TIGSource Forums

UPDATE JANUARY 2014

it has now been six years and six months that i've been working on this game

- website: http://studioeres.com/sd/
- mini-trailer 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wsqkVwAznM
- mini-trailer 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1DYVMaRCVs
- facebook: http://www.facebook.com/saturateddreamers
- daily devlog: http://rinku.livejournal.com/
- FAQ: http://rinku.livejournal.com/1961204.html

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_01.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_02.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_03.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_04.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_05.jpg)

Very interesting. Its definitely got personality. Reminds me of old school snes rpgs. Looking forward to more. BTW I am totally blown away by your massive design document. That is awesome.

So, it's an exploration... shooter? That sounds pretty amazing. I'm loving the artwork, both in this topic and on your blog (Orchard-L's?). Is Walter Eres your brother?

Interesting idea, I am keeping my eyes on this.

This sounds so great! I can't wait to play it. I especially like the nonviolent nature of the gameplay, and the crew portraits.

I think I'm in love.
This is all so beautiful.

Seriously this is something I like a lot.  :beer:

Looks super great!!

But honestly, a framerate of 40/sec isn't so bad, is it? A game i playable at 25-30...

Wonderful to hear you're back working on it! Keep it up!  :wizard::handthumbsupR:

But 40FPS on his PC might be 15FPS on a weaker one. 40 doesn't sound like a nice enough buffer.

I dunno, maybe you're doing something wrong, Paul. I still manage to get ArcMagi to cap on ~550FPS when idle and around 100-200 during the heaviest effect fest (on a similar range PC as yours). Maybe some of the procedural effects you use could be emulated with sprites or particles without much of quality loss?   

Fuzz: There's exploration, but not exactly "shooting" -- although you certainly do shoot things at creatures, you don't do so with the intent to kill them. You have different 'functions', and each of them have different effects: a line that attaches to them to pull them around, a web that slows them down, and other various effects. It's in the design doc. And Walter Eres is my father, he's been a music composer for around 40 years so knows how to do it well by now. He also composed much of the Immortal Defense soundtrack. However, most of the music for this game is by Long Dao, who arranged and composed some of the music of Immortal Defense as well. Most of the game's music has been completed, it has about two hours of music right now, which is about four times more than Immortal Defense did.

TeeGee: Possible -- when the game goes into playtesting I'll send you the code to look around in and see if you can spot anything I'm doing wrong. I also have triggers to selectively disable different parts of the game (trails, different types of particles, and so on) so we can play around with that and see which ones are causing the problem. Also maybe you just have a better computer than me? Could you unframerate trigger AMagi and send it to me so I can see what fps I get, for comparison?

Oh, and JLJac: The game is intended to run at 60fps, and the speed is locked to the frame rate (I know that's not professional but it's what most indie games do and it's very hard to do otherwise in Game Maker), so going to 40fps would slow the game down by about a third, which would make the game play a lot slower. Yes, it'd still be playable, and all the options will be adjustable so people can turn stuff on and off to get it up to a frame rate they like, even the trails can be turned off as is if they're too slow.

With the trails... maybe this isn't the right place for this, but can game maker draw polygons? or triangles? Those trails in the pic look like they're done with many rectangles or rectangular sprites - there might be an faster way than that but it depends what can be done in GM.

Whoa, sweet visuals!

Colour me highly interested!  :gentleman:

That's a good point -- I could probably modify it to use triangles rather than rectangles (since drawing triangle primitives is fairly fast -- you can even draw triangle strips using GM's draw_primitive functions), but the math for that may be a bit too advanced for me. But it'd definitely be worth pursuing to see if I could get it working, thanks for the recommendation!

Awesome, I like your imaginary worlds, keep it up :beer:

Have you thought about using particles for the trails? It won't look exactly the same (possibly better), but should be much faster.

Sure, I'll send you an uncapped AM build later.

That might work, though I'm not sure it'd be any faster. I already do use some particles for the trail (those little white dots and those ripple effects). I do get slowdown to around when there are around 600 particles or more though, and on most screens the particles already are approaching that number even without the trails.

Ouch. Then again, the game's 640x480. Even with lots of stuff drawing on the screen, the fillrate shouldn't be too high. Have you checked what's the bottle neck - the graphics or the CPU?

Well, I understood that there wouldn't be shooting, but it seems like a shooter without shooting from what you've described. Or something. Also, it's really cool that you're getting your father on board with your games.

Pretty sure it's the fill rate. But I've a fairly mediocre (not bad, just average) videocard (NVIDIA 8500 GT), and a fairly good CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0 ghz, it's even one of the newer 45nm things). On other computers it may have different bottlenecks. But it depends on the specifics of the area, they vary a lot. Sometimes it's just the large number of objects, which is more a CPU problem.

re Fuzz: It's similar to shooters in that you control a ship, and may give that shooter feeling just for that reason; I think that's the biggest similarity. It's a bit risky going for a ship as a main character in a story-based game: will people actually care about characters that they won't actually see except in the form of text box portraits? We'll see.

I tried haowan's suggestion about the triangles. Here's the result:

new triangle method:
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000xagt7)

old method:
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000x6gtq)

I'm not actually sure which looks better. I think the first method is faster, but I haven't tested it enough yet, so I'm not sure. I think they both look okay/acceptable, but not spectacular. The first method has too much overlap, and the second method has too many breaks/fragmentation. Getting it to fill perfectly is something I'm not sure how to approach. I'll try TeeGee's particle method tomorrow probably.

Sounds pretty interesting, and the visuals are superb. Keeping my eye on this.

Looks very charming, and I like the idea of an exploration shooter. Keeping my eye on this.

Okay, I tried TeeGee's suggestion of doing these trails through GM's particle system. The particles were actually much slower than either of these two methods for equal trail lengths. That isn't too surprising because creating 100 new particles for the player and for the creatures seems like it'd be drawn slower than a strip of 100 triangles or 100 lines in a loop. I did get some interesting effects which I may adapt or use for other things, but I probably will keep using the methods mentioned instead of particles due to the speed difference.

you said you wanted rainbow trails...couldn't you draw each point on the triangle strip with a different hue for that effect? I don't see why rainbow trails would be too hard...?

I could try gradually shifting the hue, yes. But what I meant by rainbow was this:

red red red red red
orange orange orange
yellow yellow yellow
green green green
blue blue blue blue

rather than

red orange yellow green blue
red orange yellow green blue
red orange yellow green blue
red orange yellow green blue

i.e. *stripes* rather than just a hue shift over time.

the second would be perfectly easy. the first, not so much. i will try the second to see how it looks though.

If you can draw texture-mapped triangles, or texture-mapped rectangles in your original system, then you should be able to put a rainbow texture over the trail without too much trouble.

It's a shame about the overlap - there are probably some neat ways around it but it might slow the game down even more to implement them.

40 fps is the crap if the game is fast paced, aim always for 50-60 if you can D:

about that triangles overlap, maybe you can fix it using the stencil buffer

GM can do texture-mapped primitives, but I haven't actually used it that often. I used it a little bit in Immortal Defense for the shield effect around the first boss, but that was mainly randomly stabbing at the air and inserting random variables in the GM functions until I got a desired effect. I'll post the textured primitive description here:


So as you can see, it has some capability for it, but I'm just not sure how to use all that. I doubt it's as simple as making a rainbow texture and telling it to use it, since I don't know whether to set repeat on or off, or what xtex and ytex values to use, and all that.

Yes, I'm aiming for 60 fps, the reason I'm not using really long trails is that it reduces it to 40 fps. I don't know what a stencil buffer is.

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000xbd6b)

crazy performance test

i had the idea: since there are about 30 creatures in the game, i'll dedicate one day each this month to each of them (programming their behavior), and try to get them in the game. today was the unicorn. if i don't get a creature done during their dedicated day, i will not be able to work on them again for several months, and have to just keep what i get done on that day. that should be motivation to do a lot for each creature this month.

That's looking beautiful. I got a manhug with your name on it when you need it.

a creature a day?  that sounds satisfying :)  i hope their interactions don't cause you too much trouble ;p

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000xcwh7)

firefly (creature in the lower right) movement/behavior/friending is in.

soon i'll reach creatures that are not yet drawn by the creature artist, so i'll have to use placeholder graphics for those.

How's this going? I was under the impression that you would post one creature a day...

I'm working on a creature a day, it's just that most of the graphics for the creatures aren't done, what I'm actually doing is their behavior. I think it'd be kind of weird to show the same sprite over and over with different behavior (I'm using the Unicorn's sprite as a placeholder for all the ones that don't have sprites yet). But I wouldn't mind posting it, I just think it'd look kind of silly; I'll post one today and see how it goes.

Little tips for you Paul:
Stop posting huge posts here. Also: stop thinking that Flash is the messiah or something.
And work on yo'game dawg.
 :gentleman:

I don't remember thinking Flash is the messiah -- my most recent comment about Flash on the front page was how a lot of people think it's easy to earn money with Flash but the numbers I see look small in comparison to shareware numbers, at least from the outside. I haven't even ever finished a Flash game (besides that valentine's experimental thing).

I don't think my posts are any longer than average, I think it's just that your posts tend to be so short that anyone bigger looks huge  :gentleman:

I agree that I should work on my game more, but I still probably work on it more often than I post here (despite what the 4000+ posts make it look like).

Man, I hope you somehow manage to make it look like that.

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000xfxkc)

another random pic of some creatures

oh, and for those of you who care about design sketches:

http://komera.deviantart.com/gallery/#_browse/scraps

those are the designs for most of the creatures in the game (but not yet all)

sayar (at the bottom) is not one of them, he's for a different game by komera

Those sketches are very cool. I like how the insect-type things are all named after various mythological beasts that share similar characteristics.

i also like the sketches :)  they seem to complement the design pretty well.

guys, which do you prefer:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000y295c)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000y1q1a)

second uses interpolation between pixels

I like the second, though I could see the appeal of the first. Maybe have an option to change between them?

yep, will probably have an option, but wondering which to use as the default

the second one is much nicer.

I think the second one looks nicer. First one just looks like poorly rotated sprites to me.

The second one. Though, you were right - pixel art doesn't look very good when rotated/resized.

No it doesn't, it looks awful. But if somebody prefers it for whatever reason, I'd say have the option available. 2nd should definitely be the default, though.

2nd

i personally prefer the first...

;_;

the first to break the trend!

i think both have problems: the second has smoother rotation but less harsh edges, which makes it sometimes harder to distinguish subject from ground; but the former has rotation problems (most rotated sprites look pretty bad if not filtered in some way due to the geometry of going from a grid to another grid). i'll probably make the second default but the first optional.

I'd have to see it in motion. Statically, the second looks smoother, but I can imagine it looks a bit flat in motion. On the other hand the first one looks sharper, like it has more detail, but might look a little rough in motion.

i'll just post new screenies here in batches occasionally

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000y84x5)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000y6hrf)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000y47qx)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000y3872)

Those look awesome! I especially like the black sea, is that actually an intended area of the game or just a test zone?

that part is an area inside a dream, not an actual area from the game map

The story screen doesn't really seem to fit with the art style of the rest of the game. It looks quite oversaturated in comparison with the in-game screenshots.

there are different artists, so it won't all fit together all the time. even with a single artist that's difficult. i don't see anything inherently wrong with making some areas of the game more saturated and some less though -- most games have more saturated and less saturated areas (for instance, compare baron castle to the mist caves in ff4)

some new screens:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000z1er6)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000z2rpy)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000z0ktd)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000yw5q6)

lately when i've been showing screens to people i usually get 'looks nice, but is it original??' -- i guess the reaction that i'm stealing graphics should be taken as a complement, but it's also kind of insulting that people would think we'd steal graphics without permission

looks nice, but is it original??



Seriously though, that is looking amazing, top notch job on the art, keep up the good work!

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000y47qx)

wow your artist really loves to use bright purple for shading :P
This stuff is VERY impressive, but as the objects on the water it will look better with a darker tone in the unlit zones IMO, because that purple is brighter than even few tones he uses for the lit parts...
Subscribing the thread anyway :] keep flooding it with awesomeness like that

there are actually two different artists (the large creature object was done by komera). she was purposefully emulating orchard-l's purple shading though.

and yes, i talked about the dark purple idea with him; he said he'd think about it and decide later, because it'd mean re-working a lot of the graphics that have been done for the game already (and the time may be better spent creating new stuff than improving old stuff). but perhaps at the end of development when we have more free time

very cool :) it's also the first time that i find someone replying this way to a costructive criticism, most of the time people ignore them or they even act a bit pissed off, like if they posted only to receive positive comments in every bit of their work.

I'm talking about games in development, on the pixel art\mockup threads everyone accepts hints and paintovers better, possibly because those are mostly only ideas or wip material, and because receiving a criticism over something that looks completed is a bit harder to digest.

I agree that doing new stuff is a lot more important now, as the game already looks very polished anyway

thanks, i think not getting offended is probably just a matter of experience and age. orchard and i have been making games for about 10-15 years now, so after that time you lose some of the fragile ego stuff -- most of the people who make indie games are a lot younger

as an aside, for updates on progress as to what i'm doing each day on it: http://rinku.livejournal.com/tag/saturated+dreamers -- that's the real devlog, this is just sort of a place to get feedback on things to a larger audience than those who read my lj

new screens:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000z7ka0)
save slot system (9 save slots, each is auto-saved so you'd never have need to (and cannot) save a single game to multiple slots)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000z6a05)
enter your name screen (lots of special characters for those who need them to type in their name, plus you can control it like a console game if you like)

video of the intro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9VUUY6Grak

the intro doesn't seem to flow to well to my eyes just yet (partly because you were flicking through the text faster than I could sometimes read it), but I do really like how it's shaping up generally.

a few other people have commented on the text too -- i thought i was a slow reader, but i guess if you read something already it's easier to read the 100th time than the 1st. next trailer/video will have slower text.

I'd really like a little more to break up the text, personally. It appears letter-by-letter, which is nice, and it does it at a good pace. But how about putting invisible "pause" characters in there as well, which you can use to sort of pause the text progression briefly between sentences. It's actually a good way to communicate your character more through text as well. A shy character might take more pauses, speaking slower; an energetic person might just spew all their words out at once, etc. Also, if you use things such as ellipses ["..."] you can make them appear slowly, emphasizing the pause. I usually use a spare character such as "~" or "`" as my invisible char, have the object that types out the text read for these characters and pause when it finds them, but just not render them.

A good example would be text such as the following:

   "What! Are you sure?"

Instead of the whole thing appearing in just one go, first "What!" would appear, and the following pause would help emphasize the exclamation before "Are you sure?" followed.

I find that it's a good way to make text-heavy games (which this may or may not be, but I'm leaning towards a yes on this one) more readable and easier to digest. Other games, such as Superstar Saga, use colored text or words that bounce around or shake to emphasize them and make the text more interesting. Your game seems a bit too serious for that, but I'm sure my point is clear.

Actually, using colored text to highlight certain words or important phrases is often used, but it is effective and does its job quite well. But it's sort of a pain to implement in an easy-to-use manner.

I don't think it's really a problem for a trailer, but you could consider say, putting the video on a flash file and having keypresses advance the video if its really a problem

pause characters are a good idea. or even an auto-pause on commas and periods and other punctuation would be nice to try.

and the game isn't too text-heavy -- this is just the intro. the story is nonlinear after this point.

when i make a proper trailer i'd focus less on the story and more on the gameplay -- will try and make a real trailer when i finish v0.5 (this was done cause i just finished v0.4).

re-uploaded video w/ a music track fix (had used the wrong music track for the boss battle): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGzrS5qKLgo

Looks good! I'm for the pause in texts too :)

Oh btw, I just bought Immortal Defense, i had to say that I never thought to buy ANY tower defence games, but your one is just on another level ;)

thanks-thanks

grid defense is also a pretty good td game -- that's the only one i've bought

i set up a kickstarter page for SD as an experiment:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rinkuhero/saturated-dreamers-igf-fee-and-misceallenous-deve-0

it's a site where people can try to fund projects -- there you can donate to us to help pay for the IGF contest fee for SD, the FMOD library license fee, and if it goes past the target goal any other costs we may have. in return you can preorder SD and get access to beta testing it when it goes into beta testing (which i am guessing is going to be january of 2010)

i intentionally chose a low target goal ($195) because if it doesn't reach its target goal nothing is paid and people's credit cards aren't charged, and i figured a low goal would be more likely to be reached than a high one.

so please help it along if you have any extra money!

I'm gonna try to donate but I don't have a credit card (my paypal is connected to my bank account) and all amazon wants are credit cards  :'(

yep, that's one thing i don't like about kickstarter, no paypal

if you like, anyone who doesn't have a cc but has paypal can paypal me an amount (at [email protected]), and i'll use my debit card to put the money into the kickstarter page project (and will keep in mind the person who donated through paypal when it's time to hand out the rewards for the different amounts donated)

Cool. Will do in the next week or so...

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001013ps) (drawn by long's friend, mizukagex)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0010250b) (drawn by orchard-l)

poll: which do you like better, and why? (this will not be decided upon by vote, i'd just like thoughts and impressions). a few people have complained about orchard-l's portraits, and long had an artist friend who wanted to join the project.

my thoughts... orchard's is much better. it just looks so much more professional, and the expression is much more nuanced.

ha, first two replies (one in lj (http://rinku.livejournal.com/1657074.html), one here) completely opposite of one another! :D

Fix the hair up in the first one (at one part at the back it looks like there's a spot where none is coming out, maybe the hair in the back should start up a bit higher?) and I definitely like it better. I don't like portraits looking at me in games, for one; it always gives me a slightly uncanny-valley effect. I don't like any of the outlining or aa-outlining in the pixel portrait too much either. If the game is all pixel artwork, though, I'd have to see how the painted one looks in-game really, because painted portraits might look awkwardly out of place. I prefer the pose and style of the first one in general, though, and don't agree with Fuzz that the 2nd is more nuanced, actually (I see just as much expression in the first, personally).

EDIT: actually, I'm concerned about this uncanny effect too. I know I'm not the only one that gets it from this while playing games, too, so I might suggest you try to avoid it as often as possible.

mizukagex's, definitely. it's not super great but if he removed that soul patch and perhaps make the nose less.sharp (her chin is guilty of that as well) or if he made it a few pixels shorter it would be much better. left eye needs a bit of a touch., and she needs eyelashes.

orchad's sketch looks like she is trying to be seductive, but failing real hard. It looks like she is stoned. I don't understand why he has the black dots spotted through his image. I also dislike the mouth for reasons I can't put my finger on..except for the bottom lip.  looks like it was chapped and she ripped off the dead skin with a razor blade. and the smile itself looks like it's merely centimeters from being similar to the joker's smile. the weird neck muscle also looks odd. I also dislike her attire. but I do love the nose. however, it does remind me of one of the females from snatcher (been too long for me to remember her name) which is cool.

reason why I chose mizukagex's:
better hairstyle; i see what chevy means about the missing spot, but I did not notice it until he mentioned it. and on further inspection it just looks like her front bangs are really long, snad since it's combed to that direction it's fine And it's less pixelated than the 2nd. pixel art is wonderful-when done right but the other one, wasn't. and it looks like time was actually spent on it, the other one looks like it was whipped up super fast. I also like what she is wearing, the name of the garment escapes me at the moment though. and like chevy, I would prefer a character in a portrait to not look directly at me, especially with that odd stoner look of the 2nd. so definitely, mizukagex's.

edit: it's late and I am exhausted..excuse my horrible use of grammar and punctuation. chrome needs punctuation correction :P

I vote for mizukagex.

The style just looks much more organic.  Orchard's looks too much like "video game art" to me.  I mean, I realize this is art for a video game we're talking about, but it also looks like "art from an old 256-color, VGA Screen-Mode-12 video game.  Unless you're going for a specifically retro look.  (which I haven't been sure of, based on your trailers, but it didn't look like it, since you have alpha blended particles and such...)

With my sincerest apologies to Orchard-I, since it is still worlds above anything I could hope to make.  But really, I'm not a fan the "limited color palette + dithering" look.  So while I appreciate both, if I had to pick one, I'd go for the one that looks more like a painting.

I think the issue with orchard's portrait is that it's trying to be too functionally correct and detailed, as opposed to suggesting features and letting the viewer fill in the blanks, which is more what mizukagex's does.

For instance, with the right eye in mizukagex's portrait, the shape of it is more suggested than shown. The left eye of orchard's, in contrast, is done as completely as the right, and therefore doesn't look as natural. Also the skew on it seems slightly off...

My 2p! All that said, I still like both of them :)

The second one looks more professional to me. I can see that picture in an old-school DOS game, whereas I can't really see the first one anywhere except on Deviantart.

I like orchard-l pixel art, he's very talented, but in that pic she looks like an aging woman more than a young girl.
Mizukagex one has some anatomy i don't entirely get but it's not bad at all, plus i like the "concept art" style more than having pixel art portraits, and she looks like a girl.


Is this one the same character too?
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000y6hrf)

I still like Mizukagex one better than this two :P this one is made well but it has a strange " '80s anime" vibe...

Try to not mix too many styles during the game!

I definitely vote for orchad-l.

The first is nice, but looks a little odd to me. I feel like she's missing some hair that should be in the top left corner of the picture. Could use some polishing as others have said.

The second would probably go a lot better with the general pixel aesthetic. There's a lot of weird dithering, though. Should it actually look like the version shown here? (http://studioeres.com/forums/Themes/Simple/images/logo.png) 'Cause if so, you've given what I feel is an unrepresentative portrayal of orchad-l's work and a lot of the opinions you've gathered don't mean much.  :laughter:

Furthermore, you've got a ton of portraits by orchad-l already, right? Would it really be worthwhile to replace them all when this wouldn't please everyone? I don't actually know the answer to that.

I'd worry less about style and more about consistency. My advice would be to go with whoever can make the portraits look varied and at the same time as if they were drawn by the same person. Judging by the portraits in the above post, orchard-l seems to have some trouble keeping the style consistent. It would be nice if you could get a few more portraits drawn by mizukagex. I think it's important that the artist can draw properly constructed heads from different angles, so I wouldn't base the decision on a single portrait.

I don't really like either to be honnest.

But 2 style is a bit more original.
If I had to choose I'd go with 2

I'm totally sure the first one is more appealing to almost every non-indie gamer and people not biased over pixel art

weaboo? they're both manga, one is modern style manga, the other is '80s manga. So... no.

@sergiocornaga: the reason it's 'unrepresentative' is that mizu has only finished the mercedes portrait so far (he still plans to do the others), so i had to compare those two specifically. also, the reason to replace them all is that orchard only did *one* portrait for each character, whereas mizu has the time to do several per character (for different emotions), which can add a bit to the game

@arachne: of course consistency is important, i wouldn't use some portraits from each and mix and match for the same thing; mizu plans to draw all the portraits (well, there are only 5 and a half characters)

@eclipse: i think weeaboo normally refers to people who just got into anime in the late 90s or 00s, whereas it doesn't really apply to people who got into anime in the 80s and often don't like modern anime, so that division makes sense

@all: thanks for all the input so far. i've collected it on the lj entry: http://rinku.livejournal.com/1657074.html

I would like the first if it were more crisply rendered and had more of a back of head and the far eye weren't...like it is.

you should have them tag-team the portraits >_>

well, mizu's portrait was unfinished -- he said he'd update it based on the thoughts given in that entry. another thing is that he probably has more time than orchard to work on the game, because orchard also has to do the map art

maybe the best solution could be that the artist that's doing the cutscenes do the portraits as well

it's also planned that mizu at least partially replace harlock as the cutscene artist, because harlock is so unreliable and has so little free time

That's not what I said. My point was that one artist can draw portraits that look very different. Make sure you have an artist who can draw portraits that look like they were drawn by the same person.

ah, understood. still, as an indie, i can't just fire people for inconsistency, since it's all volunteer, and volunteers are in short supply, so the "make sure" part sounds strange. :)

Oh, that's true. I was mostly thinking about what to look for and less about the work involved. It's nice that you have a fairly limited character selection, then. How many different emotions do you have in mind?

Looking forward to seeing how the rest of the portraits turn out. :)

i was thinking of about 5-7 emotions for the main two characters (venus and mercedes) and 3-5 for the secondary characters (theo, neotheo, icks, and spare) -- things like anger, sadness, crying, normal, cheerful, contemplative, disturbed/shocked

The first one appeals to me because it's just better. I don't play RPGS, and I only play games on my computer (indie games the most). When I was 16 or so I played japanese rpgs but not any longer. I don't care for Japanese manga/anime whatever style art either.

your stereotyping is silly :P, yet it of course it's hard to disagree with you.

saying that one is likely to be more appealing to a certain group of people doesn't preclude that that one is also more appealing to other people -- there's no contradiction

I didn't say that, I was only referring to my own preferences, and no one else's

understandable. still, i don't really think it was stereotyping -- it's just statistics. people who are used to a certain style are more likely to prefer that style. not all the time, but generally. if you go to the lj entry where i asked people about the choice, i did notice that tendency: people who were into games in the 80s liked the second one better, people who were too young (under 20-25) to have played a lot of games in the 80s, along with people who didn't play games at all, tended to like the first one better.

I like the second one more, But they both are way more then service-able.

yeah, you're right. i should have chose my words better. but yeah, i'll check out the livejournal.

also, keep us posted. very interested in this...i have a feeling it'll be a while eh?

and by while i mean several months or a year.

well, definitely not 2009 -- likely 2010

after this, no more 3-year long game projects for a while

I could have sworn I posted on here earlier, but I definitely prefer the first one. The style appeals to me. Filling out the hair, and maybe a tiny little bit more colour on the face is the way I would go. I don't mean any disrespect to either of the artists, however. I wish I was half as talented and skilled an artist as either of them.

new screenz

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0010eyq3)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0010br49)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0010a826)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00109c78)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001078ae)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00103k7f)

looks awesome, Paul ;)

Yeah it's really becoming more coherent in look now, great stuff man.  I'm still not in love with the portraits though.  In a way I'd like to see them share the uber-shaded, exaggerated colour-theory pixel look of the game, but I know it would be time-consuming!

For some reason I am reminded of SVGA graphics...

Those little crater reflections are really bothering me :epileptic:

I hope you change it because everything else is looking so good.

I think all the reflections are done by code, flipping the sprite

Very nice, sweet colors, and yeah, change the reflections or get rid of them.(or try to see if they don't look better after you flip them horizontally)


Looking good mang.

the reflections aren't final, the crater reflections are definitely wrong yes, will be changed eventually

oh god it's so beautiful :)

Wow... it's so awe-inspiring. It fills me with an innocent, giddy wonder. It would be so amazing to just explore, and see the amazing, alien sights you've crafted...

Just... wow.

I saw this on you LJ but never did give my opinion.

I personally do prefer Orchard's a lot better than the other one. The other on has a very nice painterly style... but really it doesn't seem to fit in with the games graphical style. Orchard's has a nice professional look to it that the other one doesn't. And normally I like stylized better than quality but... the first one looks just looks a bit awkward :shrug2:
But hey... I wish mizukagex's art could be fit into the game somehow because I think it's just really interesting to look at.

more screenz

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0011bk5z)
widescreen mode

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00111p13)
map

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0010tpfy)
upgrading

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0010qg83)
title

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0010ps2x)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00114yd7)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00115w6d)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0010fk5g)

also! i need a cutscene artist, since the two i had seem to have either abandoned the project or are are too lazy to do anything ever and no longer reply to my emails / IMs. if anyone is willing to do about 20-40 cutscene graphics (basically plain, 2d image-paintings of game events, similar to comic frames, but colored) in exchange for either a small amount of money and/or royalties from sales, let me know & show me what you've done in the past

My goodness, Paul.


This is utterly beautiful holey moley. Do you have a full-res version of this I can download? I'd like to have it as my desktop for awhile.

Your world is coming together very nicely, and as has already been said is looking much more coherent and "whole". This screenshot in particular...


It's great to see so many details now coming together. Keep up the good work so far, this is definitely going in the right direction!

thanks; the title screen is actually the largest size i have, sorry -- harlock only sent it to me as 640x480. i could ask him for the larger version but he's rarely online / checks email and takes forever to reply to me so it may take a while (if ever)

Very nice. I think it's really starting to look like a complete ecosystem. ;D :handthumbsupR:

However, the ship and other creatures look like they belong in a top-down view, which looks a bit strange. The reflections have already been mentioned, and I don't think there are any shortcuts to making them look right since the object is viewed from above and the object's reflection is viewed from below.

Holy snap that looks so amazing :screamy:. Will there be a public demo soon?  :beg:

this is looking gorgeous, mang.

The top-down ship, as Arachne pointed out, has been bugging me since the very first shots though.

HOOOOOoooooolllly shit mang
This is AAA top quality ma boi  :wtf:

the reason for the top down thing is that creatures and the ship rotate, whereas tile objects don't -- it's not feasible with our resources to create 50+ creatures and a ship that are drawn differently in every direction, so just drawing it top down and rotating is the best that can be done there. once the shadow is more prominent on the creatures and ship it'll give them some more depth though. if you look at aquaria, it had a similar issue: it used rotation on sprites which made some (most?) sprites seem 'directly' side-view, whereas other things were more of a perspective angle (although it wasn't as obvious in that game since it was side view rather than top-down so the contrast was less important).

no public demo until it's done (mid-2010 most likely), but there is a playtesting version that you can get access to by pre-ordering it (see its previously mentioned kickstarter page for the paypal address), but it's still very raw right now so i don't recommend that unless you want to play it in a terrible state

the playtesting version is totally worth the 15 bucks, don't be so hard on yourself, paul!

wynand's writing is really amazing in this, better than in immortal defense. the graphics are awesome (as seen above), the gameplay is really fun and creative, the soundtrack is brilliant, and it's really polished already.

looking forward to the next playtesting version, from your livejournal it looks like you've fixed most of the issues i had with this one.

What boggles me slightly is the fact that there're same kinds of background pieces next to each other. Doesn't always look that bad, but sometimes it jumps at my eyes.

Agreed.

Also, holy shit how could I have overlooked this for so long? Looks gorgeous!  :handthumbsupR:

Actually, Hempuli's point is a good one. This bothers me quite a lot about freely-placed tiles (as opposed to grid-locked ones) in games. Quite often, invisible "lines" become visible in the layouts, and result in an unattractive symmetry when you'd rather have more of a chaotic, natural look (especially in a game like this).

(http://flashpunk.net/images/parallels.png)

In this shot, the two shorter red lines show where two sets of these trees are identically relative to eachother compared to the opposite pair. The longer line to the right of them isn't so bad, but it's a bit close.

One that really bugs me is the vertical line to the left. Even if these were just one-pixel offset horizontally, it'd look better, but they're lined up exactly, and it doesn't look quite as nice as it could.

The big purple mushrooms are big enough that it doesn't matter, unless there's a huge row of them all relative, it won't produce noticeable lines. The crystals at the bottom are fine too, since they're so busy and chaotic already, it's hard for the eye to make any immediate patterns or lines out of it.

Hmm, why are all the plants and rocks ... translucent with respect to background objects but not themselves?  It seems weird to see water-reflections and other details behind each object bleeding through, since otherwise they look solid (especially since there are self occlusions within each sprite!) ...

stylistic choice; most things in the game use additive blending because i like the way that looks better; it also blends in with the water colors (which vary) better that way. it comes at a big cost, but i think the effect is worth it. also, objects become less transparent as the player approaches the object, which provides a dream-like effect.

Interesting -- I guess since the translucency varies dynamically, it'd be too expensive to do in a consistent way?  It looks kinda weird to me, but might add to the dream-like effect I guess.

If you'd like to see the game in action, I have some gameplay videos up, although it's running really slowly (8 fps) and has really bad sound quality in the videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SvartaSkepnader#g/c/33A7F89B7C4C0AAF (http://www.youtube.com/user/SvartaSkepnader#g/c/33A7F89B7C4C0AAF)
(the videos are in sequential order, although the numbers aren't visible there, also: beware of spoilers, although there isn't anything significant)

vid of the level editor & the process i go through when making an area

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK-N6busHPo

i'll need to repeat that process literally 800 times before the entire world is made

Wow Paul, that is a crazy amount of work... I can't wait to play the game.  I actually hadn't seen some of the gameplay footage that Fuzz posted until now.  The artwork is really beautiful.

awesome, very nice editor :) and the environment looks wonderful!

thanks-thanks

my plan for the rest of development is to have each month be dedicated to a set of features (for instance, february was map obstacles; march is creature coding) and anything i don't do in that month is saved until either just before release or post-release patches. so if i don't finish something at its designated time, i can't work on it again for a long time, which gives motivation to finish it during that month.

here's a vid of the intro of the latest version (no gameplay shown, just the intro) if anyone is curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Py9VksvCsI

Definitely looks great in any standard. Only thing I think is out of place is already mentioned thing with same looking sprites next to each other forming lines. Reduces some of the organic feel from them IMO. Would be good with grid based game but judging from videos I presume this isn't one. Not bad thing though.

I can't help but ask have you happened to watch Nausicaa Valley of Wind? The concept of poison and a strange ecosystem instantly reminded me of it in a good way too :)

Lookin' great.  :-*

Art reminds me of Star Control 2.

Good stuff, good stuff. Oh by the way, what is the song playing in the video where you showcase your the editor / process of creating a new area?

@tumetsu - yep, i've seen it and read the manga -- though the inspiration from the game probably comes more from solaris (the novel, i haven't seen the movie) and the game alpha centauri (which also had a living planet) than from that, but others have made the comparison to nausicaa before. also, this is a bit of a spoiler, but the game isn't purely intended to look organic: the lake in the game is intelligent, and part of the idea is that the elements of the lake are self-organizing in placement, so regular geometric orientations of elements make sense in that context. (don't want to reveal too much more there though for now.)

@sinclair - i still haven't played star control 2, though various people have recommended it to me so it's on my to-play list

@skyy - it's a song from the game, created by my friend long dao -- i forget its name offhand, though. it's used for the title screen of the game currently (and some other special uses). edit: i just looked up the name and it's called sul astro dreams, previously known as sul ponticello (the song itself had two versions with two different names); it's related to the title screen of immortal defense, which has a similar construction

I like the new starfield effect you have; is it supposed to follow where the cursor will be?  The new art also looks quite nice. 

I think I might have mentioned this somewhere, but I also recommend checking out Star Control 2.  The story would probably a lot less serious than yours (it has a lot of silly parts to it), but it might have some similar exploration elements (the further out you go into space, the harder the "battles" or negotiations are for example). 

it doesn't follow the cursor, but the 'memory cell' particles at the start do follow the cursor. the starfield later during the prologue (rotating stars in the background) doesn't follow the cursor, but making the rotating starfield more interactive is an interesting idea though -- the cursor isn't shown in that part, but i like the idea of adding non-functional gui / environmental interactions like that. (windosill is the best game in that regard, it's basically entirely that).

will look into star control 2 soon -- but i always worry about playing games too similar to my own project at the time, for fear of unconsciously stealing ideas. that's also why i've been avoiding playing 'lack of love' (obscure japanese-only dreamcast title) which is reportedly similar to SD as well (apparently you friend creatures rather than kill them and explore non-linearly, like SD).

I didn't get the impression that your game was going to be a lot like star control II, but I would also recommend it for the non-linearity.

Ah, that makes sense.  I think I'm that way about music... sometimes if I'm really into a new song I'm afraid to start composing or writing a song directly afterwards because the song I like naturally seeps into my head.  I've caught myself working on a song only to think, "oh shoot, I knew this melody sounds familiar, it's from such-and-such"... and then I have to start over :(

In my experience, games you play during development have a tendency to somehow feed into your own game, regardless of how similar they are. For instance, I played a lot of Demon's Souls during the first two or so months of developing 444, which I think was a major contributing factor to the game's relatively slow pace and its focus on planning your moves and exploiting enemy behavior. It was originally going to be a lot faster and more twitch-based.

But yeah, I see where you're coming from. I try not to play similar game or the games that inspired me during development, better to borrow ideas from an unrelated game than to make another generic Metroidvania/Zelda clone.

just an update since i haven't posted one in a few months

lately i've been focusing on the creation of the worldmap, at least in first draft form. there are a lot of areas in the game. it's hard to do comparisons due to resolution differences and movement speed differences and such, but it's roughly eight times the size of the world in zelda 3. here's the current worldmap (the black squares are the ones i didn't do yet; the worldmap is about 81% complete right now)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0017zc9s)

at the rate i'm going i'll probably reach 100% of the worldmap completed (in first draft form) by mid-july. after that i'm going to focus on coding the remaining local mammoths (which work like the "bosses" of the game).

and here are a few more screenshots

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00169cyz)
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00162a9z)
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001619z7)
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0014p47k)
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00143sk2)

Gorgeous. There are too many games developed around the escalation of bloodbaths. Nice to actually appreciate an alien world, make sense of it.

I guess there isn't sound yet? Shame, this deserves killer tunes.

Nice, those graphics and colors remind me of a Thalion game

actually 80% of the music is done, but only about 1/4 of the sound effects. you can hear some in the '100 game maker games in 10 minutes' video: the third and fourth song are from saturated dreamers. there are other songs from the game up on youtube as well in different places and accounts; i'll link to them later.

what's thalion?

http://thalion.exotica.org.uk/games/lionheart/lionheart.html

pretty; i can see the resemblance but i think that game has better gradients than SD -- i've been meaning to improve mine using bennett's gradient tool, eventually.

as promised, here's some music from SD on youtube:

- title theme used in this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK-N6busHPo
- intro theme used in this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UYwO9wwBGc
- some random song from the game used in this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUmENJ4zTj4
- various songs used in this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMZUwyAu8D4
- emtoional treebranch song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqaIHrGlmEo
- an sd song performed by an orchestra (well, a college class orchestra): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caMhWLzx3s8

it's only a few (the game itself has a soundtrack about 2.5 hours long so far) but it'll give a general impression of what the music's like

how long is the game going to be?

it's too nonlinear to have something like an estimated playthrough time. that's like asking how long fallout 1 is, or how long a game of civilization is. there are so many ways of completing those games that there's no real play time that you could tell someone to expect. every single area in SD besides the starting few and the last one is optional.

ok that's fine I was just wondering if 2.5hours was gonna be way too much/not enough music. Just a thought.

very awesome Paul!  It's obvious you've put tons of time into making a really polished and nice presentation. I can't wait to play this!

thanks-thanks

ah; 2.5 hours of music isn't especially much in the zeldalike genre -- coincidentally, i just checked, and zelda: the ocarina of time also had almost exactly 2 and a half hours of music too.

Jesus christ, 2.5 hours is more than enough music.

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00185dh9)
(see explored % for file #1)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0017p7k1)
the map on may 29, 2010

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001860w3)
the map on july 3, 2010

so i'm done with the first draft of the worldmap now; basically i did half of it in a period of a month and four days, even though the first half took about three years (though of course i was doing other stuff for the game during that time and wasn't concentrating on just the map)

next i'll be coding the rest of the 'local mammoths' (which are like bosses except you don't kill them)

Looks huge, Mr. Eres, simply huge! =) Doing all the levels at once is great because you'll have nice consistency, I know that's one of your core principles (assembly line) and it makes sense.

i think there may have been some loss in consistency since i slowly went crazy over that month, leading to crazier and crazier looking areas, like this one:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001815dp)

:

i should mention that eva helped with a few of the areas -- like 10 or something total out of the 845

u make it sound like it was nothing  :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :(

:)

no it was about 1% of the world! that's a lot

Eva rules


Even though I quite dislike you, this is exciting. Nice to see this project coming along well. I wonder where the secret areas will fit in this map, though. I mean, if they are outside the Lake, where are they I mean what

i kind of really hope you are mocking me

update: i just sent v0.60 out to playtesters, meaning the game is "60%" done now

since my last update i've worked on coding all the 'local mammoths' (bosses), and fixed a lot of bugs, and basically made the game 'beatable' and did the endings and played through the game and fixed any little thing i thought was out of wrong as i played through it

this game is probably taking more work than all the other games i've ever made combined (and i've made like 10 other games).

here are some of the more recent screenshots

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0018fth7)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/00187a7g)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0018224q)

I admire your persistence and dedication, Paul.  I'm sure it will have been worth it.

well this is looking so nice :-*

i can't wait to play this beauty.

For a long time there was something about the graphics that kind of bugged me but I couldn't figure out what it was. Finally realized from the screenshot in the IGF thread.

The ship's shadow seems incongruous compared to the shadows and reflections on all the objects, as it's a straight drop shadow with no reflection that I can see, whereas everything else has these nicely masked fading reflections and more mild purple shadows.

It seems to make the ship look a paper thin cutout superimposed over a 3d landscape.

not everything else, the creatures also have drop shadows and no reflection. very short objects (like lilypads) also are top-down and don't have reflections. i can't really change this because creatures are top-down and rotated, and i can't actually figure out how to draw reflections well in those instances.

i did at one point have reflections for creatures and the ship too, it just looked even worse so i took them out in favor of shadows (since they're flying above the water, afterall). i may eventually post some screenshots with creature/player reflections to show, and you might then agree that it doesn't really look better that way.

also since you bumped the topic i may as well add the latest set of screenshots here :)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0018prk8)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001azx5d)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001b02rg)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001b1a1t)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001a4r4w)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001a5y5s)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001a803k)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001b2918)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001b8sga)
this shows the game in a different resolution (720p, multiple resolutions are possible). it also shows invisible trees; these appear when lit (either by map objects, creatures, or the player's light function) but are invisible when not lit; their reflections are always visible though (sort of how vampires have invisible reflections; this is the opposite)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0018q0g6)
this one is the first area in the game (all areas are this size, 1600x1200, and there are 800+ of them). the blue crystals are breakable of course but not at the start of the game (typical metroidvania trope).

Ah, I understand. And in motion it probably is less striking.
I suppose someone could render the ship in 3d and just pose it at angles for 2d shots, just like in the old days, but that leads to other issues, especially if there are many objects to be done in such a way.

A possibility that comes to mind would be illustrating the underside of the creatures/ship and using a darkened version of the underside as a drop shadow/reflection at the same time.

none of us know how to render stuff in 3d and i don't like the idea of mixing 3d renders and 2d pixel art anyway; besides, i like the style and the way it looks, that should pretty much be enough ("make the games you want to make" and all). i'm open to reasonable suggestions but i can't just ask the artists do redraw everything because it doesn't look right to someone, particularly when it's already taken them three and a half years to even do what they have now

anyway, it's been a while, so i'm updating this thread with a couple new screenshots, and also adding the new % done icons to the thread icon

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001bdfxf)
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001bcp42)
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001bbbg6)
(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001b9axw)

currently i'm working on weather effects (not shown in these pics, but i'll have pics of those after i've added them into the game). snow, rain, fog, that sort of stuff, and also more alien weather related to the lake's particular situation

Paul, this looks super awesome.

Is there a projected release date yet, or just "when it's done?"

my aim is still q2 2011 (march to may), but 'when it's done' takes priority if i don't finish it by then. and there's still a lot of major work to be done and i'm still not very happy with a lot of things in the game.

What an UNindie way of talking  :monoclepop: it's like you are going to please some stakeholder!

However good job and good luck  :coffee:

you sound like one of those awkward embarrassing dads trying to sound hip with the kids

to destroy aaa games one must become aaa games

Paul Eres: Sleeper Agent.

This is just so completely beautiful and I'm really looking forward to it after I loved Immortal Defense so much.

45 new screenshots have been added to its facebook page for those interested: http://on.fb.me/lmEiQd

i'm going to try to update the facebook page more regularly (on teegee's suggestion). here's one of the new ones:

(http://imgur.com/Yga4u.png)

Looking good! :) I'm still looking forward to seeing this released.

(Also: is it just me, or is there a statue of Cthulu hanging out in the middle of screenshot 2?)

haha -- i don't know if orchard-l was consciously inspired by cthulu or not, but now that you mention it yeah

This game looks really fantastic, Paul - looking forward to playing it.

btw, i want to enter the game into more rigorous playtesting eventually (hopefully within a month or two), so if anyone wants to help test it, let me know. preferably people with game design experience (e.g. people who have completed games) and people who are 'regulars' on this forum (e.g. no level 0 people or people who barely post here) since they're more likely to have good advice and less likely to leak the game to the public like that guy did with vvvvvv on 4chan. so let me know if anyone is interested who meets those qualifications.

Looking really good!

I'd love to help playtest it whenever you're ready to add more testers.

If you don't mind us commercial game designer sell-outs then I'd love to check it out.

I'd be happy to help.

I'd love to playtest this :)

I'd love to playtest!  (My old account was like like level 10 so nyeeeehhhh)

thanks for the volunteers; will PM you guys when i want to test the game (which may be soon or may be later, i'd expect a month from now)

for those who don't follow my LJ (which is the real 'devlog' for this game, link's in my sig) recently i listed all the tasks that need to be done before the game is complete -- there were 840 tasks remaining at that time. i'm now down to 797. right now i'm working on sound effects. there are a lot of game actions which do not currently have associated sound effects, so i've been fixing that

one of the things i like about SD is that it uses two simultaneous looping background sounds: first, the music, and second, the soundscape (ambient background sounds). the balance between the two changes depending on the actions and movement of the player: so if you sit still quietly, gradually the music fades away and you can only hear the sounds around you (the birds chirping, the wind blowing, etc.), and then when you move again the music picks up again in volume and the ambiance fades away. but i'm a bit short on soundscapes, and some of the ones i have i think can be improved, so next after sound effects are done i want to edit some more of those soundscapes

decided (after reading the 'archer' devlog) to update this devlog weekly with what i did in the past week

this last week i've been focusing entirely on the "camp mode" dialogue scripts, which is the main way that you can talk to the other people on your ship. each of the characters has topics that they can talk about, and each of these topics becomes unlocked when it's relevant (for instance, you can't talk to a character about a particular creature until you've actually seen that creature)

i'm almost done with these camp mode dialogue scripts (in total there are 320 of them, i wrote 83 of them this week, only 12 remain to write), will definitely finish them up next week, but i also want to make a few changes to camp mode, such as indicating to the player which topics he's talked to a character about already, and improving the appearance of selecting these topics

the idea for camp mode came from the first persona game: i liked that you could talk to the people on your team pretty much in any room, and that most of the story in the game came from the optional interactions between your characters rather than npc dialogue. and it came from vanguard bandits, where, after each level, you could choose some people on your team to talk to. SD's camp mode isn't set up like either of those two games, but the basic idea of the story being told through dialogue between a small set of characters rather than through running around towns and talking to copious amounts of NPCs while your characters are mostly silent is the same. the latter breath of fire games (BoF3 and BoF4) and the grandia games have a similar 'camp' system, with tents and fireplaces and everything, and it's named after those 'camps' even though it's not an actual camp in this game

omg I'd love to playtest too! please say you still accept testers :nono:

Or even better, start the preorders so I can give you :handmoneyL: and play the beta right now

If I can get a working comp together again, I'd like to get in on this action, too. PM me when it's test-ready, and see where I'm at... although I'll be doing a lot of recovering of things once that happens, too. Screens are looking very superpro!

may have preorders in a few months or so; will see. i also need to begin promoting the game with trailers and stuff, i've been neglecting that

thanks to the new volunteers; will pm you guys when i send out the next playtesting version (which may take a while, i want to do finish my latest overhaul of creature code first, as well as finish all the dialogue)

anyway, weekly progress report: mainly continued writing dialogue scripts, but also added a system where you can see if you've talked to someone about a topic in camp mode already (those topics are highlighted if they're new)

next week: the plan is to continue finishing up the game's dialogue (at least the first draft of it). and i still need to improve the appearance of the camp mode menu. i doubt i'll finish all the scripts this next week, but if i do i'll start on my planned creature code revisions

for reference, this is what camp mode looks like now (the screenshot is old but it still looks basically like this, which is kind of ugly -- each number is a different topic; in this case, this is venus's camp mode, and each number is a different lake creature which she'll talk about if you ask her about it and if you've already seen that creature)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001bdfxf)

forgot to update it last monday, so here's another update: i've been continuing to write dialogue for the past two weeks, and also (in order to write certain bits of dialogue) coded a system similar to FF6 where some text isn't displayed unless certain characters are in your "party"

most (but not all) of the dialogue is now in at least first draft form, and is at ~56000 words / ~140 pages (most of it optional and non-linear so the typical player won't see most of it in any given playthrough unless they're a completionist)

there's still some dialogue to write for the game before the first draft of it is completely finished, and i hope to finish up the rest of it this week

Quick question for you, as I'm wrestling with the decision for a project of my own - did you put together a scripting language for dialogue, or is it hard-coded?

it's just normal text files with a few special codes. each line of dialogue is a textbox.

name: = show that line with that person's portrait if that person is on the party, but don't show the "name: " part
[blahblah.png] = show a bg image centered above the textbox while the line is being displayed
@name = only show that line if that person's on the party

the dialogue is text files that look like this:


that part of the dialogue is shown only if spare is on the party; the second line is shown only if both spare and mercedes are on the party. during the third textbox, it also shows an image called 'lake.png'

there are a few other codes which i intend to add later (like dramatic pauses and such)

So a mini-scripting language, yeah. Hmmm, cool, thanks!

he's a music sampler i put together just now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR8Ky5h8aw4

has 11 songs from the soundtrack, about 20 seconds from each

i got the idea from spelunky's xbla music sampler and thought it'd be fun to do a similar thing

The music is solid and shares a common theme. I especially liked the song that started at :48. It helped looking at in-game graphics while listening to the tunes to see if the two meshed well. I think you've got it.

thanks-thanks

semi-weekly update!

- wrote the dialogue for all the remaining "first-encounter" scripts for creatures (when you first encounter a new creature the characters mention it)
- wrote the terraforming scripts (as the lake's poison becomes more "purified" by the player dialogue occurs at certain %'s along the way to 100%)
- wrote 8 "entrance" scripts; the first time you enter a new area the characters mention it, but i haven't yet integrated these into the game (they don't appear in the game yet, but they are written)
- began working on the lilypad system a bit more: creating a meter to display what % of an area's lilypads have been touched by the player for instance; the meter itself isn't very pretty so far though (pictured) but i'll probably improve it eventually

next week i'm going to continue working on the lilypad system and hopefully finish up all the tasks remaining for that system

(http://i.imgur.com/BWP4B.jpg)
you can see the lilypad meter on the left side of the screen

i'm not really sure how much about this system i should explain, since it's a story spoiler, but basically a lot of the game centers around touching lilypads, after which they gain a red glow (and later mutant lilypads with a green grow appear which approach your red ones and try to change them green). it's optional though, and in practice works a bit like the seiklus system of collecting those floating dots (which was designed to highlight exploration by causing players to want to touch everywhere), although unlike seiklus it has other uses/benefits besides just collecting them

Hey Paul, I'm watching Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" for the first time and it's giving me the same vibe as the screens of your game  :). If you haven't seen it, check it out. I think you'd be really into it. You can watch the whole movie here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8704790173215648057

i've seen it and read the manga (the manga's better, but that's to be expected) a long time ago; clysm also said that my game reminds him of that movie, but there's no real conscious influence or anything

i'd say the game is more inspired by the nes games zelda1, crystalis, guardian legend, and by my knowledge of biology and biochemistry that i picked up majoring in those in college, and by the novel solaris

the game crystalis actually was inspired by nausicaa to a great degree so there may be some second-hand influence going on -- the ohmu in nausicaa resembles one of the bosses in crystalis for instance

and of course pretty much every alien world always has mushroom forests, it's sort of a cliche almost (but not so much of a cliche that i would intentionally avoid it)

i moved the 'memory cell meter' from under the player to the side of the screen, alongside the 'lilypad meter'. finished up the 'terraforming' section of the task list. added a few more needed scripts (almost finishing up the dialogue first draft section of the task list). also did a bunch of little polishing issues like making the player's location on the map blink rather than just be a static dot, and gave textboxes a border, tiny stuff like that. i also added an 'unread conversations' counter for camp mode etc. etc.

(http://i.imgur.com/Uuste.jpg)

next i'm just gonna continue plodding through the huge list of tasks to complete in attempt to get the task list down to a manageable number of tasks. i might also make a first 'teaser trailer' soon, because i do need to start promoting the game if i expect it to sell anything

over the last week i changed the way the ship's engine is drawn and added a particle 'wake' effect behind the player's ship as it moves along the surface of the lake (pictured). i also wrote three more of the ending variations and coded the criteria for them to be chosen in, as well as slightly rewrote the other two existing ending variations

as well as doing a few minor tasks: recoloring of lilypads, moving some early-accessible dialogue scripts that revealed more information than the player should know at that point to a later-accessible point, made some changes to the title screen menu to make it look more polished, added symbols next to the friending and health meters of the creatures, fixed a few bugs, etc.

(http://i51.tinypic.com/zwdk6o.png)

next week i will try to finish up a few more tasks, the major ones have to do with editing the soundscapes a bit more to reduce their file size a bit and to make them more interesting, and to give sound effects to creature actions which do not yet have sound effects associated with them

The color of the water in this one. I love it so much :-*.

damn, looks fantastic! would love to see a vid of these later screenshot levels

Yeah, video please. I'd love to see that wake effect in action.

Looking awesome as ever. I love the color of that water, too.

weekly update:

- edited a bunch of soundscapes (not adding any new ones but making the ones that exist better by making them feel fuller)
- gave sound effects to most of the creatures which did not have sound effects to correspond with their actions
- added some fmod effects to various conditions in the game (for instance, adding reverb to darkness areas, and increased the pitch of all the sounds when the player is dashing)
- made the player choose between three difficulty modes at the start of the game and started implementing the differences between the difficulty modes

What are the differences going to be?

here are the major ones that i plan to implement (the ones that are starred are already implemented)

- *in easy and normal modes, if you die, you return to the last screen, and if you exit the game and return, you begin where you left off. in hard mode, you return to checkpoints if you die (teleport points, like in sotn), although you keep what you earned when you died (like in zelda, where if you get an item then die, you still have that item, but it moves you back to the start of the dungeon or link's house etc.)

- *in easy mode, if you touch all the lilypads in a room, all the creatures in it are friended; in normal mode, one creature at random is friended, and in hard mode, you just get bonus memory cells. this is important because a lot of rooms require that you friend all the creatures in order for a passage to open up, and if that can be done just by touching all the lilypads in a room (converting them to ledapads) it becomes much easier to get through the game, and is a different or more exploratory experience since you can access many areas much earlier in easy mode through that method, and don't really need to learn how to friend each creature in the "normal" way through your actions, because most of them can be friended through the lilypad method

- *creature health and healing rate are affected by difficulty level (on easier difficulty modes creatures have *more* health and self-healing, since it's bad to kill them in the game, so they're easier to accidentally kill in hard mode)

- creatures become hostile when damaged in normal and hard mode but not in easy mode. in hard mode, all creatures become hostile in an area when one of the creatures is hurt, rather than just the creature you hurt as in normal mode

- the player requires more memory cells to upgrade their ship functions in harder difficulty modes, but only in hard mode can the player upgrade all the way to the 11th upgrade level for each ship function

- some clues / dialogue do not appear in hard mode, so the player has to learn by experimentation. some dialogue / backstory / optional information doesn't appear in easy mode but appears in normal and hard and some doesn't appear in easy or normal but appears in hard

- creatures are harder to friend in higher difficulty modes -- the way this works is that all creatures are modified by a 'difficulty' factory related to their distance from the center of the map (so that creatures near the edges of the map are harder to friend than creatures near the center); this factor is changed with difficulty too, so that a creature on the edge of the map on easy might be as difficult to friend as a creature in the middle of the map on hard; this factor affects different creatures in different ways (for instance, some creatures move faster, some pull the player more strongly, etc.)

That sounds like Hard Mode is going to be the "full experience." Maybe you should call the difficulty levels Normal, Easy and Very Easy or something instead to make that more clear. I usually select the normal difficulty when I play a game for the first time because I assume it's the way it's "supposed" to be played. I'd feel a bit cheated if I found out I missed out on some dialog and backstory because I was playing on normal.

i haven't decided what to call them yet, i'll probably go with some weird system like:

- casual gamers
- modern gamers
- classic gamers

and you miss out on something regardless, since some of the clues (which appear in the form of dialogue) don't appear in hard mode

Using the 'casual', 'modern' and 'classic' labels are likely to confuse, especially if they don't come with explanations on what they mean.

"Easy" "Normal" and "Hard" seem like the right labels. The trick is just coming up with a concise explanation to guide a player when they start up the game and have to choose, especially since selecting "Normal" before "Hard" would completely negate the 'fewer hints' part, if I am understanding that correctly.

I'd also suggest making the 'fewer hints' into a toggle all on its own presented after the player selects their difficulty. That way a player who likes thinking games can turn the monster difficulty down, but keep the puzzle difficulty high, or an action gamer can do the opposite.

@sirniko - i mentioned that there would be explanations. here's the current game text for the difficulty mode selection screen:


but having that as a separate toggle may make sense, i'll consider it, but in "easy" you don't need to really friend creatures anyway to get through the game (since you can use the lilypad method), so most of what the clues detail aren't necessary to know about on easy mode (so even though the clues are there, they're less useful). and the idea of the difficulty modes is to make the game playable by people used to different styles of game (not just used to different difficulties), so i group all the types of things that classic games had into 'classic/hard' mode, which includes things like 'going back when you die' and 'no clues' -- so it just seems to make more sense to me the way i plan for it now. i also do already have a separate option to turn all game text off in the options screen though (for those who want no text at all)

@c.a.sinclair - i'd say they're enjoyable. they aren't just straight clues, but dialogue where the characters try to figure things out or where a character from the Lake tells you about something and its history etc. etc.

Tracking  :)

weekly update: i coded "hostile mode" for most of the creatures which did not yet have that coded. what this means is, depending on the difficulty level, if a creature has been hurt by the player or otherwise feels threatened, it acts differently (depending on the type of creature). some move faster, some move away from the player, some change their actions a bit, etc.

next i'm going to continue coding some creature redesigns that i planned a few months ago, as well as coding the "sound functions" (the abilities the player can learn from a creature by recording the sound that creature makes); this will probably take a while, it's one of the big hurdles left in development

pic unrelated, just a rain effect

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001csecz)

I had no idea this project was 4+ years old... It's looking great. I also noticed you keep a daily log of you progress. There's an air of professionalism to your work. Keep it up man.  :handthumbsupR:

weekly update: coded the "sound functions" of the majority of the creatures (these are abilities the player can learn from the creatures, like with kirby). 13 of the creatures remain to have their sound functions coded

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ctw8z)

this pic isn't an actual in-game area, but a testing area. here i was testing something related to bushes: when you cut a bush with something (such as the "sword", shown in this pic) its stump wasn't lining up exactly in the middle of the bush after it was cut down, so i altered the pixel values a bit so that it lines up better

way more than a week late with this update, but i wanted to put a quick update up. because i was evacuated from my home due to the hurricane flooding in paterson nj i didn't get to work on the game for almost a week (although i did tiny things for it like picking names for areas or coming up with ideas). when i returned from the evacuation i didn't like how buggy the game was so i started systematically fixing all known bugs, and am nearly through that process of bug-fixing (there's only one major bug on the list left, which i've mostly fixed). but because of this no actual "tasks" or "progress" has been made on the game recently besides little things and bug-fixing. i intend to resume work on the actual tasks to complete this week

some new screenshots:

http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001cwap9
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001cxex1
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001cyya0
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001d020b
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001czxts
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001d27yc
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001d1rxw
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001d3pz6
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001d4cw9
http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001d5eh5

ooohh pretty  :-*

The game looks strange and beautiful... But unfortunately I can't see that one character's avatar without thinking it's you.

Bloomier. 

@phubans - i should change my avatar to another SD character then, to keep you on your toes

Or you could change it to your TIGL incarnation :D (for a short while at least).

More on topic, I love those screenshots, such pretty environments and varied flora. :)

Haha, I like this new avatar! I'm never going to stop being the Blue Knight... It is my mark.

blue knight more like night of the blues

Haha, Paul, great avatar!  :durr:

I feel like I'm being watched now...  :blink:

Paul's new avatar makes me want to pee

I'm glad to hear you and your project made it out alright. And these biomes look SO DAMN FREAKING GORGEOUS. Putting Kirby-like power acquisition in a Zelda-like setting is a really interesting take, btw. It's gonna be interesting to see how things play out, especially all of the power/situation combos.

weekly update: spent this last week finishing off the bug list (now there are very few bugs as far as i know, and all are minor), and i started on the options screen and adding more game options

for example, one thing the game was sorely lacking was the ability to change game resolution / window size without a hotkey. so if you wanted to play the game in 800x600 instead of 640x480 you had to press "f5" and cycle through all the resolutions until you got to the one you liked. that was obviously not a great system so i changed it to listing 23 possible resolutions on the options screen and allowing the player to choose between them (i haven't yet tested all of the game on the very small or very large resolutions however, there are probably problems with positioning; but for most mid-range resolutions (anything between 640x480 and 1024x768) the game works fine)

this week i'm going to continue implementing options on the options screen, a particularly important one is particle density (particles tend to slow the game down a lot so i want to make them adjustable, but doing so is a big job because there is so much code to adjust; i'll need to find every line of code that creates particles and make it adjust for the particle density global variable, which could take several days if not a week, but it's important because i want the game to be playable on slow computers)

playing the game in small resolutions:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dd5he)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dc9fq)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dbcsp)

notice that the textbox takes up most of the screen in the third one (and that isn't even the smallest resolution)

It's looking pretty awesome there, Paul. A big draw for me in games is being taken to a place that feels unreal but at the same time feels like it could be an actual place, if that makes sense. Your game does a nice job of creating an alien landscape that feels like it could be a functioning ecosystem.

I'd like to see more variation in the environments, at least enough to break up the visible "lines" of the foliage tiles/objects and whatnot so that it all feels more organic. Other than that this game is looking really slick graphically and looks like it will be interesting to play.

Keep up the good work! :beer:

part of that is partially out of my control (i can only work with the tiles that the tile artist has created, and he hasn't really created any more tiles for the game in the last half year or so, not sure when he'll add more) but another part of it is my own philosophy of 2d overhead level design, where i like to pick one "strong" tile and repeat it in geometrical patterns, and use other tiles as accents. it's just something i picked up from zelda1, 3, and 4. it's probably not the most visually effective but it's a system that reminds me of those games, so that's mainly why i do it

that said i do want to add *color* variation to a lot of the areas, even if i don't add tile variation. since tiles can be tinted any color, eventually i want to go through all the areas and slightly vary the colors on all the objects, to give different parts of a room different colors, as in this pic, where i tested some automatic coloring algorithms:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001619z7)

i think the variation in coloring like that can make an area seem less samey even though it's literally just the same tile colored differently

My netbook runs 1024x600 and 800x480 widescreen resolutions, so if you'd like those tested for placement (especially the critical GUI), I could do that for you.

this last week i worked on the options menu; adding the option for particle density, among other options. the particle density option took a while because i had to literally edit like 300+ lines of code and work the particle density variable into the number of particles generated (for both per step and when there are bursts of them)

i also added joystick and keyboard controls to the title screen (previously you could only navigate the title screen menu with the mouse), with the exception of the options screen, which still requires a mouse

i also fixed joystick controls for the game itself, and added xbox controller support, with rumble. i added rumble to some (but not all) of the things that i want to have rumble; all the most common ones anyway. but joystick controls for the game are far from finished, there are still many things that require the keyboard or mouse, and eventually i want to make the game completely controllable with just a joystick/gamepad. i probably will continue working on joystick game controls this week

i also added new "controls" options: now you can tell the game to *not* make the player follow the mouse around. the default movement method is that the player follows the mouse and then stops when about 100 pixels away from the mouse, and the player's speed depends on the distance to the mouse; this is a non-intuitive method but once you get used to it i think it works very well, but i want to preserve other movement methods. so i added an option to disable mouse movement in that fashion (so that the player can use the mouse to aim and use wasd or the arrow keys to move). i also added an option for "sustained movement" using the keyboard, which works a bit like pac man where you don't stop moving unless you tell the game to stop, and an option for "relative movement" which means up moves towards the mouse rather than towards the top of the screen

so overall due to my work this week the player options for movement are now much more varied; previously it was either only mouse movement or only keyboard movement, now you can use the mouse to aim and the keyboard to move, and there are different forms of keyboard movement, and there's joystick movement

next week i plan to finish up joystick controls and the options menu, as well as return to more pressing matters (continuing the creature re-designs that i keep partially doing and putting on hold)

here are some new screenshots, this time with a focus on textboxes! (you'll note an icycalm reference, it's not a serious part of the game, just some comic relief):

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dkc6f)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dhe10)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dgkat)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001df83f)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001deyk1)

one note on theo's screenshot: as mercedes explains in the next frame, the alien lilypads don't actually use DNA (but theo doesn't know that)

another note: the first screenshot shows the new textbox with, the latter ones the old textbox width (the old one was too wide)

also: i've updated the % done to 80%, because fewer than 400 tasks remain until release. at 200 tasks, i'll change the % to 90%.

sure, that'd be fine; i can relatively easily add support for resolutions  the game doesn't currently support, but they all have to be hard-coded, GM can't auto-detect what the player's monitor supports unfortunately

here's a pic of all the resolutions / window sizes (some of these aren't actual resolutions, just window sizes) the game currently supports:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dpqzc)

i see that i'll need to add the two that you mention

I'd be happy to test resolutions at and below my monitor's resolution of 1920x1200, though I see you don't actually have that as an option yet.

that's because the entire *room size* is smaller than that, so that if that option were allowed, it would show black spaces off-screen and would look very weird (i've tried it). imagine if you could play super mario bros and see the entire level at once, and if mario were just a spec on the screen, and if you could even see below the floor and above the sky, and behind the castle at the end. so i can't really support resolutions larger than the room size of 1600x1200

besides which, anything above, say, 1024x768 is really really slow because of all the objects onscreen at once. i wouldn't recommend anything above that unless your computer is even better than mine.

Hmm, 4 years is a lot of time and I can't say I have heard much about this game. I saw some screenshots some time ago.
My question is, why it took you 4 years? I hope this is not too direct or rude for me to ask.
Is this game going to have a huge amount of content?

there's quite a lot of content yes -- ~1000 areas (each 1600x1200), ~50 types of creatures, ~10 ship functions to collect, ~12 "bosses", about two and a half hours of music in the soundtrack, about 200 pages of dialogue; the game should be around 200-300mb in size. completion time will vary widely since most of that content is optional and the game is non-linear, but 20-30 hours to "see everything" is probably a good estimate

but the main reason it's taking so long is *not* only the content, most of the content is done, and has been for two years. it's also the mechanics and level design and secrets and pacing and balancing and so on that is taking a while. and also that i'm a perfectionist. when the game's out it'll probably have taken between 4.5 and 5 years. but a lot of games take that long. cave story took 5 years, for example. so did ocarina of time. iji and glum buster took 4 years.

i'm surprised you haven't heard more about it though! i guess i need to work more on promoting it. but it did come in 5th or so (i haven't checked its current placement) in the 'most anticipated indie games' poll, so it's not entirely unknown

You could use a DLL on Windows to grab the screen resolutions, but yeah.

ah, didn't know that, maybe i'll look into resolution dll's later. i'm wary of becoming too dependent on dll's tho cause i want to port the game to mac too, and mac doesn't have dll's (it has some equivalent but there are very few GM mac extensions)

Well, you need to make sure people outside of TIGSource know about your game. Don't forget people who visit TIGSource are not all the people who play indie games. :)

paul eres is a successful independent developer, I think he knows how to market his game ;)

people outside of tigsource are aware of it -- it's been mentioned on the indiegames.com blog, on playthisthing, etc. -- not to the degree that some indie games are of course

i also once set up a kickstarter asking for funding for the game, and it got $1500 in donations, most of which came from people not on tigsource (although increpare, from tigsource, did contribute i think 50 or 80 dollars)

there is also a teaser of it embedded with immortal defense, so that anyone who played my last game immortal defense probably knows that i'm working on this game next

but i do plan to do more promotion eventually, yes

I guess I ran into this conclusion because I thought the poll you talked about was at TIGSource.
And yea, I actually know you are successful(unlike me, heh), but I thought maybe I could contribute something. Better safe than sorry. :)

i'm not saying you're totally wrong, i do think i need to promote it more, it's just that you seemed to imply it was totally unknown, which isn't true either. i do have some ideas to promote it which i've been meaning to do:

- a trailer, which i'd then send out to various game news sites
- design videos (where i go through parts of the game and talk about their design)
- sending preview copies to various game journalists if any are interested
- a speedrun contest (where there would be a prize for the person who manages to finish the game on the hardest mode in the quickest time and records it for youtube)

if you've any other ideas i could add them to the list if they sound like they're worth doing

speedrun contest is a really cool idea. have you been designing the game with this in mind (eliminating random probability etc?)

unfortunately there's some randomness in some creatures' behavior (particularly their movement patterns) and in weather conditions (there are 23 different types of weather -- i forgot to mention that in the content part) -- those are the only two random things i can think of. i could probably eliminate the weather randomness pretty easily, but the creature randomness would have to be done on a case by case basis since i don't recall which creatures move randomly and which have deterministic movement patterns

but i don't think that's necessarily a speedrun killer: spelunky is also random and yet there is an informal speedrun contest to beat the game in the quickest time (at one point this forum's own ortoslon was the world champ). and a lot of games which have been speedrunned (speedran?) have randomness too -- even jrpgs have been speedrun, with their random battles and random critical hits.

oh yeah, i didn't mean to imply it was an eliminating factor, it is just an example of something some developers specifically go out of their way to eradicate to aid speedrunning. I was just wondering if you were taking it into account, even in a small way, when designing the mechanics of your game. Most of the time it is the case that it just works anyway, though, so it's not essential to design for.

I think for promotion you need to do something that will be memorable.
If you take super meat boy for instance, you probably remember that video where they made this guy with big twisted teeth eat super meat boy.
This video doesn't show any gameplay, you don't even know what the game is about, but it's memorable.
So the next time someone talked about super meat boy, you were already aware of the game. Even if you didn't know what it is about.
I think on games looking for large scale success(not within my reach currently) they need to think about public awareness.
People need to instantly recognize your game whenever it is mentioned.
I think what I was trying to say before is that I wasn't quite aware of your game. I don't know how many places your game have been talked about, but the fact is I didn't even remember your game eventhough I saw it's screenshots before.
It's not that your game was unknown, I am just talking about my personal experience. Which is also why I was surprised you worked on it for 4 years, because I was sure I would have heard more about your game.

super meat boy was already being promoted by microsoft (since it was an xbla game); that video was like a cherry on top of a big marketing campaign, but it was memorable yes

i'm not sure i could afford to produce a live-action commercial in that style, though. for one thing i don't own a video camera. but i may do something along those lines, just not a live-action commercial. i've a few ideas for that type of thing but just 'make something that's memorable' isn't really a specific suggestion, it's kinda obvious

i'm not really looking for "large scale success" though, it'll be enough for me if this game sells a little better than my last game (which had about 2000-3000 sales). i don't expect it to sell as much as super meat boy, since it's much more niche. as long as it makes enough to live on while i make another game it's fine

How long a game has been in development doesn't really map in any meaningful way to how well known it should be at it's current point (especially for indies who often can't pick a targeted release date that far out). In fact, you wouldn't want to be promoting your game for that long because consumer fatigue would set in eventually. Most of the hype/marketing should probably be saved until the last few months of development so you can get your player base hyped, then feed them the product while the hype is at it's peak, which would be very difficult if you were putting it out there well before it's done.

Good point.

From what I read in their post-mortem MS didn't market their game.

i didn't know there's a postmortem, i should read that. but at the very least, don't new xbla games get a mention on the microsoft dashboard? i imagine even just that helps a lot

in any case as chris pavia said sometimes it's not good when everyone knows about a game for 4 years and is waiting on it forever, eventually they may become frustrated that it's taking so long, or lose interest

but i should really start on a trailer, at least a teaser trailer. it's just that it always feels like actually working on the game and doing the next task is more pressing than working on promoting it

paul you should let me make the trailer and do pr for your game

@Paul: MS told them if they won't make it until extreme deadline they won't help them promote the game. And they earned much much much more cash from Steam than from XBLA.

that's interesting that MS would say that, i thought they'd be more understanding that sometimes good things take time (for instance, they've often delayed windows releases)

anyway, another issue was, because it was an xbla game, that gave it a certain level of prestige that other indie games don't have, which caused more places to take interest in it and review it. so even if it hadn't made any money at all on the xbla, it still would have been advantageous that it be on the xbla, since being an xbla game increases your pc sales through spill-over effect

today i added some more resolution sizes, there are now 30 standard resolutions. if anyone has any suggestions for resolutions to add, i could add it to the list

str_res[0] = "480×320"; res_x[0]= 480; res_y[0]= 320;
str_res[1] = "480×800"; res_x[1]= 480; res_y[1]= 800;
str_res[2] = "512×384"; res_x[2]= 512; res_y[2]= 384;
str_res[3] = "640×320"; res_x[3]= 640; res_y[3]= 320;
str_res[4] = "640×360"; res_x[4]= 640; res_y[4]= 360;
str_res[5] = "640×400"; res_x[5]= 640; res_y[5]= 400;
str_res[6] = "640×480"; res_x[6] = 640; res_y[6]= 480;
str_res[7] = "640×512"; res_x[7]= 640; res_y[7]= 512;
str_res[8] = "720×450"; res_x[8]= 720; res_y[8]= 450;
str_res[9] = "800×450"; res_x[9]= 800; res_y[9]= 450;
str_res[10] = "800×480"; res_x[10]= 800; res_y[10]= 480;
str_res[11] = "800×500"; res_x[11]= 800; res_y[11]= 500;
str_res[12] = "800×600"; res_x[12]= 800; res_y[12]= 600;
str_res[13] = "840×525"; res_x[13]= 840; res_y[13]= 525;
str_res[14] = "854×480"; res_x[14]= 854; res_y[14]= 480;
str_res[15] = "860×600"; res_x[15]= 860; res_y[15]= 600;
str_res[16] = "960×540"; res_x[16]= 960; res_y[16]= 540;
str_res[17] = "960×640"; res_x[17]= 960; res_y[17]= 640;
str_res[18] = "1024×600"; res_x[18]= 1024; res_y[18]= 600;
str_res[19] = "1024×640"; res_x[19]= 1024; res_y[19]= 640;
str_res[20] = "1024×768"; res_x[20]= 1024; res_y[20]= 768;
str_res[21] = "1152×864"; res_x[21]= 1152; res_y[21]= 864;
str_res[22] = "1280×720" res_x[22]= 1280; res_y[22]= 720;
str_res[23] = "1280×800"; res_x[23]= 1280; res_y[23]= 600;
str_res[24] = "1280×960"; res_x[24]= 1280; res_y[24]= 960;
str_res[25] = "1280×1024"; res_x[25]= 1280; res_y[25]= 1024;
str_res[26] = "1366×768"; res_x[26]= 1366; res_y[26]= 768;
str_res[27] = "1440×900"; res_x[27]= 1440; res_y[27]= 900;
str_res[28] = "1600×900"; res_x[28]= 1600; res_y[28]= 900;
str_res[29] = "1600×1200"; res_x[29]= 1600; res_y[29]= 1200;

currently the largest few are slow on my computer (due to all the numbers of objects and particles at once i wouldn't recommend the last few ones, also their text and gui elements are almost too small to be usable unless you have a big monitor), and the smallest ones aren't working correctly with a few gui elements that are placed wrong, but the majority / the middle ones work fine

as i mentioned earlier, that's impossible, because the room size is 1600x1200. anything wider or taller than that just shows 'garbage' space outside of the room which is not intended to be seen, has no texture, and otherwise looks like a bug. so any suggested resolutions have to be smaller than 1600x1200

what i suggest people who run 1920x1080 to do is to select the half-size option: 960x540 (which is one of the options there), and choose fullscreen/stretched, and it'd scale 2x to 1920x1080; it's what i use when playing the game (my two monitors are both 1920x1080 natively)

here's a test pixture of what it looks like in 1920x1080 -- as you can see, it doesn't look very good, since part of the view shows an area outside of the room that you can't get to, without texture:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dqkdq)

note that this room is not an actual room from the game, just a testing area where i was testing the xbox rumble function (all the objects shown on that map affect rumble); so don't judge the quality of the level design by that pic

I'm using a 1600x1200 monitor, would it be more enjoyable to play at smaller res or native to see the entire room at once?

interesting question -- assuming your computer is fast enough to handle the game at full speed at 1600x1200, there is still this consideration:

i think showing the entire map at once sort of decreases some of the mystery (since things don't scroll in, being revealed as you get closer).  it would make the game easier to see everything in a room at once. you also wouldn't get to see the details close-up. on the other hand, it'd be more strategic, since you can see everything at once and best decide which way to go (less getting stuck in dead end pockets that you didn't know where dead ends at the smaller view)

if it were me, i'd try running the game at half that for the first playthrough: 800x600, since it'd scale 2x up to 1600x1200, and only use 1600x1200 on your second playthrough, or if you were speedrunning the game, or were wanting to appreciate the level design at a different scale to learn from it (if you could learn anything from it; you might be better than me at level design and having nothing to learn from seeing the levels all at once)

as an example, this is a picture of one of the areas at a large size. if you were playing at smaller size and going through those passages, you probably would not see the other ones, and not realize that there is more to the map than just the small passage through it that you are in. so it'd make some of the secrets easier to find

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001drc7d)

In general I think its bad practice to allow screen resolution and aspect ratio to dictate the presentation of a game.  You may end up with problematic situations that you haven't tested for.  I think it's best to scale (either at discrete integer multiples or not) and/or letterbox.

But that's just my opinion.

it does scale/letterbox too -- for instance, if you pick 640x480, and are running the game in 1920x1080 resolution, it will scale up (non-integer) and add black bars on the sides (so at least the scaling will be proportional). so theoretically someone could just pick the recommended resolution that i created most of the game in, and not worry about changing it; i included the option mainly for those people who want it, so that no matter what someone's monitor's native resolution, they could probably find a window size that would give them both integer scaling and full-screen view. and also because gm's scaling (both integer and non-integer, although especially non-integer) sucks, so if someone can do without scaling they probably should. also lcd scaling sucks as well, i'd rather people play the game on crt's if at all possible (the game was so much better on my crt when i still used it)

but i also have tested / plan to test several different resolutions to see their impact on the game, so at least the gui elements will eventually work at all sizes (currently they work in all but the smallest sizes, which i'm working on fixing now). but it is true that the gameplay will be affected by the ability to see larger areas of the game for different sizes, as i described above (areas being visible or invisible depending on the size)

anyway, at the very least, i plan to make a note on the options screen of the "recommended" vs the non-recommended resolutions; anything between 640x480 and 1024x768 (or the widescreen versions of those) is optimal, since the very large or very small ones might impact the game too much due to a much larger or much smaller view of the map

Any particular reason you're hardcoding screen resolutions into the game instead of letting the player select any resolution (within the accepted range)?

yes, as i mentioned already: that's just the way GM works. there's no way to detect what a player's videocard / monitor can support in GM.

No, I understand that. I mean, instead of making a list of resolutions to choose from, have a box (well, two boxes: one for width and one for height) where players can enter any resolution they want.

i'm not sure most players even know what resolutions their computer is capable of either, so if they enter something that isn't a possible resolution, it might cause problems -- for instance, if someone entered 500x500, and gm tried to tell the videocard to switch to that resolution, it wouldn't work, and i'm not sure what would happen. worst case, i imagine it'd crash, and then they wouldn't be able to restart the game because it'd try to go into the resolution they selected (which doesn't exist). i also listed pretty much all the known resolutions that work that are within that range, and adding new ones would be easy if i discover them, so i'm not sure it would be needed (vs just telling me the one they want and me adding it)

I'm a bit confused. Can't players just as easily select a resolution from your list of resolutions that their system doesn't support?

they could, but most of those listed are supported on most systems (although some of them are "half-sized" versions of a resolution, which if selected change to 2x that resolution and scale up 2x). so it's still possible choosing one would cause problems, but at least the chances are much lower than if they are putting in their own numbers

in any case i eventually plan to look for (or, if i can't find one, make) a dll which will detect which resolutions are possible on a system, i'm pretty sure one could be made, this is just a temporary way to do it until i can do that; after i do that i can just grey out the ones that won't work and make them unselectable

yeah but must video cards automatically letterbox or scale if the resolution is weird. but like rinku said something like 500x500 would probably freeze some people's computers because of weird drivers. I had an older computer that would do that, but nowadays I think most cards/drivers are capable of either letter-boxing/scaling weird resolutions (like 500x500) using the lowest supported resolution (generally 640x580) but not all can do that. like-wise I can enter 2000x2000 and my computer would just set it to my monitor's highest supported resolution (1600x1200) and letter-box the aspect ratio.

Oh, I see. Maybe it's just my laptop that only supports very few resolutions then. It's only got a crappy integrated graphics chip, so that might be why.

hmm, that's interesting, i didn't know modern video cards acted that way, i'll have to try it. i'm more familiar with old videocards, which would just crash or show a black screen forever if you tried to change to an unsupported resolution

that's often why they have those countdown messages that say something like 'click here if you want to keep this resolution in the next 15 seconds or it'll return to the previous resolution' -- those messages exist to make sure the person can see the resolution and it isn't all black

i suppose i could add a countdown message like that, too

yeah I think integrated chips and older cards don't have the kind of weird resolution support modern cards and drivers do now.

even still-depending on the game (especially older ones)-my computer will freeze (or show black screen forever) because the driver can't figure out a way to force the application to run in the lowest/highest resolution. so even on modern cards it will still happen.

sorta-weekly update:

resumed creature redesigns / creature worldmap tasks, editing the world to make more creature-focused puzzles. focusing on the emberfly and rakari egg for this week; i fixed a bug which was causing the emberfly to not move correctly, and gave the rakari egg a new action. i also worked a bit on 'bumper' map object coding. and submitted the game to igf thanks to donations from mr. podunkian and haowan

next week i'm going to continue creature redesigns / creature worldmap tasks

some new screenshots:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dtx8t)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dw03h)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dx4y8)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dy3d5)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001dz1yp)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001e0753)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001e1f1b)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ds100)

whoa, every screen you released so far looks amazing!

I think I'll be skimming around the water listening to the music for awhile, taking it in. Those underwater craters are a nice touch.

Doesn't GM let you use C++ code if you wish?

You could also build a small loader program to start different GM exe's depending on the resolution.

I dunno if you've ever touched C/C++, Eres, but determining system resolution isn't too hard.

yes, as also mentioned there was once a dll that did detect possible video modes, but that dll no longer works with current versions of GM. theoretically a new one like that could be created, and i may do that eventually, but it's not a priority right now (finishing the main parts of the game is)

and i have used C, but not C++; i also haven't touched C since the 90s, when i used to code games using it on my 486, so i'd have to re-learn a lot

Hi Paul, it's great to see this game getting so close to completion(even if that happens next year)! This game used to have a wiki or something right? I remember reading about its different creatures on it (or was I dreaming?). I really really love the idea of having this ecosystem and interacting with it to get what you want!
I'm dying to play this thing! Congrats on the great job! :beer:

thanks; there was a wiki, and still is, but i had to make the wiki private because it kept getting edited by spammers, even though i explicitly turned editing for non-admins off the spammers keep editing it somehow. so the easiest way to avoid that was to move it to a private location that only i and the dev team know about

any chance for getting that link on private message?

i'd love to read more about the game :)

sorry for the delay in reply; i think it's too out of date to be interesting, and it contains spoilers, so you're probably better off not reading it yet -- it'd be like reading the binding of isaac wiki before playing it. i do plan on making some videos which describe the game, though, which would be more up to date. i'll link to them here when they're done

anyway, (bi-)weekly progress report:

most of the last two weeks was spent continuing the 'creature redesigns' which aim to make the behavior of the less interesting creatures more interesting, and in editing the worldmap to make creature-type themed area puzzles; in the process fixing and balancing a lot of creatures

i also edited the worldmap quite a bit, making the local mammoths harder to access by focusing the challenges/puzzles around them; now you can't just walk up to the local mammoths without a few friending puzzles on the way, but at least you have the choice between different alternative puzzles in order to reach them

next week i'm going to finish up the creature redesigns and worldmap edits, and hopefully send out the playtesting version to playtesters (including some who volunteered in this thread), and then maybe test out hostile local mammoths near end-game conditions (i need to work on those some more)

here are some new screenshots; note that a lot of them have the "fraps" frame rate counter in the corner. that number is low in some pictures mainly because i haven't yet fully optimized the game as much as i'd like, and because it's taking screenshots every few seconds (which slows the game a bit), but also because my computer is a little old. but in most parts of the game it runs at a steady 60fps, even on my computer:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001e7cat)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001e8tqw)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001e9the)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001eatta)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ebaw7)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ecax0)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001edp3c)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001eechh)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ef9bc)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001eg3p2)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ehph8)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ekcc0)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ep41z)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001eq2tt)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001erdae)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001escq0)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ethp7)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ewr17)

 :tearsofjoy:

looking sweet paul

whoa...there is a dreamy screenshots...

Looking dreamy indeed. Would love to see it in motion.

Wow it's looking seriously incredible! Really inspiring!  :handforkL::-*:handknifeR:

I was wondering reading all this, Is there GM game on Steam?

there's one: legend of fae (puzzle game)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/109200

vlambeer's serious sam game, also.

update

i wrote a FAQ about the game. those curious to learn more information about the game can now read more details about how it works. the faq isn't done and i plan on expanding it eventually, but it can operate as a guide for playtesters (and yes i still have to send the game out to playtesters; i will soon).

i'll also edit this into the first post, but you can find the FAQ here: http://rinku.livejournal.com/1961204.html

anyway, since my last update i've continuing to code creature redesigns and editing creature challenge areas for those redesigns; i'm now 95% done with creature redesigns but still have a couple more creatures to go

new screenshots:

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001exrzx)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001ey4zf)

(http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/001f0k36)

Interesting, maybe you should have divided the FAQ into "Story\background" and "Technical\Gameplay", because when you started to talk about the story I stopped reading. I don't like spoilers. :)

understandable, but note that all of the story mentioned in the faq is revealed to the player in the first half-hour during the intro; i didn't reveal anything about the story that isn't in the intro to the game

Yea, I guess, but then it would make the intro less fun to watch.
Of course the majority of your players won't encouter this FAQ before playing, I think. Over here we are not your standard players.

I think that this game's gonna be bought more from TIG's users than ordinary people and thus I don't agree with the "we are not your standard players" theory  :P

Err, I really don't know. I hope not, because I am not sure there are so many TIGUsers  Compared to the masses outside TIGSource.

yeah i actually doubt very many tigsource users will buy it at all; most of the people who bought immortal defense never heard of tigsource. i only know one or two people on tigsource who bought my last game, so i don't expect it to be much different for this one. selling indie games to indie game developers is generally a *terrible* idea, because they tend to be a) poor or kids who can't buy stuff online, b) can make games themselves anyway, c) overly critical of games. i don't even have many indie game devs as playtesters

I'd love to be one Paul.  :eyebrows:

sorry for the lack of updates recently. eva has been posting new screenshot's on the game's site/blog, which you can see here:

http://studioeres.com/sd/?cat=blog

keep in mind many of the screenshots are unfinished/testing and may not reflect what's in the actual game

as for updates on progress, i've been working on dream mode, which is the ulterior half of the game's exploration mode. or another way to put it is that dream mode is a foil for exploration mode. i don't want to say much more about it yet, partly because its nature is essentially a spoiler, and partly because i'm not yet totally sure where i'm going to take it (it could go in one of several ways)

here's a few screens from those recent blog posts by eva (there are more at that link above):

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/ll__1.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/ll__2.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/ll_5.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/ll8.jpg)

and sure, anyone who wants to be a playtester and has more than like 200 posts on this forum is welcome to join up; just say you're interested and i'll pm you when the game is ready for playtesting (which will *eventually* happen)

interested

you just said that in the post above that post

121 posts, but I'm interested nonetheless. :)

B)

Nice screenshots.  I'd be willing to give it a try.

Nice job dude

I hope the whole game is not a dream

you mean like super mario bros. 2? haha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPXtir65p40

Hahah

and don't make your game hard like hell too xd.

oh, there are 3 difficulty levels: casual (easy), modern (middle), and classic (hard)

interested  :-*

Looks cool, I'd like to give it a try :)

obviously interested  :durr:

I'm affraid I won't be able to play that game if the higher difficulty is only "hard".
Sorry :shrug2:

maybe i should label it "icycalm difficulty" instead

Three lives.
One hit deaths.
No continues.
No saved games.
Final destination.

Better call it "Speed Run" difficulty.

Icycalm difficulty setting would be so lol (pun intended). You would have to 1CC the game.
Anyway, I'm really interested to try the game out when playtesting is needed. :)

Ha, I've been following your livejournal for months. I'd love to playtest it when it's ready.

No
Call it

the Saturated Difficulty mode and make it Hidden (like star ocean games)

By the way , is there some videos we can check , instead photos only ?

i saw the marker of fraps , so that means you have some videos somewhere no ?

there's a couple of videos floating around for it, but they're older videos just intended for the people working on the game. there is no trailer yet. i intend to get a teaser trailer made when i can, the fraps were from when i was recording footage for (i have footage, i just haven't put it together), but finishing dream mode takes priority right now

I see

well good luck for finishing the game Nicely and on time.

i'm not sure what "on time" means considering i've been working on it since may of 2007 and it's had a lot of projected release dates over the years, haha

but 2012 is almost 100% definite (like, 99% definite)

Yeah sorry for my english

Yes i was talking about deadline problems and such

One advice if i may say is never give a date when you produce a game or something

It's like a bad mojo or something and i truly experienced this.

Just give the date when you played the game in your house and was happy with the results.

You are never safe from a virus or something awful , i dont wish that to you of course .

Well, at least try to make it to 2012, before the Apocalypse. If... you know... could happen... :shrug2:

I just saw this vid!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rinkuhero/saturated-dreamers-igf-fee-and-misceallenous-deve-0?ref=history


Wow oh my god

The music sounds fabulous.

The bad point for me is the art (the characters and the sketchy things ? ) and maybe too long dialogues (that it doesnt seems skippable)
other than that it sounds really good.

I want your musician right now !!!

what do you mean by "doesn't seem skippable"? how would something seem skippable based on a video? you can skip it by pressing esc or turning text off in the options. but if you just want to play a game to skip text then there are probably better games for that, since the setting is a big part of the game, and you'll miss most of the clues for how to progress and solve the puzzles if you don't read anything. if your problem is it being in english, what is your native language? perhaps there will be a translation to that language for you

and again, the only videos that exist for it are old, i think that link is from 2009 or 2008, so of course the unfinished sketches will be finished by the time the game is finished: it's called placeholder art

Oh ok i get it for the art
my bad i should have saw the year before talk.

For the Skip thing i see , i was saying that since there is a panel "press some key to skipp "  in some games and i didnt saw that.

For the texts i get it of course , i didnt wanted to be mean , i was just saying that because if you replay the game or if you have to re-play the scene again
But if you put a skipp button then it's all ok.

I second the idea of resolving puzzles with dialogues , i personnally love that kind of stuff.

My first langage is french.

hmm, maybe i should add that message, but, in most games where you can skip the story, there's no "press x to skip" anywhere. examples: the metal gear solid games, the resident evil games, the gears of war games, the halo games, etc. -- in all of those you can press the start button to skip a cutscene, but there's no message that says "press start to skip" in those games, it's just something that's considered standard

i'll see if i can get a french translation eventually. my previous game immortal defense had (undeployed publicly yet, but finished) a portuguese and hungarian translation, and has partially finished russian translation, and from that game i learned how better to prepare this game for translation (by keeping most / all text external rather than as string literals in the game code), so translating the game would just be a matter of replacing text files and the font rather than changing much of code

also, another note: the story of my games is written by a professional writer, so if you're expecting the level of story found in most games (which causes you to want to skip them) you might think differently for my games. i agree that most games make me want to skip the story, but we try very hard to make that not the case with our games, by using people who actually do writing for a living rather than people with no experience in writing

Oh for the skipp message you do as you want but maybe a little message in only  the first scene to explain , i dont know.

But yeah no need to make a big deal about that.


French translation as you want
French market is kinda ok , if it doesnt cost you too much just do it
More langages the game gets and better it is.


Pro writers seems great ,i hope the game will get recognition for this.

I think what by skip he means is skipping the scrolling until the end, like in a lot of games. You can press the continue button to make the text go faster or display all the way. If that's not what he meant, you could add that anyway, if it's not already in.

ah, i see. you can change the text speed in the options, and by pressing the next text box button it instantly shows all the text in a textbox (the way it works in most jrpgs). but if you don't like waiting you can set it in the options to instantly display all the text. there's lots of different options

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1DYVMaRCVs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1DYVMaRCVs)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_01.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_7.jpg) (http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_7.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_04.jpg) (http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_04.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_07.jpg) (http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_07.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_02.jpg) (http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch2_02.jpg)

 :crazy:

I second that, gf11221!

:crazy:

Most impressive. Considering it's Game Maker, it's double OMFG.

It's looking rather pretty indeed ... :handclap:

... but oh so strange.

eva forgot to post this original teaser-trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wsqkVwAznM

i'm going to work on a full-length trailer still (i recorded a bunch of footage for it already) but i want to wait until dream mode is finished before finishing that trailer

anyway, update: i've been working on "dream mode" still; it's been going slower than i anticipated (but it's hard to predict how long something will take to finish). i took breaks from it to work a bit on the music (with others who are helping me arrange it), and on the gui (a box that tells you which function is equipped, some hearts which tell you different info depending on which mode you're in)

there are 202 tasks left on the masker task list (down from 840 of them back last april when i originally created a list of tasks necessary to finish the game). the remaining tasks are grouped like this:

dream mode tasks: 87
exploration mode tasks: 29
art/music resources tasks: 15
options menu / options features tasks: 7
polishing/aesthetic tasks: 32
performance/bugs tasks: 5
playtesting/balancing/open/misc tasks: 12
demo/installer/marketing/release tasks: 15

so as you can see, the last major grouping is dream mode tasks, which makes up 43% of the remaining work to be done on the game, and i plan to concentrate on those until that's over with in a few months, after that the rest of the tasks should be just clean-up / much easier, then it'd go into beta testing for a while, then release (my guess would be release late this year, around oct/nov/dec, but my guesses have been wrong before)

Looking amazing, the Paralysis trailer oozes atmosphere. Exploration shmup with a interesting story? :epileptic:

However, I do have a few issues with what I've seen from the trailers. The music for the Lake Rises trailer really doesn't fit, and the one for the Paralysis trailer only marginally works. I'm worried about this, as I think music will either make or break this game.

I'm going to comment on the writing seen in Paralysis, because though you do say it's not final, it doesn't seem to be on your tasklist. And it needs work. The story itself however, seems both original and strong, so I really wish the final text does it justice by not being as dry as in the trailer. If you want someone to look over it, I'd be happy to help!

it is on the task list in the 'resources' part actually (i include text as sort of a resource), and do have a professional writer / editor editing the script (he also wrote the first draft of some of the scenes) but if you have any specific recommendations for edits/changes to the text i'll pass it along to him to help him in the editing process. but i think it'd be hard for an outsider to help with specific issues regarding it since the writing in part relies on a full knowledge of the story / characters. for instance, the dryness you speak of is intentional, because mercedes (who is narrating for much of that trailer) is supposed to be a dry / scientific character. it'd be out of character for her to speak much differently, since it's an important part of the story that she talks like that. other characters speak differently

I'd say that even scientists speak less robotic than that, but your right, I don't know the character and it's nice that you do have justification. I also listened to a music sampler video, don't know how old it is, but it sounds pretty tight. So I'm not going to comment further on that until I see it in game :)

I'm pretty torn with helping out actually, I'd like to help, but checking your script might spoil the game for me! :crazy:

what i'd suggest is that you can be a beta-tester in a few months (along with others who have expressed interest in this thread), and then, after you play through the game, or as you play through it, you'd be able to make specific recommendations about what to improve

also, the script is non-linear, so it probably wouldn't make sense apart from the game. it's about 200 pages but divided up into about 900 individual files, most of which can be read in any order. the story was designed to make sense no matter what order you read it in, because the game is non-linear, but it's also procedural in that particular types of game events bring up particular dialogue. so reading 'the script' separate from the game isn't really possible, because it'd make no sense alone, so that's why i think it's better to play it during beta testing and read it along with the game

Sure! I'd love to help test and give you feedback if your interested. My email is orihaus [at] gmail [dot] com if you feel like sending anything over. :D

Did you decide on voice acting yet?

not yet; my main thought is that i may add it after release, in a later patch. i don't want to delay the game just for voices, but i do think it'd add a lot to the game and want to eventually add it. plus, after the game is on sale and making money, i'd be able to afford to pay voice actors

basically i have a bunch of tasks that i want to do by launch, but i also have a secondary, loose wish-list set of tasks that i want to do *after* launch, for improvement patches, and voice acting currently is in that second group of tasks

SD uses a system that i don't think very many (or any, to my knowledge) other GM games use, in that the entire world is persistent; the location of every object, the color of every blade of grass, all of that can be changed and if you leave the area and come back it's just as you left it. the only things that aren't persistent are temporary stuff like projectiles that disappear after a limited time

basically there's a script i have to save the room state and load the room state. it goes through every object and saves all their data to file. it's the same thing used in the level editor (SD has an internal level editor within the game, i don't use the GM room editor)

basically the game saves two 'copies' of the world -- the 'default' world that's the way it is when you start the game, which is loaded from if the player enters a room and has not been to that room yet. and the player's 'personal' world which is saved to a different folder, after a player has been to an area

the drawback of this method is that each save file can get very large (as large as the world data). i think if you explore everything, your save file would be like 10MB large, since it's storing the state of every object in the game in your save folder. but i don't think that's that much of a drawback considering how big hard drives are these days

i wouldn't necessarily recommend this method for every type of game however. in some games it won't work, because you don't *want* everything to be persistent in some types of games (e.g. puzzle games). but because SD is so loose/non-linear it works for this game in particular

the more traditional way to do what you describe is to have what are called flags. each treasure chest, door, or whatever, would have a unique flag that is saved to file (just basically a huge array that can be either true or false). if a flag is off, the default state is used (door closed, treasure unopened) if it's on, the other state is used (door open, treasure closed). basically you'd give each door/treasure/etc. a number, and make sure it's unique. say, between 0 and 32000. that's your array element. then have a global array that you save to file and load from file (gml scripts which let you save/load arrays to file are pretty easy to write, but i could send you mine if you need it)

You could add a secret option of just you doing every voice, that way there will still be voice acting at launch.

@Gabriel: global variables?

also
definitely do this:

i don't see how they'd be any more likely to accidentally delete the folder that contains their save files as they would be to accidentally delete the folder that contains the game's sprites, or the folder that contains the game's music. i don't encrypt them no

Stop teasing us already!

no
(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_15.jpg)

Woah pretty.

I really hope that some of that scenery has animations.

depends on what you mean by animations. there are videos of the game in motion (though probably not that particular area)

briefly about the animation: most tiles only have one frame (although some have particle effects, and some bob up and down in the water and move around if they are floating, and lilypads rotate). the reflections of the objects wave in the water, and those leaves float around etc. most creatures have multiple frames and different parts which are animated separately; the ship is set up of 3 parts which rotate and move with respect to each other. and there's a lot of particle effects to give some things the illusion of animation (for instance, a lantern that sparkles, moving things causing particle splashes on the water, etc.)

in general though the game is very big so we tried to do what we could, which often meant having two different types of trees instead of a tree with frames of animation. it doesn't use aquaria's animation system (that paper doll thing) exactly, but aquaria was similar in having a lot of static art with some animation effects / lots of particles and fullscreen visual effects (like sunlight rays and clouds overhead and rain effects and water texture effects and stuff). so in general, map tiles only have a single frame of animation, but despite that, the screen rarely looks static, there's always a of visual variation going on. i'd love to have the resources to make leaves of a tree shake in the wind or when a tree is rammed into by the ship or whatever, but the game is taking six years to complete as it is

if anyone cares, currently the game has:
- 76 songs
- 121 soundscapes
- 159 sound effects
- 88 sprites (images with more than one frame of animation)
- 32 water textures
- 461 map tiles (static images)
- 856 areas (will probably be 1000 before release)

zipped it's about 400mb, installed it's about 700+ mb

paul let me and arthur do your voice acting

holy shit yes

will consider it; i think you'd be a good fit as theo actually (some of his lines are variations of yours, i read through your twitter account to get ideas when writing his dialogue)

the main problem tho is that the main two characters, and three characters total, are female. it's easier to get male voice actors than female for an indie game

dont page me dum

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_14.jpg) (http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_14.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_12.jpg) (http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_12.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_13.jpg) (http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/batch3_13.jpg)


there now i go silent for a month

the animated water in this is kool as hell except its barely visible in the videos... bump up dat efect erez. ok bye

im fully aware that there are female characters in the game, and thats why it should just be me and arthur. no girls allowed.

hahaha your game is terrifying

bros before hoes  :tiger: :brofistR:

isn't this that game where that dude went berserk on twitter?

ya, but eva isn't a "dude". and i guess it worked, since you've now heard of the game?

anyway i haven't had an update in the game for a while, so here's some more info:

still working on dream mode, recently finished porting all of the creatures (except for 5 remaining bosses) into dream mode, and finished making all the 10 weapons in dream mode's charge attacks; basically the mechanics of dream mode are done, but it still needs the levels and a little more polish, which is what i'll be working on for the next month or two

here's some new screenshots:

(http://i.imgur.com/FkyTV.png)
the entrance to the dream mode level shown in the following screenshots

(http://i.imgur.com/XoLnv.png)
testing damage numbers (effect subject to change, as with all these images)

(http://i.imgur.com/W4M2K.png)
working on the effect for dream mode messages (game over / warning / victory)

(http://imgur.com/jroWF.png)
the zig engine/missiles weapon

(http://imgur.com/76Iao.png)
the chain cleaner weapon (normal version)

(http://imgur.com/2qs22.png)
the chain weapon (charge version)

(http://i.imgur.com/sHC0c.png)
part of the dialogue at the start of that dream level

You know, I love the style, but I'm not sure if these particles really fit. Especially those from chain weapon's charge version. First of all, they are very soft while the rest of the game is in sharp pixel art style. But that's a minor thing. What bothers me more is that they look as if you just pumped out so many flares that they added up to a pure white blot.

Try using custom sprites, have at least two per effect, and generally use less of them. It looks better that way and also is faster.

i think i mentioned this before, but i'm not sure how to make custom sprites for particles -- e.g. how would you make them? could you give examples of some of them? what program would you use to make them, and what would they look like?

When you define a particle in GameMaker, you may make it use one of the default shapes, or just assign a sprite to it using part_type_sprite function. Making your own sprites for flares, smoke, etc. gives you much more control over the style of your particles and should look much better right away. For example - instead of using pt_shape_sphere you could make a nice pixel art blob.

This is my flame sprite for example:
(http://moacube.com/img/temp/Flame.gif)

Another important thing is to use several different particles and sprites per effect. Otherwise it looks artificial and quickly burns in to pure white. For example - let's say you want to make a fire effect. A typical newbie way to do it would be to spawn several yellow and red flares or smoke puffs. A better way is to make a custom flame sprite that fits your game style, and then break the effect like this:

- Create the main flame particle using the said sprite.
- Make another flame particle using the same sprite. Make it smaller, faster, and longer lasting. It will make the effect's pattern harder to notice and overall more natural.
- Have small flares/sparks shoot upwards with some gravity to simulate burning matter and ash.
- Have larger flares with small alpha pop up from time to time to simulate flashes of light.
- Add a slight smoke above it all (optional).

This way you can use less particles per second, and create much more believable and natural looking effects. People are very good at discerning patterns and will see through an effect consisting of only one particle. Using more than two is usually enough to trick the brain into thinking it's something actually natural and unpredictable.

A bit old, but a good example: http://youtu.be/hwtawrNs5IM?t=37s. Notice how the meteor effect is done. It uses two particles with custom flame sprite for the main trail, a flare on the tip to make it glow naturally, and then there are those delicate shockwaves on the sides. Looks much better than fireballs in Magi.

i know how to code it, i'm just not sure how to create those sprites. that fire sprite for instance doesn't look particularly nice to me, it looks kind of weird. maybe it looks better in groups of 100 overlaying each other, though

i'll see if i can find more examples of particle sprites to get ideas from, but right now i can't think of anything better than the basic GM ones of sphere, flare, etc.

It doesn't have to look nice on its own, just when it's grouped. It's the same I use in that ArcMagi video and it looks very nice there. You could make one that fits your game.

For example - my other project is more cartoony. Realistic effects wouldn't do, so I disable additive blending and use this as the flame sprite:
(http://moacube.com/img/temp/Flames.png)

But mostly I really think you should have more particle types per effect and use less particles per second. Right now, those blobs of white just look amateurish and clash with the polished look of the rest of the game.

understood, but keep in mind those are just still images; in video it may look much different, and this part of the game still needs a lot of polishing up. but when i get to that polishing up part i will try your advice

Yeah, sure. It's just something that came to my mind when watching the screenshots.

you should find a way to make directional lighting on the sprites.
Something like a (simplified) bump texture for each sprite where you just store which pixels are illuminated depending on u/d/l/r lighting and then use fuzzy  geometry to light the sprites around a light source.

Make it for wednesday.

that's actually a pretty interesting idea. i haven't seen it done before though, has any other game done that?

probably but I can't think of one right now.
It just struck me that in your screenshots, the trees and other stuff lacked some kindof lighting when put near the particles

one bad thing about gm is that you can't ask for all the particle positions. there's no access to them at all (once they are placed and are moving). but yeah it'd be fun to adjust the lighting of an object with the particles

not with the particles obviously, but only with the particle emitter
if each particle emitted light, that would be overkill

yeah that could work. will try a few things

What timer do you use for your pomodoros Paul? I found a program today called Focus Booster (http://www.focusboosterapp.com/) that's really simple and awesome. Or do you just watch a clock or something? I bet you already told me before.

i use two: an hourglass that's 20 minutes (which cost me like 35$ but looks cool) and 2$ ladybug kitchen timer which can be adjusted (i use that when i want to do one that's not 20 min, and i like to hear the ticking sometimes to keep my attention). i haven't tried any digital ones yet but i feel as if they would be less effective than something tangible

Interesting, I have a tomato timer that you twist but I found the ticking sound unbearable (maybe yours is quieter).

you can try putting it further away or under a blanket i guess; the ticking for mine isn't very loud but i don't have much of a standard of comparison. here's the one i have:

http://www.amazon.com/Plastic-Ladybug-Ladybird-Kitchen-Cooking/dp/B008FLENL8/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1347257482&sr=8-13&keywords=ladybug+timer

Paul is there any news about SD? Screenshots?

I was sorry to see it got overlooked in IGF but I think you are basically right about RPGs not really being a good fit for judges that have to play a lot of games.

Also, and this is a real but silly question, but how did living in NJ and seeing it flooded during Sandy affect how you view your game? Like, I saw eva tweet at one point that you were stuck w/o power but OK, then I saw a pic you posted of a part of NJ underwater, then I started to think... it's kind of a similar environment to Saturated Dreamers. Anyhow hopefully that isn't a tasteless question, I do mean it sincerely-- just kind of this weird coincidence.

rinky is making the final areas and knowing rinky there's like a 100 "final areas" so it's going to be a while

sandy and the flood were different events -- my city of paterson flooded (but had power) during hurricane irene, and had no power (but didn't flood) during hurricane sandy. both interrupted my ability to work on the game; with irene i had to stay at my father's place for a week, and with sandy we weren't forced to evacuate but we had 9 days without power, so i couldn't do much work on the game besides read through the notes and make plans and such. still that's only a week or so out of 52 weeks, not a big loss, though annoying

as for updates, like eva said i'm working on the final areas of the game -- the final ~100. there are planned to be 1000 hand-made areas, and i'm working on the final 10% of them -- about half of those 100 remaining will be normal exploration areas, and the other half will be dream mode (shmup) areas. i'm going at a rate of 1-2 areas per day so those shouldn't take all that long (another two months i'd guess). after those are done i need to finish up a few more minor tasks, and then put it into playtesting (anyone who volunteered in this thread will be pm'd a that time), and likely will release the game in late spring or early summer, unless of course the playtesters suggest so many improvements that it's worth it to implement their ideas before release

Ah, I didn't realize that Irene caused so much damage. It seemed everybody was just like "it's a dud" at the time, but I didn't follow too closely. But I guess what I meant is, aside from the disruption in work, did seeing a large area flooded up-close give you any uh, "inspiration" (for lack of a better word) for your game?

I just see large-scale destruction as a kind of surreal thing, I remember one time a small creek we have here flooded tremendously, like, into a raging torrent. It completely reshaped the landscape. I went and looked at it (from a safe distance, though probably still closer than would be reccommended) and it was just... like reality had been shuffled. It was even weirded when the water left and I rode my bike through the area, there are like completely new channels with flowing water that became permanent, and other changes to the landscape. Not to mention 8/13 bridges were washed out completely.


Cool stuff! I'm glad that the game is in the home stretch, I'm looking forward to it.

Eva thank you too for the update :)

these are screenshots from the igf build.
(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/igf_1.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/igf_2.jpg)

(http://studioeres.com/sd/ssh/igf_3.jpg)

eva you are singin' my song :) TY!

Not sure if I saw these on the IGF page but lookin' awesome, as always...

that heart image isn't final btw -- i want a better gui heart eventually. the one used there was just the photoshop default heart shape or something

and i didn't particularly get any ideas for SD from the flood, partly because i didn't spend time in the flood. i live in an apartment building, and the basement level was flooded (i live on the first floor there, which wasn't flooded), but because some people do live in the basement level, everyone was evacuated even though our apartment was perfectly fine and the building never lost power; so even though there were parts of paterson that were flooded i didn't personally experience most of it, i spent the week away from it, and most of what i saw of it was on tv or on youtube

if you watch this vid and a few like it you've basically seen everything i did: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7379088n

Ah, okay. Weirdly I somehow imagined you being stranded in the flood, probably because I saw some ustream type of coverage of it and so I probably just overlayed your situation. Anyhow it's good you evac'd.

Well thanks again for the updates!

Awesome to hear that it's that close. Can't wait to try it out.

The screens are looking good, but I am going to admit that I am a bit glad that the heart shape isn't final. It stands out a bit too much, especially in the first picture.

marketings dum

has anyone pointed out to you yet that you named your game 'wet dreamers'

this is just a teaser to distract u from the fact that the game is taking longer than fez. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lzDWabjYnY

I do want to try it out whenever it is ready to be tried out!

hey how do i get a anodum steam key

and here's individual clips from that (click them)

(http://img.youtube.com/vi/9xyLYAaxKbo/0.jpg) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xyLYAaxKbo)

(http://img.youtube.com/vi/VLAujHwAX60/0.jpg) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLAujHwAX60)

(http://img.youtube.com/vi/ekvg_N2pmjE/0.jpg) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekvg_N2pmjE)

(http://img.youtube.com/vi/2vJp8RgMCyc/0.jpg) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vJp8RgMCyc)

sent u one.

that should be interesting, i liked your hiversaires art. there's still a few months before release so we should have time; pm me on facebook or something some time and we could talk about the details

The art seems beautfiul
Congrats on creating all of that Paul

So you are the rival of Phil fish ? :)

thanks, and no, there was just some drama where phil fish didn't like that i said something like 'why are they making indie game the movie about a guy who never finished a game' (since at the time fez wasn't finished), but i don't think of him as a "rival" since making games isn't a zero sum game

anyway, here's an update of the game's progress. in dec-march i focused on finishing off the remaining exploration mode areas and tasks, and now i'm working on the remaining dream mode areas and tasks. there are 53 items on the task list that remain to be done before release (not counting bugs), some will take longer than others, but i expect to have the game in beta testing in late may, and start preorders in june

Does that mean there'll be another twitter rampage?

what were the other twitter rampages? i don't really pay attention to twitter much

can I beta test

yeah, in may, remind me then if i forget

This looks awesome, you must be damned admitted to this to develop it for 6 years, which is impressive to say the least

Looks awesome.

Glad to hear it's all in gear. o.o b

Seems you've got no shortage of feedback, which isn't surprising. But if you'd like to add me to your beta list, I'd love to be there.

ya i think you'd be a good addition, since the game is meant to appeal to people who think that zelda1 is the best zelda game

What about those of us that think that LttP is the best Zelda game?
Is your creation telling us we are not going to enjoy it fully?

that's difficult to predict, and depends on *why* zelda3 is their favorite. games are made for a specific audience, but often other audiences can enjoy it too. in this case, the game is made for people who enjoy non-linearity and desolation (feeling of loneliness) which zelda1 exemplified. so, for example, if someone liked zelda3 because of the non-linearity of the dark world, i'd expect they'd enjoy SD, but if someone liked zelda3 the most because of the linearity of the light world, or the village, or talking to all all the npcs, or all the clues and guidance sahasarahlah gave the player, they might not, because SD doesn't really have npcs at all (it has them, but there are even fewer of them than even zelda1 had, to emphasize the feeling of being alone on an alien world)

anyway, there are now 49 tasks remaining until SD is feature-complete. one of those tasks is what i've been working on for the past few days, the visualization of the skill tree. this is what i had so far yesterday:

(http://i.imgur.com/uoogz8q.png)

the branches were sort of designed to be in the shape of a fern, and they move around in response to the mouse (i wanted to give it a feeling of being alive to fit with the game's themes). ignore the title screen stuff, i'm just testing it by having it appear on the title screen, in the actual game it won't have that 'continue / new game' stuff covering it up

previously it was just a 10x5 grid (10 branches with 5 skills each). you unlock new skills by finding statues in the game (3 small statues or one large one allows you to unlock one skill, and the statues are hidden across the world). the bonuses at the tips can only be unlocked as you unlock the bonuses at the base (so you can start with any of the first 10 skills, and then start on another branch or move towards the tip of any branch). each skill is actually two skills (one for each of the game's different modes)

i plan on improving its visuals a bit more before i continue on to the next task

I assume you draw them circles at runtime, yes? They are quite sharp, I'd prefer them aliased a bit, because it contrasts with the chevrons, though that might be on purpose...

Is the background animated?

I agree that those aliased lines look a bit amateurish

@eyeliner: the proper term would be anti-aliased a bit, since aliased lines are the sharp ones

sadly gm7 doesn't have anti-aliased shapes. i believe they added anti-aliasing to studio but i'm still working in gm7. the workaround is usually to pre-render the circles rather than draw them with gm's circle shape, as i did in immortal defense, and which i'll do later on after i finalize their size and so on (i said that's what i have so far, not final -- this is a devlog, so of course i'm going to anti-alias things like that, that kind of goes without saying)

Yeah, I know, just had a mixup when posting.  :P

Of course, I believe you perfectly know what you are doing, but seeing as that screen has a lot of work devoted into it, I just had to ask. Even being obvious that you were to smooth the lines out, I just had to ask, after all, It could have some meaning...

yep yep -- worked on it a bit more today. should be able to finish up the looks of the skill tree tomorrow or the next day.

what'd you guys do for your five year development anniversary?

nothing, since i'm basically the only one working on it anymore (most of the rest of the team either stopped working on it or mostly finished their roles and have nothing further to do). well, me and eva (eva's still doing the promotion stuff and the site design) i guess. part of the reason it's taking so long is because i have to do a lot of the work other members of the team said they'd do but never got the time or motivation to do

i also don't know when the precise date is that we began the game. the earliest mention is around june of 2007, which will make it 6 years next month

crazy, well the concept is cool and the trailers I've seen looks solid. I'm looking forward to playing this game soon.

okay, i fixed the aliasing issues and made other improvements; here's what it looks like now. there's still room for improvement visually but it's good enough for now, since i've spent about 5 days just working on that i'm eager to go on to the next task -- which is actually finishing up the skill tree's skills

(http://i.imgur.com/36kgyPv.png)

Looking good dude

I'd prefer the circle inside the circumference be a wee bit more transparent, but looks good indeed.

Looking nice (aside from the text of course), will be cool to see it move around with the mouse.

It looks much better now, I'd only rethink the colors but that's only IMO

Nice and indeed allot better than the previous one.

I realized that I've never posted in this thread so I'm gonna do that now.

I love immersive nonlinear exploration games so much. Saturated Dreamers is honestly one of the most unique and interesting looking games in development that I know of and I'm looking forward to playing it.

really cool but there should be some sort of layer that darkens the background; visually noisy atm. kerning is a little weird too.

I really like the skill tree visuals too. Agree with Sandoval that there's too much competing for attention though and his idea to darken the bg is a good one (might use a grey color to keep the contrast high with the unused skill tree slots.)

yep, i agree with most of that. i'll put it on the wishlist. i fixed the font problem today though (it has to do with the way gm handles .ttf fonts of a size of 10 or lower, i upped the font size to 11 and it fixed the issue with the width of the "m" character). i also like the idea of making the middle parts more transparent than the edges, i'll try that later on too

a reminder that i'm interseted in beta testing!

same, whens beta out?
:P

same here, this looks like something I'd play

A reminder that I'm also interested.

How does it feel? To take that to-do list down to double-digits, after so long?

it's been below 100 for a while! unless you mean below 50? i'm at 44 tasks remaining now.

anyway, beta testing will begin in june. sorry for the delays. there are a few more things i want to do before beta testing. for instance, currently the game has 4 endings. i want to add 3 more (they're planned out already, i just need to write a short dialogue script for each and then place them). i also want to add a few minor touches like how in zelda 1 you can hear the boss roaring from a room away, i want to add a similar feature in SD where the call sound of a boss can be heard from an area or two away (which will add some atmosphere along with adding a clue to the player that they are getting close so they don't pass it by)

first 5 minutes of the game, most who played probably already seen this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhAWhN-w84Y

(can i playtest)

u have to finish throwman

it's nice, but the textbox is the worst I have seen in a game

Looks really remarkable all together in motion. The textbox does look pretty unprofessional at first blush, but the writing is cute.

Lol, I was just trolling eres with the textbox

Amazing =) Can't wait!

Couple notes from watching the gameplay demonstration..

1. The particle effects on text could fade off a lot faster... I found myself reading fast enough to have the particles blocking words I wanted to read.

2. The text box seems like there's a lot of space not being used... Couldn't the text potentially be a lot larger to fill the box appropriately? (or the box a lot smaller) It seems like the text box could store several paragraphs, but it then appears all dialogue is broken into short sentences anyway. I suppose there might be times where you actually show a paragraph or two worth of text... but then couldn't you have the dialog box grow to accomodate that?

Right now it's just weird that you have a huge text box and it's only using the top 20% of the box for text.

eva is playing the game in a very high resolution, and not a recommended one. the textbox normally doesn't look like that in the normal game resolution

also keep in mind two other things

1) the text is still in first draft form, and will be re-written / edited for a final draft later

2) the intro itself will be changed in the future; i intend to add a few more puzzles to it and space it out more, introducing more game elements in it, right now the only gameplay element shown in the intro is lilypad conversion

That was really cool to watch

this is looking really awesome.

what do you do for the dialogue blips? That's a really nice touch with the pitch-shifting.

for the textbox stuff, what i think i did was

a) give each character a different sound effect that is played when each letter appears
b) vary the frequency of the sound effect played in a periodic sine wave
c) make the frequency at the end of a sentence (periods or other punctuation) lower than normal

also, another thing is the font isn't final; i want the player to be able to select the font in the options (i'll have like 5 choices for font face, and a different default). the thing about the size is that the game was designed to run in 800x600 but other resolution options were added later, so in large resolutions the text looks really small; i think i'll either disable the very large resolutions (they are slower anyway) or make the font larger for those resolutions

and yes the trail effect particles as the letters appear will have its lifespan shortened in the future (that was one of the first things pandara-ra suggested; he's the game's sole playtester right now, and after he's done testing it and i've improved the game according to his suggestions i'll open a larger beta test; so far he's already found 160 things that he thinks i should improve/change/fix, although some of them may be impossible due to it being a GM game, such as locking the mouse in the window)

using fmod (someone named icuurd ported it to gm using something called gmfmodsimple). it used to be 100$ to license for indies but they raised the price since i licensed it back in like 2008 or something; it's free to use if your game is free however

i have heard from teegee that future versions of gm studio are getting pitch-shifting support natively, so if you don't want to pay for a license for fmod and are making a commercial game you can just wait till they add that. fmod has a lot of other useful things that gmstudio probably won't ever have though, such as the ability to pitch-shift, visualizing a sound wave (detecting the wave form), encrypting sound files so that only it can read them, and stuff like that

doesn't supersound.dll do pitch/frequency shifting as well?

it does frequency but not pitch. they aren't the same thing

just increase font size in higher res

so if i wanted to get a licence for my game in gamemaker and the games free, i can use the licensing software you use for free?

for the fmod sound engine yes -- just google fmod and read the site for details

Nice !

Sorry if it have been already asked but the game have 3d effects ?
or everything is 2d ?

i use some 3d for a starfield (seen in the prologue), and for a water effect (a texture is drawn over a distorting 3d model to produce the illusion of moving water, but that's hard to see in the video since it's a subtle effect). i think that's all the 3d i use, GM tends to be bad at 3d (it's very slow in game maker) so i didn't want to use too much of it

for my next game after this however i'm going to use a lot more 3d since i'll be switching to unity

Ok

For critiques , i'd say the sound music at the end of the video is way too high (maybe it was already said)
The special effect white blue light on the font while the dialogue is a bit too much ?
we have to wait a lot before reading wich give the effect some "not serious , useless" stance

i get a bit of motion sickness during the dialog. is there a way to turn the doubling effect  off? overall looks interesting, you really pushed game maker to the max. im not a fan of txt heavy scenes, but the dialog and story seems interesting enough to keep my attention.

people asked me to explain the game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GBDT2f5sLQ

audio is real bad

it sounds like the audio was filtered or something, or perhaps recorded through the microphone along with the voice rather than from the game directly

in any case that does give me an idea to make an actual video explaining the game, similar to a kickstarter video (but not for kickstarter)

sorry for necroposting, is this still being worked on? please tell me it is DX

Just plain gorgeous. Love the 'feel' of this game, and the theme is very 'you'.

This looks awesome, following.

it's still being worked on, yes

recently i added a 'sound test' thing, like in older games where you can cycle through all the game's sound effects and listen to each. a lot of older games for nes/snes did that but modern games seem to have lost that habit, so i added one in yesterday

right now i'm making some GUI changes to the menu / pause screen. i have a bad habit of making my games exit the game if you press escape twice, instead of requiring the player to manually click a 'quit game' or 'return to title screen' option the way it's commonly done, so i'm adding that now. previously you just pressed escape twice and the game was exited, which can be accidentally pressed so i want to avoid that

right on, i dig the sound menu thing. more games should add that.

i wrote this in another thread when we were talking about elevator pitches. i figured i'd post it here too. it's just a quick attempt at describing the game to someone who knows nothing about it. let me know if anything is unclear, what i should cut out for space reasons, what i should add in or expand, what i should reword, or whatever


after i'm satisfied with it maybe i'll put it on the website and in the first post of this thread

I'd cut out the 'numbers part', it doesn't say anything about the game, no one will buy a game solely because it has '1000 areas'

if you need to throw something out then I think this is the best part to do so

i think the numbers give a good indicator of the breadth of this project.
1000 areas is no small feat and I'm assuming its not a linear progression either so it really speaks for itself.
Id keep at least that number.

of all numbers this one is the most impressing so you could keep it

seperate feature list from the pitch like the site http://studioeres.com/sd/

that's a really long elevator pitch with a bunch of info i think most gamers won't really care about until they actually start playing. gotta condense, cut, and emphasize the more interesting parts. leave the details for players to discover. y'know, like layers.

Saturated Dreamers is an open-ecological-and-non-linear game world in which you pilot an upgradeable spaceship while exploring an alien sentient Lake.

Discover over 1000 hand-crafted areas, accompanied by atmospheric music, and inhabited by 60 types of creatures from which the player can gain new abilities! Use your observations of the  alien ecology to befriend native creatures, solve interesting puzzles, and unlock secret paths.

This is weird, but I like it

How many years have you even been working on this now, Paul?

I think 6, or something close. A testament to dedication.

yeah but one thing to remember is that the game isn't for most gamers, it's for gamers who like to discover things on their own (e.g. people who liked la mulana). so i don't really want to word it to appeal to the average gamer, just for it to appeal to the game's specific audience

anyway thanks for all the advice so far everyone, i'll combine these ideas with the ideas i got on my facebook and do a second draft of the description soon

Well if it isn't a game for most gamers, you shouldn't approach the quantity of stuff like a big list, because that's what most games do. What if you just changed all those numbers to: "This game was 6 years into development". Looks far more meaningful to me that somebody spent six years developing the same game, and it definitely make you wonder why.  

i wouldn't say most games do that -- i can't remember the last time a game was advertised as being a long game as a positive thing, it was something that was common for rpgs in the 90s but has fallen off. today i think most gamers have short attention spans, they're used to games that last 6-10 hours long, especially for indie games, so saying a game is 30 or 40 hours long would attract gamers who want that in a game

still i think separating it into a feature list at the end of the description as eva suggested is probably the best idea; but i don't want to keep them too separated, so it'll be like a description + feature list right after, closely connected, so that they don't read the first and miss the second

FWIW the sheer scale and knowing how many areas are in it has always been part of what makes me interested.

Buuut, one useful side note: I also know the TLC that Paul is putting into these areas. Since you seem open to suggestions I might humbly suggest "1000 hand-crafted, {x} areas" where x is another verb to indicate quality (e.g., "beautiful", "detailed", etc.)

although, in that regard, an imagw speaks louder than words :)

says the guy with the annoyingly huge image signature

touche...
There!

Saturated dreamer is a massive non linear ecological adventure game 6 years in the making. It takes place on a sentient lake inhabit by many life form. The goal is to befriend the sentient lake before it poison you with hallucination and dream. Instead of fighting the 60 types of creatures you better befriend them, by learning about their preferences and behaviors, to gain abilities that allow you to progress across the 1000 handcraft areas.

That's all I need to know to get interested :P

i like the combination of the creature number with befriending, that works well; i'll try using that in the description too

anyway, here's a pic of the title screen, which i worked on coding some more today (coding a wave motion effect and some other transparency layering effects, not really visible in a static screen though)

(http://i.imgur.com/XcQ1bUk.png)

right now i'm working on the sound effects task; which is a collection of small things that i still needed to do with sound, such as give the different types of weapon fire in shmup mode different types of sound effects, and improving some of the more annoying / loud sound effects with replacements or by softening them, that type of stuff

also, i've been thinking about eventually doing another kickstarter, mainly because i still need a story illustration / cutscene artist (as well as other things) to finish this game, because the previous artists have all vanished, so the only way to get one to stick around is probably to pay them, and since i don't have money to pay them pandara-ra (currently my sole alpha tester) suggested doing another kickstarter

i did have one in 2009, but it only got $1500, and that was back when kickstarter was starting up, and nobody even knew what the site was. i think another one would help a lot, as the game still needs a lot of work before launch and i'm not sure i can do what it needs to get finished on 0 funding

Ya, may as well try? That would be cool to get more artworks/polish. Pls have voice acting as a stretch goal if you do!

yeah we had that in mind as well; it'd be nice to see important scenes voice-acted, even if it's not every single scene (since there's a lot of text voice acting all 300 pages or so would be pretty expensive)

More than the Phil Fish ?

I can try some pictures too
your job is well paid ? (i mean how many can we expect )

yeah SD has been in production for about twice as long as fez was in production. it's not really comparable though because fez had a budget (a fairly large one, several million dollars), and a full-time team. if i had a full-time team and as large of a budget it'd have been done a long time ago

and i'm not sure what you're asking for your second question, but you're asking how much i'd pay a cutscene artist, it'd depend on how much the kickstarter was funded for

Ok
Yeah i was asking the amount of money
ANyway you can always pay with the sells the artist , you give him or her a sharing revenue.

Anyway i'm tracking this thread , making the art cut scenes for this game can be interesting.

yeah the shared revenue is how i was doing it, but even with that artists tend to draw something and then vanish / get too busy. so i think up front money (with a kickstarter) will make artists less likely to disappear. so far two artists so far from this forum and one artist who i knew from elsewhere said they'd do the cutscene art, and started it, made a few pictures, and then vanished/abandoned it

and what they made was really good and i want to still use some of it, especially lurk's portraits and intro cutscene stuff (which are really great), but i worry about contrasting styles too (the other parts of the art like the tiles and sprites are all finished, this is just for illustrations of story scenes)

and i do think you're very good and like your style, so you are one possibility. i'll contact you after i do a kickstarter and let you know how much i could pay you

Well okay
I'm not the kind who vanish
If i have to vanish i'll tell you and we gonna agree , i'll delete my work or something and return the money.

Anyway , if you hire some artist , one great advice : try to tell the exact number of drawing you want
So we can be prepared and accept or refuse.

If you want for example 15 drawing for cutscenes , then stick to it , if you want more , you should pay more accordingly etc etc

I think you maybe know this since your experience in the videogaming is there , but i always say that in case of...

Thanks for thinking about me , good luck for the kickstarter.

Also if you have several styles , you can deal with that
For example you choose a style for the cutscenes , and you choose another one for the avatar drawing for example.
You categorize , so it's possible , it will make sense  and yeah try avoid several artist doing cutscenes it could be weird.

sooo hows it going

come to our g-hangs more sean; pauls always working on this in there

right now i'm still working on normalizing the frequency of use of the ambient soundscapes across all areas -- in other words, there are some soundscapes that are used too much, and some used rarely or not at all, so i'm replacing some of the ones that are used too often with the ones that are used less often; this is a fairly time-consuming process that probably nobody would even care about anyway, and may be a perfectionist thing, but i don't like the idea of having worked hard to make a soundscape and then have it only show up in 1 or 2 areas out of 1000, while other soundscapes are like in 80 of those 1000 areas

but yeah if you want to see me work on the game in real time come to the google hangouts

like RIGHT NOW (https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/calendar/c2FuZG92YWwuam9obi50QGdtYWlsLmNvbQ.9lbtj72lhutkquvqnld0f6k9i0)

this will never be released right?

it's pretty close to release, but still lots of stuff to do; i'd say it's 96.8% done

is that number grounded on an elaborate plan oran educated guess?

Fez didn't have a several million dollar budget.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134934/the_making_of_fez_the_breaking_of_.php?print=1


based on my task list system, discussed earlier in this thread and logged at http://rinku.livejournal.com

quick update!

about a month ago i made a fun visualization to go along with the game's 'sound/music test' feature, here's a screenshot (obviously it wasn't completely finished when i took this screenshot, the GUI elements in particular, but you get the idea)

(http://i.imgur.com/YtvGnSa.png)

i just thought it was neat to have a visual representation of the spectrum/frequency data for a sound as it's being played, the way some other games do (such as the tri-ace games, tales of phantasia, etc.)

more recently, over the last month i've been working on the second draft of the game's dialogue/story. this involves printing out all ~320 pages of it (2 pages per sheet so as to save paper), and marking down changes to improve the writing, making several major changes to the story that i think will improve it, fixing contradictions in the story, planning out a few new scenes would improve the story, and making a list of the story scenes that i want to illustrate, among other things

this is a slow process but i'm about halfway through that process. the end result, hopefully, will be a much tighter story that makes more sense. our games have always been known for their writing/story quality (particularly immortal defense and fedora spade), so i want to be especially sure that we don't disappoint people in that regard; my own goal is to meet or exceed the quality of some of my favorite sci-fi novels, not just to have 'a good story for a game' (while also taking advantage of the unique aspects of stories in games, such as interactivity -- there are currently seven endings, and the order of the story is mostly non-linear)

it also might interest people to know that my "task list" for finishing the game, which started at 840 items several years ago, is now down to only *10* items. the writing revising is of course one of those ten. most of these ten are fairly big items, but the game is close to completion

right on man. 's on my list of games to pick up. looks unique.

That's great!  Congrats on getting this far.  I can't wait to play it.

Any idea on a specific time frame when the game will be done?

my predictions are notoriously wrong. however, here's my current timeline that i think is realistic

january - finish the writing/revising task, and start working with an artist to illustrate the story scenes (by providing them with a list and so on)

february - do several of the remaining crucial tasks -- in particular, the improving the endgame sequence task, the improving the intro task, and the creature helpfulness task

march/april - start beta testing, and do most of the remaining tasks, and adapt the game to playtester feedback

may - do a kickstarter and a greenlight, and start taking pre-orders with early access

june/july - finish up all remaining tasks, including finishing the art for the cutscenes, fix any bugs on the bug list, make a trailer, begin marketing, and release

august+ - marketing and post-release patches for things that come up after release

So KS in this plan, is just a marketing/pre-order system?

no, it's also a way to pay an artist to illustrate the cutscenes, among other things

Ah makes sense, just don't think I've seen KS used so close to a game release like that before. Good luck :)

actually we already had a kickstarter for SD back in 2009. it was the second game ever successfully backed on kickstarter or something like that. but the $1500 we got obviously wasn't enough to fund 6 years of development

For some people

1500 dollars is way too much for 6 years
Aka get a real job...
facepalm people.

oh, i do have a job (freelance writing), that's why it's taking 6 years, haha. if i was able to work on it full time it'd be done years ago

so basically what you are saying is that nobody should ever do a kickstarter, for any reason? the point of that site is to help people do projects that an audience wants done, by giving them the funds to allow those things to be done. my game cannot be finished without funding, and not every job provides enough funding to finish it. artists are expensive -- for the amount of art i'm looking at, we'd need tens of thousands of dollars. my job isn't enough to cover that; i've already put at least $5,000 of money into the project from myself (beyond the $1500 from the kickstarter -- and i don't mean 'imagined salary', that'd be a lot more, i mean in terms of paying for things (fees, programs, sound resources, etc.) necessary to make the game)

Yeah , i was sarcastic ? sorry about that.
it was an irony of course !

I was meaning : 1500 is way too low for 6 years , it's ridiculous.
You deserve way more.

ah, sorry. but some people actually *do* think like that, so my reply can be taken to be for those people who are like 'nobody needs a kickstarter to make an indie game'

anyway, i am trying to make the game as inexpensively as i can; my computer is 5 years old for example. but the choice is either make a worse game or get some type of funding, so i prefer to try the funding. if i can't raise anything (if people aren't interested in the game) for a kickstarter i'll still do the best i can to finish it without a budget. but it will take a lot longer to finish that way

Oh well than, hopefully 2nd KS is a success as well, art certainly can be expensive.

Reminds me to appreciate my partner once more.

Yeah Paul, your kickstarter Backers are still patently waiting. This and Flywrench, at least Resonance!

ya i'm working steadily on it; yesterday i added muting of the sound when the window isn't in focus, which actually required a dll because game maker stupidly doesn't have a way to test if the window is in focus or not

http://indiestatik.com/2014/01/01/indie-games-2014/

saturated dreamers was mentioned on this list of the 100 most anticipated indie games of 2014

my cousin carrie is in danger of losing her job/car/apartment if she can't come up with $500 in three days, but she also doesn't want to accept gifts or loans due to pride. so i came up with a plan to pay her to help me with my game's editing (she's a writer), which works around her dislike of getting something for nothing or begging (i have no such dislike of begging, especially when it's for someone else)

i myself don't have $500 on hand however, so if any of you are willing to help out, here's a paypal donate link: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=YASCY8JVLBH4J -- i can pay everyone back within 6 months unless you tell me not to, any amount would be good. credit/debit cards will work

by donating you'd be helping out one of my family members *and* improving the game and helping it come out sooner, because i'd have someone to help me out with the game's writing's revision/editing process

if you like, this can also operate as a pre-order for my game; any donation of at least $15 will receive a free copy of the game when it's released

http://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/operating%20system/os_is_paused.html

i think that's studio only; SD is being made in gm7

ah, my mistake.

edit: gonna quote this back in since i sort of bumped it out of sight with the new page:

best of luck to you and your cousin, Paul!

I'd gladly help if I wasn't in debt myself  :-\

no problem, same case for many people i'm sure. so far we have $90 in contributions and more people who have promised to give something soon.

and we've reached $500! i only posted this request on facebook and here, i'm impressed at how quickly it worked out. many thanks.

wow, I'm impressed how many awesome ppl there are, congratz!

awesome! Great to hear that :)

What program do you use to do line counts in GM? I can't seem to find any online (either the links are dead or the dl site looks shady as fuck).

you can export all the scripts. right click the 'scripts' folder (at the top level) and select 'export all scripts'. it'll export them into a single file. you can then count the number of lines in that file.

this also counts comments, so if you want you can use a separate program to strip comments and blank lines (there are several such)

ah, thank you!

but what about the code in objects :|

if you use code in objects you're using game maker wrong

in fact you have to use code in objects in order to trigger your scripts, therefor your statement is invalid

and no, I'm not using anything wrong  :handthumbsupR:

you're definitely doing it wrong if you are calling scripts from code events rather than script events. that is way slow

If you want to get crazy about optimization, then code in objects is faster than calling scripts.  :shrug2:

Hint: it doesn't matter at all.

I wonder, none of my newer games made in GM had any optimization problems. I won't argue without seeing how your game is actually coded, tho.

it's faster to put all the code in code events, assuming you don't call scripts, yeah, but that isn't what i was saying. in gm7 and gm8, the overhead for calling a script is typically much greater than anything contained in a script. so ideally, you put as much as possible in a script, and then call it from the script event. what i was saying was this: creating a code event if you are only going to use that code event to call a single script is wrong, because the way to do that is to use the script event. that's what it's there for, so it's literally the wrong way to use gm. it'd be like zipping a zip file or something.

and it isn't just about optimization (although that's a part of it), another big issue is that you can't search code in code events with the search function. i use the search scripts feature of gm pretty much 5 times an hour, so to cut off much of the code from being searched would cripple a large project, because you are constantly going to be searching for code as you work on a game. teegee's suggestion of putting code only in code events would make searching through the code impossible, which would be impractical for any project larger than about 15k lines, and annoying even for small projects in the 5k line range

they fixed both of these problems in studio of course, i'm just talking about gm7 and gm8

I have no idea why you have to search for code that often, I have most of my code in code events, and some in scripts that I call from the code, I have no problems with searching for any code because I know where it is.

there are countless reasons to search through code, i'm astonished that you can imagine making a game without it. it's really really really essential

here's an example of the last time i used it, just a few minutes ago. a playtester reported a bug where the shmup mode in my game would not be set to 60 fps, but instead set to unlimited fps, so it was running faster than the rest of the game. to find out why that happened, i simply had to search for this string:

"room_speed ="

that returned everywhere in the code that the room speed was set. which was about 12 places. i checked through each of those places, and in one of them i found the bug

without the ability to search through the code, i would have had to try to remember every single part of my code where i mess with the room_speed variable, which would take quite a while. a bug that took 2 minutes to fix could take 2 hours to fix without search

Search is in my opinion essential. At least in larger code bases, I also use it constantly. Of course so are tools like "Go to definition" and such, which I have no idea if GM has.

that's because your code is a mess   :durr:

how so? my code is pretty good i think. i also don't see how clean code would even help with this; are you saying that if you yourself had written 60k+ lines of code you would never need to use the search feature when you encounter a bug, the way i do? i find that pretty hard to believe -- it's more a factor of size than of organization

perhaps you are only used to writing casual puzzle match-3 games? if i were coding a game like that i might not need to use the search feature either, maybe

yea, it had ~30k lines of code or so, mate-o :)

tho I agree, I don't make 5-years projects atm and thus I don't need to use search functions every 5 minutes, therefor I don't use GM wrong

I would die without a search function.
Thats like a must to me.

So, is this about Saturated Dreamers or how addicting a search function is?

which menus in particular? any advice would be helpful; i can make some screenshots of just the menus later on as they exist right now if that'd help

as for game updates, still editing dialogue. should take another month max. also with my cousin helping me with some of the editing that frees some time to code some other parts of the game that need attention

next i want to add a way to play specific sounds during textboxes at specific moments (i don't plan on using it very often but there are times when "play a beep right here" would add a lot)

also, @anty, i have no idea why a match 3 game would take 30k lines of code to make! immortal defense was only 15k lines and is a lot more complicated than a match 3. if you can write 30k lines, bug free, without using the search feature at all, that is kind of impressive, but i wonder if perhaps you could have done it even faster/better if you knew how to use search

The screanshots aren't working in the first post!

rinku just needs to replace studioeres.com/sd with saturateddreamers.com

yeah sorry. i moved the server. i'll fix them soon.

No worries! Thanks, was just curious.

as a side note for a short update, i've been taking a break from SD for the last few weeks while i prepare a patch for immortal defense (e.g. with 720p mode instead of 1024x768, 60 fps instead of 30 fps, upgraded to GM studio from GM7, probably a mac version, and new translations to french, portuguese, russian, and japanese that fans did, some small balance changes and other small improvements like a fast forward button and music/sound volume controls, some shaders added, some new custom levels... basically a quick "quality of life" patch, because it hasn't been patched since 2008 or 2009) -- this should take another month max. i'm continuing to work on editing the SD dialogue off and on during this time, but i'm not focusing on it as much as the ID update.

That's awesome. I guess that update could help push it through greenlight too! (is that going ok?)

that's going okay -- it's at 46% of the votes needed to be in the top 100 or something. i haven't really been promoting it, but i'll do so after i make this patch. i may also add achievements in this patch (i want them to have some gameplay bonuses though, rather than just be aesthetic rewards)

created a new teaser trailer:

 https://youtu.be/wjDvXvyFqjo

best E3 trailer so far

o is it the e3 right now? i am not even paying attention haha

turned it off after 25 seconds (especially that I was it lasted for over 7 minutes)

not a very good release trailer, unless this is an april fools post

it's not a release trailer or even a trailer! it's a teaser trailer. it was patched together from some old vids i found on my second hard drive, the vids were taken 3 years ago or something, so it's a fairly outdated vid. it's not really intended to market the game

it was also originally 35 minutes, but i cut it down to 7

it's the i'm not dead video

Teaser trailers are supposed to be interesting Paul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCc2v7izk8w (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCc2v7izk8w)

Like, this is the star wars teaser trailer. Shows very little footage, but it shows enough to spark the imagination and create hype.

It's like you really don't want people to feel hyped for your game.

ok, sorry, my mistake, it's not a release trailer

but like impmaster said teaser trailer are supposed to be even shorter than release trailer (which are usually around 1-2 minutes), it should show very little footage and only the most interesting bits

It's awesome, ignore these fools. PAUL I'M EXCITED AND I BELIEVE IN YOU AND A LOTTA PEOPLE DO (INCLUDING YOURSELF I KNOW ;) 
:cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory:
:cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory:
:cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory:
:cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory:
:cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory:
:cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory: :cavestory:

sorry but shenmue 3

nice

ya but read the comments on the video and the replies to the video on twitter -- fans of the game do seem to like the video. 17 likes, 1 dislike so far, that's a pretty good proportion (better than most of my videos). the video is not intended to introduce new people to the game, it's intended to update progress for people who have been following the development of the game. it is definitely not intended to create hype. when i want to introduce new people to the game or create hype i'll make a video to do that

another issue is i *want* those who are not the game's audience to not like the video, it helps weed out people who wouldn't enjoy the game in the first place. i don't want people to buy the game who wouldn't enjoy it. and the game is for a very particular type of audience: older gamers who remember zelda1 or who like very slow-paced atmospheric games like seiklus. that isn't the average gamer, so the average type of gamer video is not going to work, instead long slower videos that don't explain anything are what that type of audience wants in a video, so they can study the video and try to figure out the mechanics -- that's at least what i look for in videos of games like this that i'm interested in. basically most teasers feel like candy or chocolate or a cookie, this teaser is like broccoli or cabbage

lastly, as stated in that vid, i created this vid out of random footage that i had recorded years ago and found on my second hard drive. i didn't record footage specifically for this video, i used left-over unused video that i had forgotten about that i felt had some interesting atmospheric parts to it, it was also basically a teaser done in half an hour in the morning on a dare from amon26 who posted on facebook something about 'do something cool this morning' and i said ok

(also, comparing it to the star wars trailer makes no sense; star wars has a pre-built in massive, mainstream audience. ask anyone on the street and they'd have heard of star wars. it's also a sequel -- and not just a sequel, but the 6th sequel in a long line of movies. this is a new game with a small audience. with star wars all you need to do is show luke chewing gum or something and fans will go crazy. that trailer also had a large budget, and was made by a large team with film school degrees, with almost unlimited resources to draw on, whereas my trailer's budget was probably actually negative money, since i lose money by spending time creating it, it's apples and oranges)

Star wars was just the teaser I had watched most recently. I just wanted to show you what a teaser was supposed to be. If you don't really want this teaser as your main trailer, that's fine but its not really a teaser trailer then. (Although I don't know why you would want to limit yourself to a very small niche?)

because fuck normies

(http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/915/652/b49.gif)

REEEEEEEEEEEEE

Wonderfully weird.

mainly because the type of games i like to play, and the types of games i find fun to make, aren't the types of games that most gamers like, and because i think if you try to make a game that you yourself don't enjoy making / wouldn't like to play yourself, that often fails pretty badly, and besides, isn't the point of being an indie dev is to have fun and express yourself, not to make the most money possible? if i wanted to make money i would have just been a typical non-game programmer and made 100k a year or whatever doing that

you are probably right that i should have called it something besides a teaser though, but it's too late for that now. maybe "video preview" or "gameplay mystery video" or something would have been a better way to put it, but teaser was the first thing i thought of at the time to call it

it's possible i'll be surprised by the size of the audience, though. immortal defense's audience was also far larger than i thought it'd be, i even had a ton of 10-13 year olds who enjoyed that game, which was a younger age than i thought was possible to enjoy that game due to the complexity of the writing (when i was 10-13 i didn't know a lot of the words that are even used in that game's dialogue, and probably would have found that type of game too boring to play myself)

I enjoy the trailer a lot, pretty candid and informative of the game. there's a very relaxed and airy, surreal vibe to it. it's very gentle and strangely beautiful

I can't wait to play it!

btw, just a quick update -- the game was on greenlight, and got through greenlight a week or two ago. going to try for a release late this year or early next year (but all of you have heard that before, haha).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=610411179

anyway, as i think i might have mentioned before (though i'm not sure) i've been doing watercolor work (the physical medium) so that i can illustrate the game's cutscenes through watercolor paintings. the reason i'm going with watercolor is because i think it fits the game's "wet" theme, since the game is based on an alien lake, and because it's just the most fun for me to paint in (i've tried other physical media out too before i decided on this one)

random example of one of my attempts (supposed to be a tree):

(https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13220858_10153869119001263_7954425156962307583_n.jpg?oh=08bc81f7af20f3f32c1b6e6598438810&oe=57D584E6)

if you want to see more attempts, and have an account, check my facebook, i post them there usually (most are for practice rather than specifically for the game, since at first i'm just learning)

https://www.facebook.com/paul.eres

I just wanted to say I always wondered what happened to this game after seeing it on Kickstarter years ago, and I was totally shocked and excited to come across it on these message boards! I love the otherworldly style, and I'm glad y'all got greenlighted to Steam! Looking forward to playing it and exploring the world and characters. :)

godspeed

name entry screen

this is also my first time ever creating an animated gif

(http://i.imgur.com/Rt3ZLlY.gif)

hey paul

nice

I really love those particle effects!

So amazing wow Paul.... :)))

Classic movie reference, here, folks!

new animated gif. the game's "sound test" feature.

one of the things i'm most proud of about the game, even though it's completely useless, is that you can, in the options screen, cycle through all the sound effects in the game, play each, with various effects, and see not one, but two, visualizations of that sound.

also works with music, though the music tracks might need to be 'unlocked' before you can play them there (might need to encounter them in the game first before you can play them). this is a feature that was common in games of the past, called the 'sound test'

(http://i.imgur.com/IoEilIa.gif)

this is beautiful  :-* every game should have the sound test screen

periodic update. store isn't public yet, and there's no trailer, but i set this up today

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CzglYMTVQAAn2tY.jpg)

 :handforkL: >:D :handknifeR:
woo almost there!

OKAY FO0Ls, so it turns out that john sandoval is the best playtester, and that my game has a bunch of bugs

(https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6Yg24d36DRpw9TZ6/source.gif)

just wanted to update with *something*

oh and here's a ink and wash draft of one of the watercolors i want to do to illustrate the game, this one is a creature called argus

(https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/16463308_1639119472770045_8557521798369360549_o.jpg?oh=b2dde3414c5e932d9be830b13ece06ca&oe=594A2570)

argh how do you even resize images on this forum anymore, help

img width=880

also that's good

thanks, and yay the width thing worked

periodic update (glacial era periods).

been doing months of playtesting, adding about 10 new playtesters per month. making good progress in polishing and bug-fixing. still porting the game from gm7 to gm studio.

(https://media.giphy.com/media/26n6KM9cVfohfRZ1C/giphy.gif)

Good to have news! I hope you the best

♡

how come the lines update at a different rate to the balls. anyway i want to fuck you paul. best wishes.

i probably don't update it every frame / fast enough, cuz gm7 is slow. but i'm going to be porting the game from gm7 to gm studio, which is only hatefully slow instead of mournfully slow

it's only as slow as you code it to be

this game is cool yo  :handthumbsupL: :handthumbsupR:

some new junk

(https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohs86kFv3ey0A1Z1m/giphy.gif)
a boss?

(https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohs7LNOMgLnH77DhK/giphy.gif)
an options screen?

hello my friend paul, wonderful to see your progress as always

Did you port the game already? How hard was it?

i have the game running in studio now, however, the port is not fully complete. i still need to port the fmod engine (the sound engine i used in the gm7 version), so right now it's ported, but with no sound, and there are a few other bugs i need to work through. so basically... the game is playable in studio now, but isn't completely bug-free or feature-complete in studio. i think it'll probably be fully ported by the end of the year.

as for how hard it was, it was tedious, but not difficult. lots and lots of little changes that i had to manually make to the code over and over. the game has 70,000 lines of code (which may be a record for a game maker game), so it took awhile to change things.

for instance, in gm studio, you have to draw on surfaces during the 'draw' event, not the 'step' event. but in gm7, it's the opposite, you can *only* draw on surfaces during the step event, and not in the draw event. so i had to do a lot of shifting around of code from one to another.

another major difference was function parameters. in gm7, you could do function overloading (a function that accepts a variable number of arguments), but in gm studio you can't, so i had to make sure each function always got the same number of arguments, and always used all the arguments it got.

sandboxing is also a big difference -- i haven't yet fully ported that aspect of it, but basically in gm studio, you can only save to a particular folder on the hard drive, and can't actually save to the folder that the game itself is installed to.

also (this one is my own fault) gm7 allows an option to treat uninitialized variables as 0. gm studio doesn't. it's not a recommended option, but i used it in gm7, so all variables that weren't initialized before being read i had to go and initialize them. so i have scripts now that are just like 600 lines of initializing variables to 0.

so lots of little stuff like that add up. but the port was necessary because gm studio is cross-platform (gm7 is windows only), much faster (like, more than twice as fast, i get much less slowdown), etc.

and here's some new gifs of the game in studio (in the first one, there is a bug where the crystals have different transparency values if they are above/below the player in y value -- that's another bug i still need to fix):

(https://media.giphy.com/media/l2QE0dxHA8Orrlbfa/giphy.gif)

(https://media.giphy.com/media/l2QDMqjGaX77IBE5O/giphy.gif)

Studio 1.4 or Studio 2? How are you liking it?

Glad to see you are thinking cross platform. Nowadays is a must.

sorry forgot to reply lately. studio 1.4 for now. may try studio 2 eventually though but right now i have the game working in studio 1.4, and the speed increase was enormous, it's like 5x faster.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQYEl6aV4AAIb9y.jpg:large)

Really dig this man. It looks like such a trip. Reminds me a bit of Hohokum (with the movements especially) but more surreal. Though I see you've been working on this since way before haha

looks fun!