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[rj]

a videogame by robert j! lake

latest update

hopefully out in 2020.

[Sam B]

I like it. I'm uh... not sure why I do.

Or what it is.

I like his little clean sprite. Yeah, that's it!

[rj]

thank'm! there'll be plenty more of his little clean sprites as i build out his abilities/animations

right now there isn't that much more than you've seen; i've got a change-direction thing and a double-jump in the works (and that one is hella cute and i'll post 'em when i get 'em together)

[rj]

aaaaand it looks like i've found a programmer already, which i honestly wasn't expecting at this point

[Pemanent]

Yeah I love that box dude. his "character" is really intriguing. What's his name?

[rj]

thanks!

you probably missed it because of the woeful text dump in the first post, but his name is

ishmael (that's the dude up there, all wigglin/jigglin)

yeah. Ishmael, like the guy from moby dick.

anyway have a GIF of something actually moving around in a workable/playable environment!

[Pemanent]

ha nice! I like it!

[rj]

2



working on some backgrounds tonight. more substantial update soon! animation stuff + other things within the week

[rj]

3




idk messing around, mostly

i still like the flat one more and not just because animating the shaded one might be a nightmare. i have a feeling a subtle gradient alone might be nice, but i don't know; it might just be antsiness.

the entire reason this even happened in the first place was spurred on by the realization that ishmael is the only guy who really works as well as he does as a completely flat sprite; he's kind of a fluke.

maybe getting a dynamic shader together for caves/indoors only might be doable? probably the best bet, but i don't know if that's too complicated for mike.

i've tried doing other sprites, for NPCs for instance, in the same style, to keep it consistent:



the problem is that the complex shapes fuck up the crisp lack of anti-aliasing. ishmael's whole deal is that his body looks like terrain from knytt stories; you try putting that outline on shapes that aren't flat and it messes up

i realize there are issues with this sprite other than the lack of shading, but i started doing some enemies mixed between the way the environment looks and the way ishmael does (painted but with a solid color outline) and it looks really nice. i'm mostly worried for cohesion's sake, but i think it might work as long as ishmael's the only person who's flat-flat.

alternately i might just be worrying too much.

this is mostly just uninteresting word vomit, i swear i'll post reasonable devlog stuff soon. pretty colors and stuff. people like that

[rj]

3.5

not a full update, but one last one subtle thing for the night:



honestly i think this is a little too fast right now. i'm gonna fill it out with tiny idle things too; foot tappy stuff, all that

[siskavard]

I like this little hand soap person

[rj]

hey thanks, i like your cloudy guy

[nox]

i started doing some enemies mixed between the way the environment looks and the way ishmael does (painted but with a solid color outline) and it looks really nice.

Show meee

There's not much here yet, but I quite like what I see, and I suspect that everyone else will too. It's all very charming.

[rj]

i started doing some enemies mixed between the way the environment looks and the way ishmael does (painted but with a solid color outline) and it looks really nice.

Show meee

There's not much here yet, but I quite like what I see, and I suspect that everyone else will too. It's all very charming.

i'll have some of those lil' dudes uploaded soon! also thank you lots.

here's another kinda Half Update

3.8


click to embiggen

Working on the map more; I have a lot of areas solidly together in my head but their spatial relation to each other (though I know it in a -general- sense) isn't specific enough yet. I'm fixing that.

I already have a few seed differences in mind; the starting area is a good example. At the beginning, Ishmael is dumped into the desert almost 90% of the time. Ideally, regardless of your screen size, you're going to see desert fully to your left and right at the beginning (there's a very minor player fatigue issue here I have to address; I'm considering just forcing HD resolutions into a pixel doubling, but the better solution is to try to find a way to make the walking interesting) and in the map I'm hammering out right now, you come across a cavern if you go to the left and there's an impassable wall to the right (you need to collect the jump to get across it).

In another seed, the rightmost path instead has a gatekeeper who won't let you pass further without ID clearance, and the leftway contains a parking lot.

I've considered mixing and matching individual parts (handcrafting the elements that can make a certain area of the world instead of handcrafting the entire world several times over) but that runs into a potential issue with replay fatigue; if the upgrades are in the same general area each time, is that too boring? Do I worry way too much?


do i

probably



i kinda pseudo-storyboard my animations for ishmael (and others). i imagine the vast majority of them look like incomprehensible scribbles without context (as, mind, the map above probably does)

[Leon Fook]

Soap with a face.
Cloud with a face.

they should both meet one day.

[alvarop]

I'm liking the idea and the main sprite is kinda weird but cool [?]

Let's see how this plays out.

[rj]

thanks all <3

4

holding off on some animations for the time being bc they're not quite done yet and they're juicy. mike just sent me a second test build with collision detection and basic physics working. it's a bit wonky but it's surprisingly together right now:

[nox]

Ishmael's expression raptures my soul.

[Boreal]

I'm pretty interested in the lockout mechanic.  So far I've never played a Metroidvania that got dynamic routes right.

What kinds of things are affected by the procedural dialogue?

[rj]

I'm pretty interested in the lockout mechanic.  So far I've never played a Metroidvania that got dynamic routes right.

What kinds of things are affected by the procedural dialogue?

firstly, thanks! i haven't either, and that's a part of what i'm trying to get right here (and hopefully I do). i've been working a lot at figuring out a way to make it feel organic; at some point, if you open up the world a certain way, how do you account for players who have newly expanded mobility? the easy answer is "make changes to the world map that remove the possibility for getting early-onset upgrades in the late game" and i'll probably be guilty of that somewhat in the end but i really want to work on making it organically impossible for the player to access other branches without purely resorting to story events explaining them away (there are a few times i've planned where that will definitely happen, but)

hilariously, one of the best examples of something that does this (kind of) well (though not to the extent at all that i'd like) isn't even a metroidvania: sonic the hedgehog 3 has a lot of paths sonic & tails can't access that knuckles can; he goes down branching paths as a result, but the divergences always feel directly linked to the two sets of characters and their respective abilities, never to hamhandedly railroading each down a certain path. .

secondly: it's important to note that it's not procedural in the strictest sense (in that dialogue is not, in fact, going to be generated by a set of parameters automatically in the same sense that worlds/words/descriptions are in something like nested. rather, i'm going to be writing several different possible versions of dialogue for each possible interaction, and the game, on its outset, picks one of those versions at random. there might be some procedurality in some small things like adjective choice, etc etc but i don't want it to end up feeling like mad libs or anything

those dialogue chains will each also have their own series of conversation trees that are full waterfall structure; as in most games, the vast majority of these choices probably won't ultimately affect a whole lot (though i'd like to say they would, realistically it's unlikely that i'd have the time to build in believable consequences for every single decision,) but occasionally they will affect minor-to-major things in the end, like ending branches, some puzzle solutions, etc.

although at the core the game is a metroidvania in the very strictest sense (and it'd be entirely possible for most playthroughs i think to end up just not talking to anyone if you so choose) and the most radical changes are going to be based on which abilities you choose, there are going to be minute-to-vast possibilities opened up by talking to npcs as well.

there's a gatekeeper, for instance; you can talk to him, and he'll let you through the gate if you can convince him to do so. you can also sneak past him, but if you do that he might lose his job later on, and that would change what he says to you/what possible interactions he'd have.

one way to maybe describe the balance between npc conversations and metroidvania mechanics i'm aiming for is that i'm taking a balance cave story had between both and i'm making both more emphasized, to different degrees; for one thing, the game actually is a full-on metroidvania, unlike cave story; for another thing, conversations have some slight import beyond being an opening for getting the worst ending and being flavor.

the short answer is "i'm hammering out specifics right now" of course, though, since we're still in incredibly early stages

Ishmael's expression raptures my soul.

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original OP under the cut

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(hopefully)  a videogame by robert j! lake

so i started working on this a year ago. i plan on getting it finished in time to release in 2020. that's about a six/seven year dev cycle if you count that, but alas.

this is gonna be my solo project.

so what the fuck is this? it's a game. or, at least, it will be. i'm not a programmer and i have no programming experience, but i'm a hell of a designer/animator/sound designer/writer/composer/producer and i'm gonna be building to the best of my ability a pile of assets and rulesets until i either find a programmer or force myself to learn. so this might not be the usualest of devlogs; especially at the beginning, there aren't gonna be programming/implementation updates, just animation/music/background/world layout/level design ones. as it is, i've got a good 5 percent of that work done. when i graduate next year, i'll have a lot more freetime to dedicate to nothing but that. actually turns out i might have found a programmer, and this devlog hasn't even been up for a day

and you're thinking "okay sure, maybe that's not how i'd do things, but rj, you haven't told me what you're actually building.

what is this?



answer: it's a metroidvania

kinda

not exactly. but that's close. that gets about 70 percent of the idea across. the thing is that it's a little more complex than that.

metroidvanias don't typically have multiple paths.

you run through super metroid in one direction. you may backtrack, and it may be one giant map, but there's still a general "correct" path through the game, despite there also being an abundance of secrets.

in this game, there are multiple upgrade trees.

so ishmael (that's the dude up there, all wigglin/jigglin) can find upgrades that allow access to new areas like samus can. the difference is that finding those upgrades means ishmael is locked out of other upgrades, and consequently other paths through the game. meaning there are going to be quite a few endings and a fuckload of ways to get through the game.

that's still only about 85 percent of the way towards explaining how this game works.

ON TOP OF THIS there's also a lot of

cough

ahem

"rogue"-"like"-ish "elements" (SIGH) throughout, but only in the most tenuous of ways. see there are a number of possible layout seeds (but each are hand-crafted) and dialogue seeds (for those dudes you can talk to) and etc, and each playthrough mixes and matches them. on top of this, there are a number of possible random events, starting points, etc that can change how certain areas work and even sometimes the outcome of a playthrough's final path.

---

but i'm doing this without any knowledge of programming to guide me. i know enough to know how to design a thing. i just can't build that design.

there are a lot of things i can do without that ability, though, and i'm gonna keep working as long as i can on those. i did prototype in unity actually but i can barely make things run and it was a mess. it was a workable enough mess that i know there's something here, but i'm not the person who (currently) can build the gears.

so this log, for now, will just be updates on other things.

in essence, i'm building the game backwards, from a fully-fledged idea inward. i already know more or less exactly how the final product should feel, play, look...and i'm fully capable of putting all of that together myself.

i'm gonna post a collaboration post thing once i

-have money to pay someone
or
-have enough assets/work done to prove i'm not just a quote unquote "ideas guy"

until then, have the weirdest devlog ever, i guess

as above, someone contacted me. we're still working out the details, but it seems pretty solid.

also, music (all still wip, unfortunately):


hit it

also this

at least one of the (probably quite a few) game over/ending tracks

thanks for indulging me

EDIT: a gif




tree

EDIT AGAIN: i should probably clean this first post up in a year or so