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[thomasmahler]

Hey guys,

Whew, my first 'real' post here. I just wanted to say hello, show you guys some work and get some feedback for a project I've been working on.

I've been working as a character artist for the games industry for a while now. A couple of months ago I noticed that many of my buddies are now sorta peeking at Indie Games, trying to get something cool done - So I also thought I'll look into what's out there.

I had some money saved and knew that I had to relocate soon'ish, so instead of doing projects for clients, I spent the last couple of months (and most of my savings :D) working out a project that's near and dear to my heart.

I always had a couple of ideas regarding games I want to play that you probably wouldn't see in bigger, commercial projects, so I thought I'd give it a try now.

The current name of the project is simply 'Sein'. It's heavily inspired by the stuff Eric Chahi did in the past (Another World, Heart of Darkness) and recent games by Fumito Ueda and his Team Ico, though it's heavily story-based and quite experimental.

It's still pretty early, but I just wanted to know whether or not people like where this is going and generally what the 'indie audience' out there thinks of a project like that.

Couple of screenies:





Most of the stuff is built for a 720p resolution and looks exactly like this in realtime. I'm using Construct for quick prototyping (fucking love that app!), so my workflow is very much like storyboarding the game in Photoshop and sorta storyboarding the game design in Construct - It's such an amazing thing that we can work like that nowadays. Characters are the only thing that are being done in 3d and rendered out as sprites, the rest is very simple brushwork in Photoshop, to keep things managable.

Oh, and there is still quite a lot of placeholder art in there.

I concepted the game as being 3 episodes (acts), like a TV show - So you'd get the first act, 2 months later the second act, 2 months later the third act. I think the whole thing will be rather short, each act can probably be completed in half an hour if you know exactly what you have to do - That's because I used to love the long 100 hour epic games, but now I just don't have the time for that stuff anymore and I often feel overwhelmed by todays next gen games, where you somtimes have to put in an hour just to get through the tutorial.

And episodic content always seemed like something very interesting to explore to me.

I'm just trying to reach out to the indies here, trying to find out if people actually like where this is going, etc. - if there's actually a market for a game like that and maybe someone with more experience in terms of indie stuff could lend me a helping hand

Anyway, enough blabla for now, hope to get some insights and some feedback from the more experienced guys round here.

(I initially posted this on the IndieGamer board, but it seems it's pretty inactive nowadays - hope nobody minds me crossposting this)

[AuthenticKaizen]

welcome thomas

those 2 screens are looking pretty good so far.
nice style.

btw heres the introduction thread

[increpare]

the screenshots look nice (though, do you mean 'grief' as opposed to 'grieve'?)

[Guert]

Hey there! Nice to meet you!

Well first off, I'll guide you toward the big introduction thread where you'll be able to introduce yourself to the entire community.

Secondly, I'll say that those screenshots look pretty good but I'm curious to see it in action, see how it plays. I know that the gameplay style your are going for is reminiscent of the action/adventure click'n'point games of the early 90's but I'm wondering how those detail-filled screen work out when playing.

I'm interested to know how many individuals are workin' on this. From what I understand, you are the sole creator. The game looks quite "art heavy" so it must be a lot of work. Also, on what plateform are you aiming to release the game on? PC? Mac? Anything else in mind? Do you have a demo? What kind of feedback are ya looking for?

Anyways, it looks interesting and I would be curious to try the game out. Also, I would show pictures a bit smaler and link them to the big ones so that we can easily see the whole thing instead of scrolling around the window to look at them.

Take care!
Talk to you later!

Edit: Well, AuthenticKaizen just posted the link while I was typing... So... Yeah, the introduction thread is important :D

[thomasmahler]

I'll come up with a proper introduction once I've got a bit more time at my hand, but thanks for the warm welcome

@stephen: haha, fuck, yeah! That's what you get from writing the dialogue in a txt file without a spellchecker :D

@Guert: I don't think it's heading into a point and click direction, really. It's more of a mix between Another World / Ico (Puzzle Elements) / Cave Story (fuckin loved that game) / Castlevania right now - with quite some experimentation regarding story during gameplay.

I think from a story / gameplay perspective I solved a couple of problems with this project that haven't been tackled before, that's really what I think is the coolest thing about it.

Also, I'm the only one working on this project right now. I have a couple of buds playtesting and I'll most likely cooperate with a composer on this project, but it's a one man effort, really. The art isn't as complex as you might think - it's actually pretty fucking simple. It relies heavily on layers, blending modes and parallax scrolling, so it's pretty fakey. I've been working as a freelance artist for a while now, I think my way of working is pretty efficient - so far creating art for this project was a breeze, compared to the nextgen stuff I usually do for my clients.

I fucking love how I can work on this project in general. It's realtime everything, I concept and design in Photshop, then bring it over to Construct and put the game design together, tweak things until it's fun and until it plays well, then I compile it and send the exe away for others to playtest. No waiting for renders, bakes and shit, it's a beautiful way of working.

Bout the platforms: It's gonna be only on the PC so far. I'd love to have it on the Mac and the 360 as well, but we'll see about that. It's 2d, but the art is still pretty resource hungry, thanks to large textures, pixel shaders, motion blur and lots of layers blending together.

Demo will still take a while. It's still pretty debuggy right now and the character animation isn't done yet, so the characters running around look like crap, but it's progressing nicely so far.

What I'd love to know is how many people actually like games like that - Who here would buy a '2d Ico'? I'm just wondering if there's actually a market for games like that out there now. I'd love to create games like that and subsequently hire an orchestra to really push it. There's a lot of cool stuff indie games can do that would just be too risky when it comes to big budget games and it's been a lot of fun to work on this so far, so we'll see how things pan out

[vdgmprgrmr]

Game looks pretty. And if you're going in a platformer/exploration direction with it, I can't wait to see it in action.

(And "grief" wouldn't be caught in a spell-check.)

[Guert]

Well, thanks for the extra info. i'm looking forward to play this.
Later!

[Xion]

why would it be grief? Isn't grieve like the verb form of grief? To have grief vs. To grieve.

Anyway those screens look mighty beautiful.

[Craig Stern]

The art looks lovely so far, although I'm afraid the "everything in silhouette" approach is getting to be a bit of a visual cliche in the indie game community.

[CK]

The art looks lovely so far, although I'm afraid the "everything in silhouette" approach is getting to be a bit of a visual cliche in the indie game community.

cliche you say?

[agj]

Who here would buy a '2d Ico'? I'm just wondering if there's actually a market for games like that out there now.

There is a market for games like that. I'd buy a 2D Ico, provided it's as special as Ico.

[thomasmahler]

Hope my question didn't come off as me being arrogant or anything, but it's interesting to follow that indie movement right now and seeing what could be done by smaller teams

The Team ICO games didn't really sell very well from what I know - and that's retail where Sony took on the job of marketing those games. So I have to budget all of this with the mindset that there'll be very little returns, which is a hard thing to do.

@Craig: I know, the silhouetted style has been used in quite a lot of games now, but I think Sein looks very different than, say, Patapon, Feist, etc. in motion. I use lots of layers and blending to give it a flat / 3d layer / cutouts look. Almost like one of those story books that you pop open and someone created a papercraft landscape or something. Also, it's been inspired by those japanese scrollbooks that you scroll from right to left to tell you a story, using pictures and text - that's one of the ways the 'narration' works.

The style was chosen because of the Art Direction, the theme (the story takes place during the times of the black death) and because of production expenses (no UVs, no textures, no meticulous painting, I guess that's why a lot of indies jump onto it, cheap bastards :D).

I'll keep you guys posted on updates.

[Urishizu]

I just wanted to say that I am absolutely in love with that first screenshot. The way you chose to create depth by focusing on a solid, to transparent, to bright looks absolutely fabulous. I'm really looking forward to playing this.

[mirosurabu]

I still want to see this in motion.

Are you using pixel shader effects, by the way?. Nice.

[Loren Schmidt]

The game looks promising so far. Another World and Flashback have both had a big effect on me. One of the things I appreciate most about the two games is the strong sense of atmosphere they have. I hope you intend to emphasize this to a similar extent in this game.

The style was chosen because of the Art Direction, the theme (the story takes place during the times of the black death) and because of production expenses (no UVs, no textures, no meticulous painting, I guess that's why a lot of indies jump onto it, cheap bastards :D).

Silhouettes can definitely be beautiful. Even if they are in vogue right now, I think that any game using them sensibly won't be any the worse for it.

[Fuzz]

This sounds pretty amazing, and the art is mindblowing.

[thomasmahler]

The game looks promising so far. Another World and Flashback have both had a big effect on me. One of the things I appreciate most about the two games is the strong sense of atmosphere they have. I hope you intend to emphasize this to a similar extent in this game.

On me too. The thing I hated about Out of this World (Another World) and Heart of Darkness was that Chahi was incredibly unforgiving in terms of linearity. You either do things exactly the way the gamedesigner expected you to do or you die. I always thought games like that would fail miserably in todays world, where we have much less time than we used to have and if you have to do things over and over again without giving the user any gratification doing so, he'll stop playing. That's also why I'm a bit concerned about people putting the game into one category. Right now, it's sorta mixed between Another World and Castlevania in terms of pure gameplay, to overcome that poor design decision.

I recently researched those titles a bit and let a buddy of mine play Heart of Darkness. He still loved the graphics and the animation, but after him dying 10 times in a row because he hadn't yet found the right 'pattern' (The place where you have to jump over the 'goats') made him put away the controller in an instant, which is a shame.

About the atmosphere: Definitely, that's one of the reasons the game looks the way it does. I've been writing a story that's a bit more on the serious side and I hope people will respond to that. The people that are playtesting right now know that I'm a little nuts when it comes to story and character development, so it'll be interesting how people will react to it when they play a demo. The game is definitely not for children under 13, but not because it shows a lot of physical violence or blood (blood is black here), but mostly because the idea is to play with psychological pressure.

Silhouettes can definitely be beautiful. Even if they are in vogue right now, I think that any game using them sensibly won't be any the worse for it.

The wonderful thing about silhouettes is that it automatically makes you focus on the bare essence of what's there. Designing the characters that way means that you only have the silhouette and the negative spaces to define them - the silhouette is one of the most important things in terms of character design anyway, but here it's right in your face.

Also, from an animation point of view it's intriguing, since it's sooo focused on body language. You don't ever see the characters faces, their facial expressions, it's all based on body language.

[thomasmahler]

I've been working on two powerful scenes over the weekend - Playtesting will be interesting now. Anyway, here are two more screens, I think the art direction is pretty much done at this stage. The art is still simple enough to be painted in a reasonable amount of time and it's still running at smooth 60fps.

[FiaStarta]

looks pretty cool, would like to see some anim

[PGGB]

Cool, the silhouettes remind me of Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions a lot.