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[pixeltrickery]

A House of Many Doors is an upcoming indie 2D RPG/explore-’em-up scheduled for release in mid-to-late 2016.

In A House of Many Doors you are an explorer, poet and spy, traversing and mapping the House – a vast parasite dimension that steals things and people from other worlds.

Exploring through a labyrinth of procedurally-generated architecture in a steampunk train propelled on mechanical legs, you will discover bizarre civilizations, lead your crew, level up in poetry, and cling to life and sanity.

Your Navigator will guide you towards 'Special Rooms' - rooms seeded amongst the procedurally-generated nightmarescape, in which you will discover hand-designed cities or ruins, wonders or horrors, each packed full of text-based quests, narrative and lore.

In a Special Room you will be able to gather supplies, plot intrigues, face challenges, and then launch yourself once more into the dark.

The House awaits you. But it does not welcome you.

Intriguing events, quests and lore are available at every new location. Uncover secrets. Choose your allegiances wisely.

A robust real-time-with-pause combat system, taking inspiration from FTL. Exchange barrages of artillery with enemy vehicles! Watch their Will to fight you decrease as their comrades die! But the lives of your own crew are also in danger...

A full cast of dozens of colourful characters are available to join your expedition, each with compelling dialogue and a unique quest.

Turn off your lights to avoid bandits and other vehicles, but risk losing your sanity and attracting the pale monsters that dwell in the dark.

Follow me on Twitter at @pixeltrickery for regular short updates.

I've been posting a devlog on my website for 3 months now, so you can catch up on the previous entries there before reading the new updates here.

I'm going to cross-post my devlog entries both here and on the website! Let me know what you think!

[pixeltrickery]

I was waiting for a response as I didn't want to double-post, but that hasn't happened so I'm going to cross-post last Friday's devlog here.

Check back later today for the Monday devlog!

I’m stupendously busy right now. My Kickstarter and Greenlight campaigns both launch on the 2nd, and I have plenty of different priorities to consider – along with my doubled update schedule, I also need to make a trailer, schedule emails, build my social media presence, and basically get myself out there as much as possible. Any help on this front is appreciated, dear reader. I also need to decide whether I want to unleash a demo alongside my Kickstarter – and if I do, I’ll need to clean up some things and add a very rough tutorial.

But I don’t want to neglect my devlog. This thing has already more than paid back the time I’ve put into it, and I’ve realized that over the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing more on ‘real life’ stuff, like the Kickstarter and founding Pixel Trickery, rather than what you all presumably want – actual game development progress.

Unfortunately, refer back to the first paragraph – August has been a month of very little dev progress and mostly getting things in gear. This is the problem with being a solo dev. I don’t have any marketing person to handle this stuff for me. It’s just me.

So what can I show you? Well, I realized that a lot of the basics of the game and how it plays have been neglected in this devlog. My updates have mostly been focusing on vehicle-to-vehicle combat, which – while it did take up most of July – is only going to be a small part of A House of Many Doors. The real focus of the game is on exploring the story, the setting, and the characters.

So this week, let’s dive into some lore. There’s a lot of stuff that I added to the game long ago but still haven’t mentioned yet.

The House

The House is a parasite dimension. No-one knows what it is, or why it exists, but it’s an endless plane of klepto-architecture which steals from other worlds. In the House’s high-ceilinged chambers, you can find everything that was once under a sun.

Some of the House’s rooms are vast. And in these rooms, civilizations cling like a scab – cities of extra-dimensional immigrants, clustered together for dubious safety. The player starts in one of these cities, the City of Keys, so called because it is the only city which can produce keys to the locked doors of the House.

A House of Many Doors will involve exploration of this setting – which offers all the strangeness of a thousand alien worlds.

The gods

There are five essential ambitions which the player will be able to pursue in the course of the game – exploration, poetry, journalism, espionage, and religion. You’ve already seen some of the poetry.

So today I want to talk about religion.

No, I’m not going to start handing out pamphlets. Sit back down.

The gods of the House are very, very real. They were stolen from their worlds, just like everyone else in the House, and they’re just as bewildered by what happened to them. In fact, the House seems to have a special fondness for kidnapping gods – gods are common as fleas and twice as annoying.

In the City of Keys, citizens are only permitted to worship nine gods – these are known as the Sanctioned. I won’t go through all of them right now, but I want to show you some screenshots of how the player and the gods can interact, so I’ll drop a little exposition on you. One of the Sanctioned Gods is Scorthidion, the Coagulant God, the Mountainous Scab. Scorthidion is a congealed divine mass, said to have healed a scar in the fabric of reality.

Once they’ve proven their devotion to Scorthidion, or to any of the other Sanctioned gods, the player is invited by that god’s church to act a a missionary and convert distant civilizations to their chosen deity. This, of course, can be extremely dangerous. Most civilizations in the House have other gods which they much prefer to follow, and don’t take kindly to your patronizing divine saviour bullshit. And there is at least one civilization that routinely kills gods for sport.

But acting as a missionary has its benefits – you can attract your god’s Scrutiny, which eventually may result in you being granted a Favour. And having a god’s Favour is useful, both mechanically (it will increase one of your stats) and for providing unexpected narrative benefits. Of course, to successfully gain Favour, you must propitiate that god in an elaborate ritual – which requires several resources, and may go very badly wrong.

Be warned – the gods are fickle. It is far easier to earn a god’s Reproach than their Scrutiny or their Favour. And of course, earning too much Reproach will have serious repercussions.

[pixeltrickery]

Two shorter updates this week, rather than one long one. This one is especially short, though, because over the last weekend I've been working on nothing but the trailer – which I think is good, but it's awaiting feedback from some trusted friends before I post it publicly.

The process of working on the trailer has been really interesting, though. I uncovered a lot of bugs, which is partly why it took so long to make – for example, I found something that was more of a feature than a bug, but which was having unintended side-effects in the rest of my code. It was a tiny segment of code, hidden away at the bottom of an unrelated script, which was making it impossible to increase the kinetopede's speed.

So how the hell did I miss this? Usually I'm pretty good at spotting this kind of thing. Interestingly, I don't think the problem is anything to do with programming – it's a combination of psychological factors which meant I never noticed the bug in the first place.

I never realized that the kinetopede's speed was limited.

This is the big one. I couldn't solve the bug because I was having trouble spotting that it was a bug. All of the changes I made to the speed were very incremental, and when I played the game, I looked very closely at the tiny steam-train chugging along and convinced myself that there was a measurable difference in speed.

This is confirmation bias at its finest – I made a small change, and because I expected to see that change having an effect, I convinced myself that the effect was there. I only noticed there was a problem when the gap between my perception and the reality became too great – I more than doubled the speed so I could whiz around and find interesting things for the trailer, yet it was still moving along at the same sedate pace! Only at this point did I even realize there was a problem.

I worded the comments badly.

The MaximumSpeed code is a CRUCIAL bit of code in terms of how the game feels and plays, but for some reason – back when I was still very much new to coding – I sandwiched it halfway down the player object and then wrapped it up inside an unrelated script.

But it wasn't lost entirely. I've looked over that script many times, but my eyes just slipped right over this crucial bit of code at the bottom. And you know why? Because I worded the comments badly, and it had the psychological effect of making my brain turn off almost instantly.

Let's look at that piece of code again.

See the word “just” there?

That word is a bastard. Every time I got to this bit of code, I'd read the comment, and some idiot part of my brain would think, "oh, it's 'just' keeping the speed under control. That seems reasonable! Time to move onto the next thing."

This 'helpful' comment managed to actually completely obfuscate the code's actual purpose. What does "keeping the speed under control" mean, anyway? That could mean that it represents a distant theoretical limit, accounting for speed upgrades which I haven't yet added to the game. I think that was what I assumed it meant, somewhere in my addled little head. But really the word "just" was stopping me thinking about it even to that extent.

3. I failed to 'clean up' what I thought was an abandoned variable.

When I first started coding, I determined the speed of an object by dividing a large number by the room_speed. This was because I misunderstood the nature of the room_speed function – I had assumed that it meant the game's FPS, and my intention was to ensure the game played smoother even if it slipped under 60 FPS.

Unfortunately, room_speed didn't work the way I thought it did (I now use the fps_real function to achieve the desired result). So I changed all the variables which used it, with the exception of one – which I assumed was a legacy variable, unused in the main program, but which I was too lazy to clean up. I'll delete that later, I always thought when I noticed it, usually because I was busy thinking about a different problem.

Turns out, if I'd deleted that variable, the game would have crashed. It was still very much in use – and cleaning it up, as I should have done from the start, would have sent me down a rabbit-hole which would eventually lead to the culprit code.

Anyway, that's a little snippet of the bug-fixing process. That bug, and many other less interesting ones, have now been laid to rest. Hopefully I'll be able to post the trailer up here on Thursday! See you then!

[pixeltrickery]

With the upcoming Kickstarter consuming my time, and in the absence of much dev progress because of that, it’s going to be a much more personal entry than usual. I want to talk about the process of becoming a full-time indie developer.

So far, the experience has been equal parts exhilarating and terrifying.

For a long time I’ve wanted, very badly, with a kind of sick longing that lives in my stomach, to make writing stories my career. Games are a way of delivering a story that I find really interesting, that I want to explore – and that I feel has a lot of untapped potential, too.

Pixel Trickery doesn’t feel like a proper company – it’s just me – but if it is, then that company’s ethos is that there should be more indie games taking all the imagination and invention I see applied to mechanics and art, and applying that to how they tell their stories as well. I’m not suggesting there isn’t good writing out there – there certainly is, in abundance – but it’s a slightly rarer beast.

So now I’m doing it – I’m making a game with writing and a story, as a job! I’m living the dream! That should be fantastic, right?

Well, yes. But it has also turned out to be very, very scary. Tack on a couple more ‘veries’ there, depending on what mood I’m in and what day it is. I’m learning a lot of things very quickly.

The importance of marketing, which I’d understood only in an academic way, has become hugely and terrifyingly tangible. The difficulty of doing it well has been even more of a surprise.

And it turns out that working from home is almost as difficult as developing the game in conjunction with a job – for very different reasons. Of course, before I had stability and certainty – terrible as my job was, and precarious as it frequently seemed, I at least knew that something was coming in every month to keep me going.

Now I don’t have that, which makes me determined to work as hard as possible for as long as possible. But I can’t do that, either. I need to remember to go outside, to socialize, to spend time with family and friends, to read books. I want to make a game. And it’s an ambitious game for one person to make. But I don’t want to be consumed by the process of making it – and I don’t want to burn out halfway through.

Two months ago it seemed very easy to say ‘I’ll do a Kickstarter,’ but now the Kickstarter looms ahead like an iceberg, waiting for my nervous little Titanic to stray into its waters. I won’t be asking for a huge amount of money. My goal is £4000 (approximately $6000), enough to pay some of my living costs and the game’s soundtrack.

Let’s hit that iceberg and burst through to the other side, shall we?

Because I’m not a fan of the alternative.

[pixeltrickery]

The game’s very first trailer is now live. This is not a drill. Check it out here!



I have managed to find a truly fantastic artist who has agreed to work on the game’s illustrations. Say hello to Catherine Unger – she’s drawn some of the art already for the Kickstarter!

I think her gorgeous art and distinctive style are going to absolutely transform the aesthetic of the game, and make everything a million times prettier.

The Kickstarter begins TOMORROW. If you have any friends who are also interested in the indie game scene, let them know about the game – I’d appreciate it so, so much!