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[RedPandaWasTaken]

Show us your move, darling.

[spoiler]when's demo?[/spoiler]

[habadash]

Your game looks beautiful. The colors are especially nice 

[Sean Hogan (seagaia)]

tytytyt

worked on area today
and msuic
https://soundcloud.com/seagaia/shorein-even-the-ocean-wip

[kittakaj]

thanks habadash!

[Sean Hogan (seagaia)]

a beach appers

[Pemanent]

I think that audio track and the art fit really well together. I can't really explain why they just seem to work.

[Conker534]

this game is neat

[MallowyGoodness]

so yeah! leave a message in the tigs thread so i remember once i get around to a demo or whatever.

Sup I'm here to break your game and make you cry over bug fixing, whenever you have a build to do that on.

Other than that though, just read through the whole thread (because I'd feel out of the loop otherwise) and you guys look like you're doing a really awesome job on everything (I really like the idea of changing art styles between stories, which seems like it would work in a really neat way with the split up game thing) and now I'm upset that this is probably going to take another year or so to finish (I want it now).

The side effect of reading through an entire thread, though, is now I have a ton of things I want to bring up and it's going to make this post bloated as heck.

I've noticed through the thread that the game reminds me a lot of OutLand right now, with the conflicting energies and danmaku making up 90% of the traps, just your mechanics for dealing with those things are entirely different.

I also noticed the controls for the shield look like they might be a tiny bit wonky, based on the Pax sheet. Any chance you'll have keyboard+mouse or twinstick alt control styles? I could see that making defending a lot easier, and as far as I can tell your only other action is a jump right now so you might be able to get away with twinstick+bumpers/triggers and WASD+Mouse Movement and Buttons.

And quotes...

just little things - intro level stuff, slight physics tweaks were all i made., and probably more friendly towrads speed running (a speed runner came by and we talked for a while and it was pretty interesting)

I was actually thinking of half-jokingly asking about how you plan to cater to speed running (because honestly Anodyne has really cool potential for speed runs, and the two categories I've seen it done in so far turned out really neat) so it's really neat to see you take this into account.

oh yeah if anyone wants Even Alive digital copy you can PM me and I'll email it to you or share a dropbox link or something. It's sort of a narrative experiment with lots of pictures (it was for my art major senior project). A more traditional story-driven work I've done is How You Like Your Eggs, which you can read here: http://www.carletongraphic.com/?p=2179

I'm going to have to check those out. Is there any chance that Even Alive can still be tied to ETO's storyline? If so you could totally rebrand Even Alive and pretend it's merch for ETO like how people release light novels for popular animes and make Big Bucks$$ (this is a horrible idea (probably)).

yeaahhhhh it won't be a public demo for a bit though . ill send u the pax build though.

Might I possibly be allowed to procure such a thing as well?

muzak of the day

http://tindeck.com/listen/ciei

This kind of reminds me of the Red Caves from Anodyne, which is cool because Rogue had one of my favorite themes.

All aboard the Young train, please enter through the left nostril.

Speaking of Rogue...

[Sean Hogan (seagaia)]

yeah, people have mentioned the outland thing. there is that idea of light and dark. i think we are hoping to not give them negative or positive connotations with respect to some mythos, but those are more of convenient handles for the two types. outside of wall jumping i think things are pretty different from outland though (atleast from what i briefly read/watched about it).

yeah, there are traps and stuff. my level design mindset has been drifting more from clever puzzles to just somehwat fun/interesting environments to move through, with a hint of challenge for the main game - which is what I like, anyways, I like most players to experience everything, because I think an important part of playing our games is to experience the entire world and get sort of a comprehension of how each part fits together. and then of course sadistic extra optional stream of consciousness weirder stuff...

there is a certain satisfaction to interesting puzzles based on the mechanics, but I think I personally care more about interesting world....by interesting i do not mean beautiful aestheticaly, but where each part of the world sort of "works" with the bigger whole in some sort of manner. hm.

I hope to not spend another year on it, I like to finish projects more quickly. we'll see!  We are financially stable though so i guess we could spend another year on it, but i would like to finish and release before I turn 22 (there is something stupidly satisfying to releasing once per existence-year for me...idk) .

stuff is still sort of rough for Even (well, the gameplay structure is like...done, but the narrative tying up stuff is probably tougher). it will be interesting to see the games in juxtaposition with eachother, though the idea comes to mind that if things are taking to long maybe we will focus on one game first, release that, then release the other one. we will see.



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the controls may seem sort of wonky but they are quite intuitive after a little bit of playing. i feel like it is a keyboard game because it is designed with that in mind, but controllers seem to work okay (there might need to be some small tweaks though, like with analog sensitivity). dunno, i'll do that later. but it reaaaaally is a arrows + X-C-ENTER sort of game. if the game gets popular enough i'll do in-game controller support I guess, sort of like with anodyne.

yeah that bluedown song i do kind of like. i can't think of anywhere it would fit in even the ocean at the moment, though...maybe it needs a different instrument...

---

here's a new song.

http://tindeck.com/listen/xhwq

[MallowyGoodness]

If it helps any, I would say ETO is less similar to OutLand than Anodyne is to LoZ, but then again Anodyne is really similar to LoZ. You shouldn't have to worry about being too similar, at any rate (although playing OutLand might give you some ideas on how to handle some design, who knows).

I'm sure XCEnter will work fine for ETO, but I'm the kind of person who thinks "well as long as it's not too hard to implement it might as well be added for the people who would enjoy it".

[Sean Hogan (seagaia)]

yeah, there isn't anything that has been super similar to EtO that people have brought up yet. it definitely has its influences, though!

Yeah ifI can figure out how to add controller support I likely will do so.



i added some splashes yesterday.
https://twitter.com/EventheOcean/status/381213670946000896

[MallowyGoodness]

Yo I realized a thing with Anodyne that would probably be good to think about for ETO.

The way you have saves set up in Anodyne is that absolutely everything associated with your game gets put into that one save. This means that if I send my save to someone they get my resolution, gamepad, language, and any other system settings that I have, and it can be kind of janky. I *think* this might have some connection with it constantly asking me to config my gamepad, since I restart a lot, but I'm not sure.

For ETO this means that maybe you should look at splitting up saves? Having a System data save and a Game data save would prevent silly little things like your config getting reset or changed. On that note, maaybe splitting saves between Aliph and Even would be good too? I can see this being better for testing and speed running than for normal play, but since you seem to be having even control some flags for Aliph's half, it would help if say you wanted to see the differences between Aliph's game with Even at 0% completion or at 100% completion.

On that note I'm not sure if this has been said, but are you going to be able to go through all of one game without switching to the other or are you going to have something like episodic or other sectioned off gameplay so you can force the player to alternate?

[Sean Hogan (seagaia)]

that's a good idea. it's pretty easy to do so I will probably do that. everything just saves to a text file or a directory of text files (for dialogue and entity state) right now, so i'd just make a separate file blah blah for system stuff.

there are 15 save files, which is just an arbitrary number I picked.


I might also do separate aliph/even state stuff if that's needed.

you can play through either one as you want. maybe there are interactions between the two in some way...maybe...who knows...secrets...spoilers



for some reason I get really excited about postgame. like as if creating the entire "solid game" is an excuse to let me get away with some weirder abstract stuff at the end. hm. it's sort of like you learn all of this interesting stuff from building a solid world(s).



worked a little on a level today. fixed some issues with swimming and wind. hm.

[Sean Hogan (seagaia)]

tindeck.com/listen/orqo

darkness

----


water descent

[kittakaj]

Thanks for the comments MallowyGoodness!

We were originally thinking of the shield mechanics as twin stick controls, but then we decided to switch it to d-pad + two buttons. It's hard to explain, which is partially why it seems so wonky, but it's actually a lot simpler this way. Once people got the idea at PAX, they didn't seem to have trouble with it. I'm not really into the idea of alternate control schemes that are so different from each other, because it would change the relative difficulty of various kinds of obstacles and that would be kind of a design nightmare.

Even Alive isn't going to be changed, but we might link to it from the EtO website or something. Not as merch, but as a related and separate work.

[MallowyGoodness]

When you put it that way I can see how that would be a better idea, yeah.

As for Even Alive I didn't mean change it, I was asking if the story of Alive could be like canon to the newerish world you have going with Even the Ocean. Like, if you could put Alive up and say "this is part of the same series" or if the story has incompatibilities with what's stated in ETO which prevents it from being part of the same universe... if that makes any sense, I'm having a hard time thinking of how to word that. Also the merch thing was a joke (mostly, I mean if ETO gets popular you could release some physical collector's book with art and EA in it... dang now I want that).

[Sean Hogan (seagaia)]

yday


uh

worked on a level


bosses for this will be interesting...hmm.....i guess i mean bosses are fine . yeah . programming

[wccrawford]

I don't know how I missed this before.  The premise sounds amazing.  I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this!

[kittakaj]

Oh yeah Even Alive and Even the Ocean sort of exist in the same universe, but there's not really a canon in the traditional sense because Even Alive has all these discrete vignettes with different fantastical elements that aren't even necessarily consistent across the book.

But yeah it's like the same character, Even, so they are connected

[RedPandaWasTaken]

I guess the "bossfights" will be platforming-centric since it seems there is no combat. You going to do stuff like those bossfights in Super Meat Boy (like, running from a killer machine/lava, racing an enemy)?