this design?

(colors are temporary, just the artist playing around with different options)

Zatoichi meets Cyberpunk. Though if he's blind (white cane, sunglasses), why is the screen on his arm so bright? I draw no conclusions about your game except that it HAS a protagonist, and is therefore not something I'd like probably.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


I remember that you said the MC being blind was a gameplay related thing, but I have a hard time imagining a future technomancer wizard ninja using a cane to feel around for the subway steps on their daily commute to gently caress up bad guys.

Also, I think the Shinobi blindfold thing would look cooler than the matrix glasses, even if it's extremely weeb.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
Thanks, y'all. I'm not gonna be changing the design at this stage...at minimum, I want to let it cook for a bit. Just curious how much you can read into it. But of course, I forgot I told y'all about the setting already.

5TonsOfFlax posted:

I draw no conclusions about your game except that it HAS a protagonist, and is therefore not something I'd like probably.

I'm curious about this, though. Care to expound?

5TonsOfFlax
Aug 31, 2001
Oh, just that my preferred genres are puzzle, casual, word, board kinds of games. First person too, though I haven't actually played any of those in years. I am not interested in games-as-stories, mostly because I cannot commit the time necessary to consume them.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

I'm bad at posting about what I'm working on, but I'll make an effort to chronicle this project here.

About a decade ago I made a design doc for a Space Station 13-inspired game. At the time it was a complete daydream, but working on Goblin Bet gave me some ideas for ways I could strip a lot of the pain from an online multiplayer game by using web dev tools as the engine. Two or so years ago I made a simple web-based MUD framework--basically just enough to track rooms and let players in the same room see each other's actions.

One of my students this semester has been talking about working on a Goonstation remake with a friend, and it got me thinking about my old design doc again, so I've spent this and last weekend giving this game a shot and it's going way faster than I expected. Here's the game as it stands so far:



The game takes place on two space stations of ~10 players each and lasts an hour. At the game's start the two stations declare war on each other, and each player has a job on the station loosely related to the war effort--some are pretty direct, like the Gunner or Commander, and some are much more roundabout, like the Janitor or Bartender.

The war is on some level just the backdrop of the game, though--each person gets a list of personal goals that encourage them to just run around the station and get into trouble. Maybe you have another person you get rewarded for spending lots of time around, or you want to end the game with the most money possible, or you want to murder another player, or you just really want a high-end nuclear powered mop--all the players have a bunch of goals that run orthogonal to the war effort and compete with it for resources. The station combat system itself is also balanced so that it's unlikely either side will totally defeat the other if both play competently, although if one plays competently and the other fucks around one side can totally get blown up, so the war effort is serious enough it can't be ignored but chill enough that you can pursue your own bullshit.

Basically, I want to make a digital LARP/megagame--honestly, I think that's a lot of what's cool about SS13 in the first place. I'm using a MUD engine at first, but am structuring it so I can pretty easily add a graphical interface to it if it seems like the game has potential.



So far I have the Gunner (chooses between shooting offensive and defensive missiles), Power Station (allocates energy to the various other stations for bonuses), Fabber (crafts new items) and Commander (grants and revokes ID card privileges to crew members) stations pretty close to done, and the Quartermaster (manages station funds/inventory and can buy items for people), and Drone Controller (harvests resources that all the other stations use to function) have their core mechanic in but lack much interactivity. There's also scheduled to be a Janitor (cleans up messes that happen, can buff stations by polishing them up), Security (has a gun), Bartender (can cook/mix drinks with various effects), Medic (heals hurt people), and Scientist (researches new crafting items), as well as various non-crew roles like space refugees, independent merchants, and infiltrating vampires/aliens/clowns/etc, but those are less immediately important for the game's core loop so they're being put off a bit. Personal goals are technically in, but are just text prompts for now.

I'm having a lot of fun making this, despite the fact that MUDs are an extremely dead genre and that maintaining an active playerbase that's consistently between 5-20 online players is basically impossible. I'm excited to see where this goes.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

5TonsOfFlax posted:

Oh, just that my preferred genres are puzzle, casual, word, board kinds of games. First person too, though I haven't actually played any of those in years. I am not interested in games-as-stories, mostly because I cannot commit the time necessary to consume them.

ahh, well, for what it's worth this is going to be a very story-light game. It has a defined protagonist, and there will be some writing, but you won't have any obligation to read any of it really. Hoping to strike a decent balance of casual-vs-hardcore gaming too.

FuzzySlippers
Feb 6, 2009

Maybe I'm weird, but I have a similar reaction if I see a named protagonist in a game's description. Just zipping through Steam indie games that might be enough to get me to click to the next game. I like stories in games well enough but named defined protagonists tend to be telling the kinds of stories I don't like in games (specially and not compared to other media). This is especially true in something like roguelikes where I expect the story to be told subtly but a defined protagonist is a warning sign the game may have a lot of tedious dialogue to click through over and over.

That doesn't mean every game has to have a character creator (tho I prefer it) especially in something like pixel art games where that's unrealistic, but there's a difference between enigmatic player character art and the game's description being 'You are John Hardbody out for revenge and seeking the lost treasures of Zanabone'.

I just stumbled into a terrible example of that in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. The whole game top to bottom is an exercise in developer bloody mindedness (it eschews a lot of sensible genre ideas to force you to play it on its terms) but as I'm bouncing around a lot of space games where they rarely tell stories this way it was particularly harsh. The game has an extremely detailed player character and basically all of the storytelling so far has been focused on this character. We've had so many scenes about how much of a hard rear end they are and lots of scenes of them talking, but the game is actually saying very little. Its plot and universe are actually way less detailed and interesting than even the low budget barebones indie space games I had just played. Yet it wasted so much of my time on these tedious scenes. If it were a novel or cartoon I'd probably dig it, but it's terrible for a space sim.

All those pointless words aside, I'm obviously a terrible person to say whether a character design can help sell a game. That character design does seem perfectly fine and if you are wanting cyberpunk Zatoichi you definitely nailed it. Cyberpunk stuff often makes little practical sense which is ignored if its vibing correctly.

Aneurexorcyst
Feb 11, 2004

There is a great disturbance in the monarchy...
Trying to carve out more time in the evenings to work on my horror shooter thing.

Some progress on the art side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6qOZkpdG8E

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

FuzzySlippers posted:

All those pointless words aside, I'm obviously a terrible person to say whether a character design can help sell a game. That character design does seem perfectly fine and if you are wanting cyberpunk Zatoichi you definitely nailed it. Cyberpunk stuff often makes little practical sense which is ignored if its vibing correctly.

Yeah, this is more what I'm going for. It's all about the vibes. I don't expect to do much of any character development outside of, like, flavor text on relics/spells, which you can easily ignore. Other non-mechanics text will be pretty much limited to "here's a short paragraph setting up a scenario. Which of these three options do you choose?", kind of FTL-style but terser.

cumpantry
Dec 18, 2020

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I've been working with an artist (MightyDubz) to design the protagonist for my game. My goal is to have a character that can help sell the game, someone that will look cool and vibe-y. This art will also be used as reference for the sprite artist, but of course they're gonna get significantly reduced because the in-game sprites are 24x32 pixels.



I'm curious what y'all read from this character, and what conclusions you draw about the game based on this design?

(colors are temporary, just the artist playing around with different options)

it's a pretty terrible looking main character design. what DOES it say? he's got sneaky ninja feet like he's gonna be hoppin and dashing all over the place, but then he's got all this poo poo--long hair, straps, jacket hood--that a bad guy's gonna yank easy or a tree branch's gonna snag. what's up with the jacket anyway, pants as well, is he cold? then why did he shave half his hair to imitate blind skrillex? guess he could pull the hood up over his head, but how long's that gonna stay on while running? and i haven't even touched on the one glove thing. how's he even supposed to use his pipboy 3000 when his spare hand is the one that's gloved? not that his other would be much use after succumbing to frost bite. if this guy was just some npc, whatever. but main character material?

question for your artist, how many character sketches did they do to get to this guy? 50 is a good place to start. question for you, what inspirations are you providing them with here? what direction are you giving them? valve looked to impressionism and norman rockwell for tf2, eidos montreal to the renaissance and greek mythos for deus ex. i ask because all i see is some medley of cyberpunk 2077 and valorant. if you want a main character who can sell by their looks, you gotta give your artist guy some serious meat to chew on. or get a guy who knows a butcher

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
Wow cool, learn to give feedback in a way that doesn't alienate your audience. There's probably something valuable in there but gently caress if I'm listening to you after all those insults.

cumpantry
Dec 18, 2020

:frog:

cumpantry
Dec 18, 2020

i'm sorry i've offended you. your goal is "have a character that can help sell the game, someone that will look cool and vibe-y" and my gut read of the character is he won't accomplish your goals and says very little

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Your Computer
Oct 3, 2008




Grimey Drawer

cumpantry posted:

i'm sorry i've offended you. your goal is "have a character that can help sell the game, someone that will look cool and vibe-y" and my gut read of the character is he won't accomplish your goals and says very little

you're being a dick hth

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