next »

[melos]

Not much yesterday, recovering from sickness. Starting to work on some event scripting again, doing more music. Lots of music. Music is hard for areas that have multiple narrative contexts and points of view from acharacters.....argh.  Traditional "town" music covers up the system complexities that combine to create the thing that is a town square and...I don't know what to do

[melos]

It's more that I see a lot of routes in which a song can work for the city square, but tehy work for different reasons and push different sorts of agendas . Like you can have a normal town song which conveys the surface aesthetic of a square (cosmopolitan, consumerist, cheery - this is 99% of RPG Town square music), but that ignores things like the things that a city relies on for a square to even come into existence.

 Or you can tell the song from Aliph's point of view to empathize with aliph, or from other points of views...

I'd like to be able to use contrasting music in the same location at some point...so perhaps the best choice for what I'm grappling with is the traditional way. This gives you more contrast if you decide to do a more atonal/ambient sort of track later-for dramatic effect or to emphasize other themes

Hmm this is something I'd post about after the game's out more...so I can talk about various ways the plot ties into what I would do.

I might just combine a traditional short-ish song with some ambient city-wave stuff...hmm...

[melos]

Of course! It's very hard. The decisions are much easier in some aspects than others..like I want to , and we do this, de-emphasize the main areas at occasional parts. Every human needs escape to some degree, not necessarily like full-blown vacations, but the gameplay reflects this as does the music to an extent. The town square presents a lot of difficulty because a lot happens there. I'll probably end up writing multiple songs.


Here is one of the WIPs. If anything it will just be the town square music for the first..hour or two of the game. I think I'll need 2 or 3 versions in all, but they're really fun to make so it's okay.

http://tindeck.com/listen/clen

[kittakaj]

I'm not sure if this would work for all variations, but seems like you could use character-specific theme music for most alternate square music? So have a basic square theme, then maybe it sometimes plays the Mayor's theme or H's

[melos]

i think i decdied on the harder things. For the majority of the game I'm sticking to a ...consumer-point of view song...blah blah for various reasons. you know, that feeling you get walking into downtown manhattan or chicago or disneyworld, IF you dont think to hard about it adn ARENT WEARING HEADPHONES BLASTING YOUR OWN MUSIC


posted a WIP song to soundcloud

https://soundcloud.com/seagaia/river-in-wip-even-the-ocean-ost


---

spent a few hours yetserday morning organizing  some of the music. I divided things roughly into


Outtakes / Not using currently but maybe i'll refine / Currently in-game / Worked on but not in game, needs a lot of work / worked on but not in game, needs a bit of work / Done but not in game / Need to starrt at some point /

in total there are about 90 songs that will need to be in the game. i think that number will only go up though. a few of them are just 1-2 minute long diegetic ambience tracks though but theyre important

anyways i guess i can refer to that spreadsheet now instead of keeping tabs on all these by myself.

plus i also organized the outtakes. right now htere are 32 minutes of outtake songs. there will likely be even more because i need to export some of them / find longer versions, but ill do that later. but i considerthe outtake songs to not be bad (though a lot are unfinihsed) , just they didnt really fit the game


---

as far as msic goes...idk how much to expect. i'm at 30 min with 15 tracks that are in game but some of those arent finished.  so it will be a long soundtrack, but it's not that weird since it was over the course of two years  and the game is pretty big, so there's more songs that are needed etc. it'll be weird. quintuple vinyl release?

[melos]

some new art!

Please retweet it on Twitter if you use twitter!

You can do that here: https://twitter.com/EventheOcean/status/517375643701751808




also I finished a cool song.

music progres...

[melos]

Yes, I believe Jon is putting off super details until doing more areas roughly (which in general is a good idea when you're doing anything at scale - you're gonna be redoing stuff!) .

It's the first area of the game! I don't think I'm going to be showing ...parts..of the game .well i've posted tons of small music snippets (not on my soundcloud) , so there's that.

glad you like that one! it really suits the place I think. there's always a hum I hear from this truck-mounted AC system in the alley behind my apartment and it's a nice chord of sorts.

anyways...i didnt do much game work yet today...mostly paints, reading book reviews, thinking about novels and writing (following this? http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/how-to-write-a-book-in-30-days dunno if I can manage to get through it but you get a really detailed book outline at the end.). I want to write my Inspiration Dave of novellas/short stories.

For those new, Inspiration Dave was a platforming game I made in the beginning of 2012. It's kind of adorable but it's also really embarrassing...and bad.

http://www.arcadeprehacks.com/game/20750/Inspiration-Dave.html

anyways i guess i'll work on more music. i haven't been in the mood for tedious event scripting lately and turning cells in a spreadsheet from red (havent started ) to orange (sketches ) yellow (did a good amount of work) or green (mostly done 'cept for mastering stuff) makes me feel good.

[kittakaj]

Thanks Josiah! Color is something I'm not super comfortable with, although I been learning and growing quite a bit on the color front through this project. Doing rough concept paintings by shoving together, adjusting, and painting over bits of photo reference, has been really helpful. This concept artist Feng Zhu does a lot of really helpful videos: http://fengzhudesign.com/tutorials.htm

This ended up being really long so I added headers so you don't get lost as much:

Anodyne Colors and Childhood Story
There was this whole neogaf thread that popped up around when Anodyne was releasing that was shitting on Anodyne's colors ("The artist needs to go to color theory school" etc). I get why. a lot of the time they're not really perfectly pretty in a trained-graphic-designer sort of way. You can tell when someone just is spot on in making perfect, harmonious color palettes, and that's not me. I grew up totally focused on contour and form, I always shied away from color because I felt like I wanted to master single-color stuff more before I worried about the infinite possibilities of color. It's funny, when i was a kid my Mom would want me to add color to like thank you cards, to just make them look like traditionally cheery children's drawings, and I'd be too into just using a pencil and getting the contours right or making a functional pop-up card.

Anodyne Colors
But anyway, I chose Anodyne's colors for atmosphere and theme, more than just beauty. Maybe if I was less limited I could do both? But choosing color to fit the other aspects of the game is most important in a game, and that doesn't really come across in a few screenshots on neogaf. It really bothered me at the time, because color is something I was self-conscious about, and I do sometimes judge other games for their color choices (and sometimes "get" them more after playing the actual game), but now I think I'm less bothered. Or maybe I'm just more confident now, I'm not sure.

Screenshot WIP?
That screenshot is WIP, but not thaat WIP. I think what I'll end up doing is a sort of selective polish. Certain little focused  areas I'll zero in on the detail and then leave the player's mind to extrapolate. I think that will make sense from a variety of perspectives. Of course, anything to save time is a bonus in this big ol' project. But I think it also works to engage the player's imagination, de-emphasize polish in my own mind, give up some control over the conversation, and represent the "story" nature of the game. Because you see from the very start of the game that there is a storyteller framing device, and the game itself is a story being "told" to you. And stories are all about a collection of selective details.

Thoughts on Polish, EtO's Context in Games
Been thinking a lot about scope and polish, and about where a game like Even the Ocean really fits into the video game world. It's strange to be in a situation of such relative security from Anodyne and to have the kind of background and skillset to be able to make a game like Even the Ocean? In many ways, it is sort of rough/amateurish, I feel, but also really good and really big/ambitious...? Amateurish in the sense of... it's like only our second major game, and a lot of parts will feel rough about it in some ways? Even just like the promotional materials, like i dunno, I'm no good at that stuff. Although I know it always feels different on the inside, you can see all the rough edges more clearly.

Competing Influences
It feels like it's in an odd space between classically polished, predictably-financially-successful game, and alt, weirdly personal, unpolished game. So point being, I go back and forth throughout the long process of development taking in various influences... when I see bigger polished games, I'm like, "It has to be perfect, it has to be impossible-to-ignore, everyone must love it and be amazed!" and then I see more alt and marginalized work and I'm like, "No! De-emphasize polish, subvert capitalism, focus on the personal/flawed!" and so I feel jostled back and forth between all these different worlds and can just hope that somehow it comes out being some sort of true or valuable thing. And hopefully that it can make some money too. It's a rollercoaster. But in the meantime, all these forces end up having a sort of subtle/subdued effect on the actual day-to-day work. I mean... a lot of it is just going on how it would, I think. But with my mind shuffling through all these competing desired. I'm just really itching to get closer to finishing and start to be able to see what Even the Ocean will be.

[kittakaj]

Yeah it's not good to try to impress everyone. It's partly just an internal struggle--different threads in my own person with different values that are competing.

Also, no way, Anodyne's colors were beautiful. The Van Gogh-y main field area, the evening light in the cliffs - maybe it's not color theory perfect, but when a piece of art is, I just get this overwhelming mental image of a highly-trained artist, surrounded by tiny wooden mannequins and color wheels, mixing the perfect shade of blue for this gorgeous shadow in a commissioned piece of FPS concept art and making thousands of dollars. I mean - there is nothing wrong with that. It's just that, sometimes the theory is so well-practiced and executed, the artist's meticulous training is all I can think about, vs. his personal expression. Personally I prefer the latter, though yeah I suppose the two can co-exist. Anyway, tangent.

Thanks! I feel similarly, although I go back and forth between wondering if I'm just jealous? But like... that's a real significant thing to think about in how art comes across. Jealousy can be artistically distracting. This is a random example that I think about sometimes: I feel like Scott McCloud's comics theory (in Understanding Comics, etc) is extremely approachable to many artists, because his actual drawings are good, but not masterful. And, of course, he has a lot of good ideas. It's hard to talk about these ideas without being either jealous or condescending, which I think leads artists to avoid conversations about the artistic meaning and purpose of certain types of skills like draftsmanship, color, polish. There's sort of an assumption that art consists of an idea/meaning wrapped in a package of artistic form. And that the form should just be as "good" as possible. When of course, the form is really part of the meaning, and any value judgement on the objective quality of the form is wrapped up in a lot of cultural assumptions. It's hard to get away from everything being both personal expression AND competition, the competition part is so ingrained in Art and capitalism that it's easy to forget about how big a factor it really is.

I definitely get the creative bubble idea, and think it's pretty good. I was able to do that with Anodyne, working on it to the exclusion of thinking about hardly anything else. But that's not really possible for EtO, since I'm in a really different stage of life and it's a longer process. I kind of wish I could just bang it out, but it doesn't seem really possible.

[melos]

Jon's livestreaming art right now! http://www.hitbox.tv/kittakaj

[melos]

music progress !

[One-bit Punch]

Love it!! Great colour palette too, beautiful stuff

[mushbuh]

nice to watch you make some art earlier today jonnnnn n n n n

[kittakaj]

thanks onebitpunch!

and yeah it was nice to have you around, mush!

I'll be doing more streams. Even if like nobody's there, it's just a focus technique. Most of them will probably be week afternoon EST though... that's the time I'm working and everyone else is too :/ but might do some weekend ones here and there. I'm not sure how much i'll want to do yet overall though

[Sam English]

so in love with that new art! 

[fakezohan]

nice art 

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Art is soo gooodddd. Am I correctly informed that you're handpainting the entire maps (vs using tiles)?

[kittakaj]

Thanks for the art compliments!

Catguy, there are 2 types of areas:
-exploratory/NPC-filled areas, which will be completely handmade without tiles
-gauntlet/Dungeon-like areas, which will have a mix of hand drawn stuff but will also have tiles, to convey a clearer, more "designed" space for platforming challenge-focused interactions.

[Innomin]

I'm looking forward to EtO a lot, especially after Anodyne. I do want to voice a concern though, even though it seems like you are aware of this and have it mostly under control. =P

When you make money on a past game and you have some wiggle room in finances, there is a tendency to get comfortable and overambitious. The recent posts about 10-15+ hours of gameplay and entirely hand drawn areas seem to me like they are at two extremes of a very large project, and might even be impossible in the same project.

Of course, the fact that you are blocking in unpolished areas and using tiles when necessary prove that you guys DO know what you're doing. I wish I had had the sense to think of that in an old project I worked on that will forever remain in limbo now...

Just know the stakes! Evaluate play time vs. development time constantly and see how much you can do, and don't be afraid to scrap some ideas to strengthen the feasibility of a project. Take it from somebody who's gone much further into a doomed project than he should have, it always seems like a good idea at the time.

I guess this is where I throw in a joke so I don't sound so depressing. Does this game involve even numbers?

[melos]

My intuition says 6 months of dev left (this is good: for most of the project my intuition for release date was "I have no idea".) This guess is from knowing the finite number of assets we need to generate...but it's hard to nail down exactly.

Idk. I can't really put an ETA on the art since I'm not doing it - but generally things tend to get easier once you do a few areas. So I anticipate things going a lot faster than the pace for that first map + the city WIP.

I want to get all of my main stuff out of the way before the 2014 calendar year ends: that means finishing the music, putting in SFX I know I'll need, finishing the NPC scripting in the last few nature areas, finishing the main storyline event scripting, and redoing  4 gauntlet areas and adding in one small one and one large one (for spoiler reasons). Also controller support and coding the ending of the game....then misc crap like resolution options, steam support.

So yeah...that's most of what I have left to do on my end. So I'd probably spend a lot of 2015 dev on ETO doing QA stuff, and misc things (like adding in jon's sprite or animations or some misc NPC stuff - there's still some npc dialogue he wants to write for like the city and stuff, little misc things)

During that time I think Jon will probably still be doing art, though there's a little bit of writing and some level design to do on his end.


As far as 10-15 hours of gameplay goes, who knows - could be lower or higher.  I'm not too worried what the end playtime is, I think the sociopolitical ideas, themes, as well as of course game design ideas, will be in the final game, and that's what I care about in the end. Might run under the 10-15 hour time mark?? idk.

But yeah, I mean this isn't my only project and stuff...so if I get most of my work done I'd just be doing other things on the side - arts, music, reading/writing, other small games, etc! I'd like to be shipped on win/mac/linux by before mid-summer next year (I want to go to Japan for a month or so, also I might move to NC??), but we'll see. I'll be keeping tabs on how the pace of stuff goes and we'd cut stuff if necessary...this would be things like side areas/side narrative threads, post-game features. Althrough it really depends how tired we are? Like if things do take longer it could be okay - by the summertime next year I doubt I'll have anything heavy. So I could work out of japan for a month and it would be okay, since it would just be fun things like programming post-game things or adding in some stuff if Jon needs help (animations etc, idk.) we'll see. things will be fine!  important thing is just to also be dabbling in other things and be having creative output outside of your main project, I think.

we're financially fine for a few years anyways, which is way longer than the game will take!