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[unsilentwill]

Hey everybody. This is a game I've been working with on and off since late one night in the summer. It's finally winter break for me, and I plan on going full time on this thing.

This is my first solo project, and it's on a pretty serious deadline. It's my Senior year of college as an Art major, and I have all intentions of displaying this work in the gallery alongside my traditional sculptures, drawings, and oil paintings. The fun part will be convincing my very traditional school to let me do this.

Since I am only an artist, I'm relying heavily on Adventure Game Studio (and anyone who knows the program, feel free to give tips!). The gameplay is fairly simply, as it intended to be played with my old NES controller (more details on the build set up later), but with a good amount of action. It's essentially an short interactive play, based on the medieval triptychs, in three acts. It should be far from boring.

Currently the plan is as follows:

• Character Design (100%)
• Character Animation (90%)
• Script (90%)
• Music? (20%)
• Sound? (60%)
• Font (100%)
• Set Illustrations

        -First (100%)
         -Second (100%)
         -Third (80%)

• Programming (95%)
• Physical Setup

        -Box/Manual (25%)
         -Console (70%)
         -TV Connection (%)
         -Speakers? (?%)

• Polish (0%)

As you may have guessed, this has fallen fairly deep in "artgam" territory. This happened because I think a lot can be done with the medium, and my schooling so far of classic literature, art, history and philosophy is strongly reflected in this idea. And of course, it is intended as an installation in a gallery. However I still think when it is complete, the message and the gameplay should suit a wide audience.

I plan to have a mockup of the main stage by the end of the night. Otherwise, this devlog is mostly for my own responsibility. But I would love nothing more than some advice, comments, suggestions, and heavy critique on any of my work. Thanks guys.[/list]

[RotateMe]

This somehow sounds a lot more interesting than most of the artgames I know. Especially the "installation in a gallery" gets me excited. Really like the logo, show us some more!

[PlayMeTape]

Just posting to let you know this sounds very interesting. Would you mind sharing a screenshot of your current progress?

As you may have guessed, this has fallen fairly deep in "artgam" territory. This happened because I think a lot can be done with the medium, and my schooling so far of classic literature, art, history and philosophy is strongly reflected in this idea. And of course, it is intended as an installation in a gallery. However I still think when it is complete, the message and the gameplay should suit a wide audience.

Also, this sounds very promising. I would love to see more people with less "gamey" backgrounds develop games.

Best of luck!

[bgogol]

I'd like to see more of this too.

[zacaj]

Looks/reads cool.  Any other artwork to show?

[unsilentwill]

Really quick mockup of the Towns Square and the HUD to give a rough idea, and to keep my promise.


And here's the early stage of some of the main characters.

[EDIT] Revised characters on the left with a better pallet and size, old on the right. Got a nice amount of "code" done, which is exciting, so I figured I should finalize the characters as soon as possible.

Thanks for the kind words already, I'll try to keep updating this as soon as things become more presentable.

[unsilentwill]

Look, an update. I made my second ever walk cycle.



I think I'm going to move on to other illustrations, that is, unless there's any small or large issues with the current animation.

Oh whoops, I marked the character designs wrong, editing now...

[unsilentwill]

Alright, I got a lot of important stuff done, a lot of stuff I wasn't actually sure I could do. In between some yuletideish breaks, I actually did some programming, it's kind of hard to believe... 

Like I said I'm modifying the lovely Adventure Game Studio. I was kind of dead-set to use my NES controller (with RetroUSB + JoytoKey) to be the input. I figured that hopefully some people who don't play many games would try it out, so I wanted to make things intuitive. Also it is "traditional", like a triptych, and the game is different from the usual arcade experience. I had no idea how to do this though, and I was this close to starting everything over in Game Maker.

Anyway, the point is I'm now about to have two (or three) different commands mapped to my controller to run in the style of a SCUMM game.  Everything else programming wise should be a breeze through here, and more like directing than programming.

... I knew I'd post too much text, so I worked on some art to pretty up the devlog.

Hey look, day and night cycles! I love those. I snazzed up the HUD GUI. It looks a bit too round, but I'll fix it later. Expect this much detail or more in the illustrations to come!

[unsilentwill]

Things getting done all over the place, focusing on getting programming knowledge and animation out of the way, as illustration is more natural to me. This means of course nothing pretty to show off yet, except a linear perspective pixel tiled floor.

But I am asking for help now! There's a basic function which I am trying to understand, and getting close, but the deadline looms. Basically I'm just trying to program in AGS a "chargeshot"--like in Mega Man 4. I'm thinking three different options for what happens when you hold down a button for 1 second, 2 seconds, or 3 seconds. Honestly I think I'm very close, using a timer and a global variable... I may just go hunting through the AGS shmup modules or hopefully learn it out my own.

Again, any help or critque is appreciated, a functional build for testing should be up before the end of the week!

[cosec]

This is looking cool! Keep us updated

Out of curiosity, where do you study? And do you have an online gallery/portfolio of your work?

[superflat]

This sounds very interesting thematically.  I'm not an AGS user so can't help you there, but there are a few about these parts.  Keep us posted on your progress!

[unsilentwill]

Again, I truly appreciate the interest even with how little content I have actually shown. I have done a lot and things are looking really good, but I don't feel comfortable showing most of it quite yet. Just finished some important animation (I fixed the bounciness of the last one) and I am too, too tired to compile them, so I'll just finish the rest the just put them in a demo build to show them. Here's something though, a main character I haven't shown off yet.

I'll be happy to say where I go and show off my portfolio--when it's done and I get news on whether or not this will be allowed in my show... I'll make a big pretentious announcement to be sure. I feel bad being in the middle of making this game, building a portfolio, planning my show, and building my website (as well as other senior year life goals) because there's so much still in the air that can go wrong. I'll show more as soon as I can!

[unsilentwill]

I had this big speach about how games are art, defending interactivity and violence in context of religion and persuit of the traditional methods of art, expansion of a medium follow the purpose of the liberal arts, and as soon as I put my beret on they just said "Sure, put a game in your show". I didn't even show them any assets or running programs, So whatever.

The show I believe will be in two or three months at Hillsdale College, but I want to finish this by the end of this month if possible. I am back at school taking a minimal amount of credits, so I hope to devote an entire day or two to finishing this project.

Title screen is currently up, and the scenarios are being built up quickly. I promised a working build, and I think once the first day is set up I will release a version to anyone interested who PMs, posts, or emails me, so that I can get some much needed feedback about a project I feel the need to be so secretive about.