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[Kyle Preston]

Respect for doing most (if not all) of the work on your own. I started my own game a few months ago, and now with a few projects bumping into each other, I'm becoming very familiar with how much work and dedication it takes. Programming, designing, art and music/sound are not easy things to juggle around.  Best of luck sir, looking forward to seeing more.

Animation is excellent by the way!

[Seaport]

Just wanted to say how much I like your main character design, a really original idea ,animations are cool too
Not so sure background you showed a  couple of pages gels with main character though
,  it's quite bold colours and painterly in style in comparison. Maybe the less is more approach might help  anyway looking forward ho seeing more   

[rj]

THANK YOU EVERYONE. late thank yous to everyone.

A NOTE: this game is not dead and wasn't ever dead. i know i don't post here enough. that's because i am in my last semester of college, currently

that semester ends may 11, but even then i have some summer classes to attend to

but i'm still pluggin' away at the game. gonna do a check-in with mike soon and see what's up on his end

yup yup

[rj]

a lot of shit has happened in the year since. i'm kinda financially wrecked and trying to find a job which makes working on this difficult. but i'm not Hopeless. what's less encouraging is that i haven't heard from mike in forever and ever and ever. i emailed him over a year ago asking what was up and got no response and, you know, that's a struggle. also a struggle is i lost a good amount of work in a hard drive crash. i have a new workstation though, and now that i finally finished managing homestuck volume 10 i can come back to reality a bit, though, and talk about this at least briefly.

i have two interested people who might pick up the pieces and start a new build so that's cool. for now i'm going to focus on planet toad and crash heap project one (more on what that means in the next few weeks) and try to get stuff backgrounded for this.

i still want to work on this a little bit until i can floor it, though. i want to promise a new update every two weeks; let's see what happens?

bleh.

a lot of links in this thread are going to be broken now because i had to do some soundcloud cleanup but i'll work on getting them back up.

this game is getting made, though.

[rj]

vague update for the time being: looks like my brother is, amazingly, going to be coding the game for me for the time being, at least until he goes on active army duty. that sounds more insane in theory than in practice, because he's a part of the brand new, uh, Cyber Branch. that's literally the dumb name for it.

the long and short of it is he's as good at coding as i am bad. seriously this kid's a nutcase genius and has decided that ISHAB is being built in c++ from scratch and who am i to argue since he's already made more progress than my last test build in way less time.

now i need to find time to work on assets again. i've dusted off my old ishab sketchbook (filled with level designs etc) and am gonna start putting together the basis of the world again for the first time in ages.

[rj]

also of note: part of The Struggle is my cintiq is a useless brick. i've been making due with a cheapo wacom in the months since it died but though that's okay for painting it's awful for pixel art; the 1-1 touch is something i really need for ISHAB. so raising the money for a new one is a pretty big priority.

in the meantime i'll just struggle my way through it.

[ProgramGamer]

Glad to hear!

The more games being built in C++ the better imo hahaha

[standardcombo]

When someone says "ill make it from scratch in C++" That's a scary sentence because of the language flexibility--you don't know what kind of bat-shit-crazy-unmaintainable architecture  will come out.

Anyways, I think this is my first time posting in your topic. Good game concept/style, I hope it gets made.

[darthlupi]

I loved the main characters face.  He has a unique expression for a hero.
AND I really dig the short music clips you put up.
What are you composing in?

[rj]

yet another thanks first off to everyone; the response to this game even at this early stage never stops amazing me, honestly.

i'm building the music in fl studio primarily but i'm using a lot of weird tricks and synths to get there. there's actually an ukelele theme written for this that i kind of overwhelmingly identify with being the game's "theme" that i haven't even really recorded yet because i want to have a more solid mic setup first, as weird as that probably seems in context with the rest of the tunes

and yes c++ is a nightmare. here's hoping it's not too much of one?

[Zaeche]

((follow post))

The art style kind of reminds me of Jump! Ultimate Stars (that one game for the GBA that had the weird squares-with-faces) but much more refined.


Strangely, Ismael's face makes me think of JJBA and I don't even know why.

[rj]

maybe it's the eyebrows? mind you, i haven't watched jojo, despite every single human being i talk to on a regular basis having it as a part of their regular media consumption diet.

anyway. thanks for the follow! i should really clean up this devlog's front page and also my act in general.

my current goal is to get a solid internal VS build together by february, and have a public demo out (with a ks campaign?!??) december 2017. it's doable on my current schedule for sure but it's still a nightmare logistically to figure out. anyway. with that out of the way.


Update 9.7





My brother's made fast progress with the build. The video above (which he texted to me a month ago) is a bit outdated as there's not really any assets implemented and nothing concrete right now besides the pure functionality but (and again, I remind you, this is C++ from scratch) he's already gotten a system together whereby I can build levels using bitmaps; the engine interprets it with solid collision detection. the way it works is that black pixels are solid and red pixels are jump-through floors, and it's robust enough that I can build basically anything with it, and then we can overlay the actual level assets on top of that.

That in mind, I've been going through my old sketchbooks and have begun the unenviable process of actually laying the world out, at-scale, in photoshop. It is taking a very, very, very long time. The good news is that hopefully by the time that's done I'll have scrounged enough money together for a Cintiq and can get back into animating all of Ishmael's assets, which is the other big thing I have on my agenda before everything else.

I've also been focusing on writing the game. Writing this game is hard.

Writing any game is hard. Fuck, writing is hard. But writing this game is especially hard. There is a lot of writing to be done, and I am nowhere even close to scratching the surface.

I'm almost afraid I don't even have enough time left until my ideal release to finish writing the damn thing and I've been writing since fucking 2014. But I'll manage it.

If I'm not done writing the whole game by this time next year I'm gonna sit down and crunch until I've got it all, and then crunch again until I'm happy with it. I'm not in the business of being sloppy.

Anyway. This isn't a lot of progress, but it's a lot more than's been done this past year previous until recently so...cool?

[Zaeche]

I'm the same way--haven't read JJBA /yet/ but I know enough people who do to be exposed to it regularly enough.

Re the writing. I know you mentioned story-boarding sometime earlier, because I caught sight of the word as I skimmed through the posts. Have you tried a sort of comics/graphic novel approach to writing the game? I know it's been done (somewhere? Can't think of an example at the moment); it has the added bonus of laying out the scenes and the world as you go (allowing you to do multiple polish passes on it later).

If you're already doing that, nevermind! Carry on.

[rj]

There is some stuff I've boarded out but it honestly doesn't work for the bulk of the writing, like, for instance, dialogue trees, which are basically pure words.

The trick is basically just navigating and organizing an endless slog of text and not losing my mind over it. So far I've...mostly held together?

[rj]

9.8

fuck okay time to get my mojo back. i still don't have a new cintiq but the realization occurred to me that i could save time for when i do get one by prototyping whatever animations i could prototype using shortcut techniques.

a test for how i might go about that is this sprint right here:

there is a LOT wrong with it as it is now, but it's way, way, way closer than i expected since it's literally just modifying the standard run animation using skew and some rotation/transformation of certain elements of the legs. it won't take much cleanup to get this to final, and that's really encouraging.

[rj]

finally finally finally updated the OP for the first time in literally over a year to clean things up, moved original post down to the bottom of the first page.

in other news, i did the flip version of the sprint and also messed around with some of the leg positioning so that the animation as a whole a little smoother/more even. getting there!

[Zaeche]

There is some stuff I've boarded out but it honestly doesn't work for the bulk of the writing, like, for instance, dialogue trees, which are basically pure words.

The trick is basically just navigating and organizing an endless slog of text and not losing my mind over it. So far I've...mostly held together?

I hear you! I mostly deal with word-text myself but since you can draw, I thought perhaps you could work that magic, haha. Nice to see you're pushing to get back into the groove of things!

About the sprint animation! Somehow it feels it would suit the character better if Ishmael ran a bit more ... cartoonishly? Say, his head 'followed' his legs rather than the other way around; sort of a Looney Toons-esque sprint?

[Kyrillion]

I like the visuals and animation work is pretty good. Keep up with the good work

[gabrielcarioca]

Writing any game is hard. Fuck, writing is hard. But writing this game is especially hard. There is a lot of writing to be done, and I am nowhere even close to scratching the surface.

I'll agree with you, writing any game is hard. We are passing for some problems with it too, I know the struggle. What helped us a lot was watching talks in GDC Vault and searching some examples in the internet, but when you have to do it for your game is a whole different story.

Good luck with your game