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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsSuper Daryl Deluxe - A comedy action-RPG
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Codebread
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« on: September 19, 2015, 07:12:45 PM »


Update!

Steam "Coming Soon" page is up: STEAM PAGE

------------------------------

Super Daryl Deluxe is a 2D Action-RPG with a heavy focus on humor and customizable combat. You play as Daryl Whitelaw, a new student at Water Falls High School, a school that has been secretly taken over by a devious self-help author that plans to use the school as a front for an evil brainwashing scheme that will annihilate proper society as we know it.
 
On his quest to make friends Daryl will struggle to climb the social ladder, save a contraband textbook business, and tutor a princess locked deep in the heart of the school. His exploits will send him through time and worlds unknown where history and fiction mingle and come to life. He will gain access to dozens of unique abilities and be able to level them up, evolve them, and create hundreds of different four-skill combinations to blast his way through hordes of enemies and bosses, transforming the combat system as he goes.
 
With the help of these powers, and an unlikely friendship with the school’s Janitor, he just might be able to uncover the secrets of his new high school and put an end to the evil self-help plot that threatens it. He’ll be the most popular kid in school in no time... and he might even save the world.















Hey guys! My name is Gary, and I’m a co-creator of SDD. I’ve been working with my best friend, let’s call him Dan, on this game for about three years now. I’m going to do my best to explain the major parts of the game in this original post and then in later posts I’ll talk about the game’s history and take a deeper look at certain mechanics.

Features

- Six hilarious chapters following a weird new kid being taken advantage of at every turn by his peers while he accidentally saves the school from brainwashing at the hands of an evil self-help author

- A huge amount of side quests and storylines to complement the overarching storyline. Take a break from saving the world to help build a stolen-textbook business, bury dead pets, and deal with Death’s high school football gambling problem


- Tons of items in the form of equipment, loot, and quest objectives. Give Daryl the best equipment for slaying hordes of enemies and making friends while you sell yesterday’s items to the hundreds of mysterious Trenchcoat Kids throughout the school


- Break into other student’s lockers and ste--borrow their useful belongings to aid you on your quest to make friends

- A customizable combat system that spans across many playstyles, that grows and evolves as you use it

- A huge cast of unique characters and enemies to meet and slaughter (Respectively, of course)

- An in-depth journal and character/enemy biographies for anyone interested in the story and lore


The Gameplay

The general gameplay flow of the game is as follows:

  • Start a new chapter
  • Get handed a stupid task with an equally stupid reward
  • Go to one of the classrooms inside of the school, which is actually an alternate dimension with a bunch of crazy antics and monsters inside it
  • Get sidetracked doing stuff in the classrooms, like bailing Julius Caesar out of his debt to Genghis Khan
  • (Optional) Do a bunch of side quests and collect bomb-ass items
  • Fight a boss
  • Complete your main task
  • Chapter ends

We shake things up of course, but this is what you should expect from each chapter of the game.

The Rest
We’ve done a lot of fat-trimming since we began the project, and a lot of features didn’t make it in. The game was just too feature-heavy and didn’t mesh together well. That being said, the combat is joined by other fun RPG-esque things, like quests, optional bosses, puzzles, and things to collect. We do our best to tie everything into the wacky world that Daryl lives in, so nothing will feel like pointless filler to those that are seeking out the full story and lore.

Sound and Music

After our Kickstarter we hired Miles (our sound designer) and Alan (our composer) to breathe some life into the game we had created. They’ve done a wonderful job so far, and you can hear some of their work in the trailers posted above.

Here are some links to other sources of information:
Website
Twitter
Facebook

EDIT: I'm splitting this post up into multiple parts to make it a little less intimidating. It was super long before.
« Last Edit: January 23, 2017, 08:28:10 AM by Codebread » Logged
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« Reply #1 on: September 21, 2015, 10:59:42 AM »

The Combat

Daryl is going to need all the help he can get to stop those dastardly self-help authors. Luckily he got his grimy paws on a powerful book that gives him unexplainable powers.
Find Textbooks throughout the school to purchase new abilities and equip up to four at a time to create your own method of dispatching your mortal enemies.
With dozens of powers spanning across multiple play-styles to choose from, all with the ability to gain experience, level up, and transform as they are used, Daryl will have access to hundreds of different skill combinations. Find one that tickles your fancy, level it up, and decimate your foes!


The gameplay in Super Daryl Deluxe focuses mostly around the customizable combat mechanics. As you progress through the story you will unlock new abilities for purchase, which can be bought and equipped in Daryl’s locker. At any given moment you can have four skills equipped. Because the skills vary greatly in use and playstyle, you will be able to create skillsets for virtually any situation or gameplay preference.


The skills themselves gain experience as you kill enemies, which will allow them to rank up and transform. Your puny wooden mallet might one day be a rhino on a stick, if you work hard enough. I’ve added level requirements for each skill, and to each rank of the skill, which will allow earlier skills to scale into the later chapters of the game, as long as Daryl has leveled up. I realize that some players will simply prefer to use some of the inherently weaker, early skills, and I hope to make those skills viable later on.







So far we’ve incorporated a lot of hack-n-slash, ranged, and comboing mechanics in our skills, but we intend to have more strategic abilities in the future. It’s easier for me to test the current style of skills because it’s what I prefer to use.

I said above that you purchase and equip skills at Daryl’s locker. I like locking the player into their choice of skills until they decide to go back and change them, but this presents a problem as Daryl’s locker exists only in one spot in the school while the world around him is enormous. To make it so the player doesn’t have to travel all the way back to his locker to swap out his abilities, we created a terrifying locker monster that spawns in certain areas and can be used as if it were Daryl’s real locker.




As for who Daryl will be dispatching with his handy set of newfound powers, we’ve designed and created around 20 unique enemies and bosses so far with plans to add many more. I’m particularly happy with how different each enemy is, in both visual design and behavior. I’ll do a more in-depth look at enemies in the future.









The game’s pace bounces between exploring new areas, doing quests, and killing various enemies to completely chaotic massacre-fests.
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« Reply #2 on: September 21, 2015, 11:08:30 AM »

The Characters

There are a lot of weird people in high school, and Water Falls is no exception.
Meet a wide cast of characters - ranging from kind of normal to downright crazy - and listen to what they have to say. Usually it involves asking you to go out of your way to do something ridiculous for them, like collecting broken glass or fighting giant fire-breathing mountain rats. But hey, you have to make friends somehow.


Dan and I spent a long time coming up with the core group of main characters and deciding what their place was going to be in the game. We needed certain roles to be filled of course, but we also needed a ton of other characters to give the school life and give out weird side quests. Below are some of the game’s characters to give you a taste of the world we’re building.



Daryl Whitelaw

This is you. Daryl is the new student at Water Falls High School. He’s weird, silent, noodly, and wears an orange headband. We assume that deep down all he really wants is to make friends, but maybe he just enjoys doing a bunch of meaningless tasks for ungrateful teenagers. In any case, he’ll stop at nothing to see to it that every task in WFHS is answered.



Paul and Alan

Paul (Right) and Alan(Left) are two young entrepreneurs and the first students that Daryl meets in WFHS. They are sly, manipulative, and mostly harmless in a sort of dumb, chaotic way. They want to start their own business of selling stolen textbooks to students, but there’s a problem: Trenchcoat Kid has been doing it for a while now and is the school’s most trusted source of contraband textbooks.

Luckily for Paul and Alan, Daryl is new and desperate for friends. The two of them quickly manipulate Daryl into working for them in exchange for pages out of a self-help book that they took from the Principal’s office. A book that they promise will help make him a ton of friends. A book that soon becomes the center of a lot of attention at Water Falls High School...



Trenchcoat Kid

The school’s main source of blackmarket items and contraband. No one knows exactly who Trenchcoat Kid is, or what he looks like. Some say that he doesn’t even exist, and that the closest you’ll get to him are the hundreds of look-alikes that are scattered around the school, selling old markers and stolen textbooks. Whatever the case, he’s a thorn in Paul and Alan’s side, although he and his employees could prove useful for the right price.



The Janitor

The Janitor used to be a world-famous boxing champion, but has since retired to live a solitary life as the school janitor. When the school came under the rule of an evil self-help author trying to take over the world, he was the only one able to resist the brainwashing due to the many concussions he received throughout his career as “The Cleaner”.  Now he spends every day locked in the Custodial Closet, waiting for someone to come by who might just be brain damaged enough to resist the brainwashing as well.



Dwarves and Druids Players

D&D is popular at Water Falls High School, and these dorks will tell you all about it. They’re going to have all sorts of useful tips for Daryl to get started as a Dwarves and Druids player. It’s too bad that none of them can agree on what the most important rule is.
« Last Edit: September 21, 2015, 11:14:41 AM by Codebread » Logged
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« Reply #3 on: September 21, 2015, 11:09:36 AM »

The World


Super Daryl Deluxe takes place primarily inside of Water Falls High School, a bleak, colorless prison of a school with a new principal, a neglectful cafeteria chef, and a lot of closed-down classrooms. In fact, only one small section of the game takes place outside of the school while Daryl attends an angsty barn party.


A handful of classrooms have been locked down and transformed into huge alternate dimensions based on their classroom’s subject. The History classroom is a chaotic mixture of major historical events and characters, the Science room is a neon labyrinth of dangerous science equipment, the Literature room is a weird collage of famous writings, and the Art & Music room is...well, Beethoven is there. And so is Da Vinci. There are ghosts playing sousaphones, too, if you’re into that.




Being a 2D game, the maps can really only have vertical and horizontal elements. I try to have a balance between flat maps that allow for intense combat, and maps with stuff to climb on and explore. This causes some challenges with placing objects in the world, since we have so many things going on at once (NPCs, Map Quest Signs, Treasure Chests, Outhouses, etc), but the sheer number of areas that we have created for our universe has made it easy to spread things out.




To speed up the development process I created an in-game level editor so I could design and create maps while also testing them out. It allows me to place platforms as well as choose their size, type (used for footstep sounds), whether you can pass through it or not, and whether or not enemies can spawn on them. This sped up map development considerably, since I can test in real time as opposed to making changes in an external program and import the maps into the game (which is how I used to do it).


Saving

I originally wanted people to have to go to specific save points to save, because I was new to programming at the time and thought this would be the easiest way to save a game state: by not worrying about specific maps and what’s going on around the player. So I came up with the idea of saving inside of the school’s bathrooms.


Since then we’ve expanded the idea by adding outhouses throughout the game’s worlds where the player can save.


We’re sticking with the idea now because it’s kind of goofy and fits the theme well, despite being able to have auto-saving if we really wanted to. It also allows players to develop strategies around saving (which also restores you to full health).
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« Reply #4 on: September 21, 2015, 11:17:26 AM »

History

I’ll keep this brief since it isn’t really the point of a devlog, but we’re three years in and I think that it will helpful to explain how development has progressed so far.

Dan and I started this when we were sophomores in college, about 3 years ago. I wanted to make a game based around a bleak, depressing high school, but I really enjoyed fast paced action RPGs. Dan and I have been friends since middle school and a lot of our friendship involved trying to make people laugh, so we combined all of these things into Super Daryl Deluxe (At the time titled, ‘I Survived’).

It started out pretty crude, as most game projects probably do. A lot of features were added just for the sake of adding them, and a lot of stuff was left out because I wasn’t sure how to go about programming it.

I started with Microsoft XNA and a blank slate. Making a box move, giving it a platform and simple physics. Adding maps and other characters that can talk. I slowly built a game engine to suit my needs.


This is the oldest screenshot I have of the game. It had NPCs, moving enemies, maps, platforms and some basic physics, the 4-skill combat system, and an inventory that you could open and drag around the screen. Obviously this was pretty far along already, and I took a lot of inspiration from 2D MMOs (hence the floating inventory screen and gigantic HUD). At this point I had been using my own art, or art that I found randomly on google.


Around this point I had roped Dan into the equation and he began designing our main character, who we quickly named, “Daryl Whitelaw”.

We wanted a character that was the epitome of a gross, weird, new kid. We went through several character designs for Daryl, but they stayed mostly the same. The art style changed a lot though, while we tried to find a style that fit our game’s atmosphere while staying reasonable for a single artist




Dan experimented with drawing Daryl outside of the game, scanning it in, and doing small touch-ups in photoshop. The end result looked neat, but it wasn’t something we wanted to stick with. After a few more alterations we ended up with what we have now.


Bonus picture of how the game used to look with fully colored characters. We moved away from this artstyle to separate ourselves from other games and embrace a really unique look, but also because one artist having to draw and fully color everything was a large undertaking and we thought it was best to make things simpler. In retrospect, I’m very glad we did that.

Eventually we found our footing and worked for a while on a vertical slice of the game, a small interlude that takes place at a barn party. We did this with the hope of launching a Kickstarter, which we did soon after we completed that short part of the game.




Our goal was for $7000, which would give us enough to hire a couple of guys for sound and give us some wiggle room for other stuff. Long story short, we were successfully funded, but we didn’t receive a lot of coverage due to our lack of sound and music. People didn’t want to make videos about a silent game.

We soon hired Miles and Alan, who have been a great addition and a perfect way to round off the Super Daryl Deluxe team.

My favorite thing to come out of the Kickstarter (besides the other half of our team) was the reaction to our $100 tier, which was to become a character in the game. Here are a few we have made since then:


Each Kickstarter NPC comes with a series of side quests for maximum Daryl fun.

Around our Kickstarter is when we started working with MAGIC Spell Studios at our college, and they acted as consultants and partners in our game development quest. They provided us with industry knowledge, connections, and other useful stuff that people always take for granted.

It was around this time that I switched from XNA to Monogame, which was a huge upgrade for us. It runs much smoother and makes it very easy for other people to play the game on their own computers.

We felt that our current demo didn’t showcase our vision for the game’s hectic combat system well enough, so we began working on a larger slice of the game from around the end of Chapter 2. It takes place at a time when Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar form a super army and try to stop a warlord from taking over the entire History room. Daryl leads the charge and has to lay waste to an enemy fort then protect a poorly built trojan horse (made from a hydrogen bomb) as it slowly wheels its way into the center of the fort to blow it to smithereens.


Just in time, too, because it was through MAGIC that we went to GDC 2015 and participated in the Intel University Games Showcase, where we won first place in Best Visual Quality.

A week or so later we were contacted by Steam and set up as partners, allowing us to distribute our game through their platform.


We haven’t gone public on Steam yet, but our little private store page is there, half finished, waiting for us.

Our next adventure brought us out to San Francisco again for the Microsoft Imagine Cup, where we won first place in the United States finals.

Since then, tired with how long developing to a very polished level was taking us, we decided to run through the entire game a create it at an alpha level, allowing us to playtest to a much larger extent and see what should we taken out and what should be added.

And that’s where we are now. We have a fully complete and polished Prologue chapter, an alpha-level Chapter 1, and half of Chapter 2 at alpha-level. There is also the small chunk of gameplay from Chapter 2 that is fully polished and completed from our GDC demo.

We’re continuing to work on the rest of CH2 and hope to be finished soon. After that we will move onto Chapters 3, 4, and 5, before going back through and polishing everything, adding optional content, etc.

On the business side of things we just formed our LLC, “Dan & Gary Games”, and will be trying to obtain a publisher in the very near future.

Phew. It's over. Now I can start updating things as I add them. Again, I skipped over a lot of stuff. If there are things that I didn't make very clear, or just something that you're curious about, just ask! I look forward to hearing feedback and posting updates on what we’re currently up to!
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« Reply #5 on: September 21, 2015, 11:18:15 AM »

This week I'm working on a larger dungeon inside of the History room. We're introducing spike traps and the anubis warrior enemies at this part of the game.


Although a lot of the world is open and allows you to explore, this particular area is much more reminiscent of older dungeon crawling games that require you to solve puzzles and collect items to progress. It's a pyramid, so it's somewhat maze-like, and it has a multiple floors with various unique gameplay elements that don't exist elsewhere in the game, like really dark maps only lit by a few torches. It's looking to be about 50 rooms in total.
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« Reply #6 on: September 21, 2015, 11:51:17 AM »

the animations of this game are amazing  Kiss
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« Reply #7 on: September 21, 2015, 11:55:08 AM »

Thank you! Dan does a great job. He taught himself to animate for this game, actually.
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« Reply #8 on: September 26, 2015, 06:01:27 PM »

This week was really hectic at my job so I barely got any work done, but here are a few new characters from this chapter of the game.

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« Reply #9 on: October 04, 2015, 10:08:43 AM »

Still chugging away at the pyramid dungeon. We added pyramid themed breakables and a new object that can be interacted with: exploding dandelions. Once Daryl obtains a certain item he can activate the flowers, causing them to violently explode. They can be used to destroy walls, objects, and enemies. They're going to be a vital part of navigating through the pyramid levels, as they can tear down obstacles in your path and open up new doors. They even chain together like exploding dominoes.


Exploding flowers only grow in the pyramid, so you won't see them naturally outside of this dungeon. However, I'm thinking of adding a skill to the game that allows Daryl to plant them himself. I'm thinking as it levels up it will allow you to plant more flowers, let them last longer, and have them do more damage with a larger explosion radius.
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« Reply #10 on: October 04, 2015, 11:41:27 AM »

I'm intrigued for sure! Animations look great and well, don't have anything useful to say right now than that I will follow with interest!
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« Reply #11 on: October 05, 2015, 06:32:55 PM »

I'm intrigued for sure! Animations look great and well, don't have anything useful to say right now than that I will follow with interest!

Thanks for following! I'm sure you'll find something to call me out on in the future. Like maybe asking why our story has so many loopholes and why that student just turned into a giant gorilla.


As for today, well, I did something that I never thought I would do. I added a fifth skill slot. Now, I know what you're all thinking:

"But Gary, Daryl was meant to only have four abilities at a time! It's the core game mechanic! You can't just go changing something that isn't broken three years into development!"

Or maybe that's just my subconscious telling me to change it back. Regardless, I have a sort of sick feeling in my stomach from doing it. It's been so long since I created that four-skill feature that having anything different is weird. But, let me tell you why I did it.

The purpose of the combat system is to allow players to mix and match dozens of different skills, all varying in playstyle, to let them find something that they really love using. Because there are only four skill slots, I have to make sure that each skill has enough utility/damage output to justify it being included in the four-skill combination that the player is constructing. This means any extremely simple skills are terminated very early on in the design process.

To change course quickly, one design issue I've had to deal with since the start is Daryl's tall, noodley stature. For an action game that often relies on fast-paced combat, we have a frustratingly large target for enemies to hit. If I wanted to do something that involved a bunch of obstacles being shot around the room for Daryl to jump through and avoid, I simply can't do it very easily...he's too big and doesn't have enough mobility. I suppose if I were to zoom the camera out far enough to give the player some more visual room to work with it would be possible, but that's a discussion for another time. The point is: Daryl is large and doesn't have much mobility outside of sprinting around like a plastic bag waving in the wind.


This is why players found solace in a very early skill: Quick Retort. Quick Retort is a dashing ability that shoots Daryl in the direction he is facing, dealing damage to and stopping at the first enemy he hits, or after a short time. The speed and distance increases as it levels up, offering a great way to move around, dodge attacks, and be an overall badass.

The problem is it had too much utility and almost no damage. You wanted to keep it for the mobility that it gave you, but it meant you were relying on only three skills to deal real damage. This didn't seem like a good trade just to give Daryl a nice escape/initiate, so I decided to add the skill to Daryl's arsenal permanently (once he unlocks it in the story). By double tapping the left- or right- arrow Daryl will be able to use the skill as if it was part of his four-skill combination. Hopefully this will be a fun addition to the core gameplay.


I'm not entirely sure of the specifics yet, like how it's going to level up for instance. The other skills level up by killing enemies while you have the particular skill equipped. Maybe this will level up the same way, but slowly, to make up for it always being equipped. Another option is to level it up with the player, since it's kind of a passive ability anyway. Another option I toyed with was making a new NPC that sold you upgrades for the skill, but I think that's getting a bit too far away from the game's norm.

Anyway, this is a rather lengthy and impromptu post about a small crisis I've been having the last two days. Enjoy!
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« Reply #12 on: October 11, 2015, 11:54:57 AM »

We've switched gears a bit and have begun working on the Literature classroom, where you will explore a handful of classic tales as you battle against the Literature Honors Student and her minions. The pyramid dungeon is nearly done anyway, but we decided that it makes more sense for Daryl to follow the Literature quest-line first as it falls more in line with other major character's motivations and things happening in the world.

The Literature room is a bit different than the other rooms. It has a large main area, tentatively named Tall Tale Terrace, where giant books extend from the ground like flat, uneven buildings. The stories from inside of these books are slowly bleeding out into the world, creating a quickly changing landscape that houses multiple settings. Daryl will have to go inside each of these book worlds as the game progresses in hope of becoming the coolest dude around.

To start we have Middle Earth. These maps are small and there are only a few of them, so we've only created one new enemy type for them: Tree Ents.

Tree Ents are normally passive, but they'll smash the crap out of you if you provoke them. The maps themselves are going to work as an introduction to the Literature room, but there are a few side quests and a map quest associated with them.

Keep in mind that the background/environment art is still alpha-level. You'll see the same level of polish in these that you can see in the fully completed maps in the future.





I'm happy with the way the Ents turned out. In keeping with our tradition of making things as easy as possible for development, we made them sink into the ground after their attack and grow back out exactly where they started. It's funny and saves on art development.

It's also particularly goofy when you get a group of them attacking you.

« Last Edit: October 11, 2015, 12:02:50 PM by Codebread » Logged
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« Reply #13 on: October 11, 2015, 12:39:30 PM »

This game looks amazing!  Hand Money Left Hand Money Right
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« Reply #14 on: October 18, 2015, 06:34:45 PM »

This game looks amazing!  Hand Money Left Hand Money Right

Thank you! I hope future updates making it amazing-er!

Speaking of...

I'm working on a new area of the Literature room, a story arc based on A Christmas Carol. For this we have an entire new zone mapped out, Scrooge's Mansion, and along with it are some new gameplay elements and enemies.

The Mansion area will be somewhat linear with only a few secrets to find. I want it to be focused on the unique enemies and obstacles that are presented, along with the more immediate goals. Of course there are still a few optional things for the player to find and do if they so choose.

Scrooge's Mansion

The area is overrun with ghosts and you have to deal with them! They are floating balls of smoke that will attack you if you provoke them, and they can't be hurt. Luckily there are mysterious green lights that exist throughout the mansion, and the ghosts reveal their true selves when they are illuminated by the green light. The more illuminated they are, the more solid they become.


The ghosts can only be hit when they are at least partially illuminated. Conversely, they can only use a basic, weaker attack if they aren't near any light. Once an enemy is partially illuminated they will begin to appear and can be damaged. The amount of damage you deal to them increases depending on how illuminated they are.


There are three types of ghosts, each behaving mostly the same. They have different attributes and attacks, but they all follow the same light/illumination physics. In the next GIF you can see their "floating ball of smoke" form attacks, and their illuminated forms.


Now that the enemies for this area are created we will spend a while creating the entire area and getting the story all ready to go. I have a couple of side quest ideas for the area as well, and I think they're going to be hilarious.

The enemies:


I realize that because we're so far along in the game already that it's tough to sort of jump on board with development updates. I'm just updating from where we are right now, but it might leave a lot of questions open about what's actually going on with the game as a whole. Why is Daryl in a weird classroom that doubles as an alternate dimension? How do all of these random areas connect to the main story? Why doesn't Daryl ever speak?

I might start doing retroactive updates about certain game features, like the Questing system, the combat system, some recurring NPCs. It seems like it would be fun, and a good way to introduce new people to the game piece by piece. All development going forward is going to be game content in the form of enemies, items, skills, characters, maps, and story. It will make for a lot of diverse updates I hope.

In the mean time, feel free to ask about anything!
« Last Edit: October 18, 2015, 06:53:19 PM by Codebread » Logged
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« Reply #15 on: October 27, 2015, 06:00:00 AM »

I was out of town (and consequently away from my computer) for half of last week, so I didn't get as much done as I would have liked.

I'm still working on building up the Christmas Carol section of the Literature room. We have all of the alpha-level art in, and all of the rooms have been created. Now comes the tedious part of filling it all in with enemies, breakable objects, items, NPCs, and hidden stuff. I always find this to be the most difficult part of world building...the level design is tough, but populating the maps with all of this stuff is a tricky balance. It's really easy to put too much stuff in the maps, and it's equally as easy to leave them sort of barren and uninteresting. It's something that only a lot of playtesting can get right.

Anyway, there will be a mini boss in this section as well, and it's going to be pretty significant to the story. I hope I can get her designed and implemented soon; we're pushing for the end of November for the completion of this chapter. It's vital that we get this chapter right because it sets up the story for the rest of the game.

I don't have much to show off right now visually, so here's an image of Caesar partying hard like he was born to do:

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« Reply #16 on: November 01, 2015, 03:04:44 PM »

I think the thing I dislike the most about development so far has been making the bosses. It takes forever, they're hard to get right, and they typically have to be done before I get the art for them (which is the opposite of what we do for regular enemies), which makes it even more difficult.

I say this because I've spent the last couple of days creating a new boss that completely breaks the game's combat mechanics up to this point. It hovers around defying gravity, can teleport, and has very little idle time that lets you get free hits in. And, unlike a lot of the bosses up until this point, it doesn't have a gimmicky weakness that you have to exploit. It's just a plain ol' brawl that Daryl is going to have to power through.


Right now we only have a static image for the concept, but the mechanics of the fight are complete until I get the final art. She's going to be able to control some sort of energy or electricity which she uses to blast daryl from short distances and, occasionally, from across the room. I'm thinking she'll have chains that she uses as whips (since she dresses as the Ghost of Marley when you first meet her).

The really difficult part with creating this boss was making it so she could essentially hover around without gravity affecting her. I knew that I wanted teleportation to play a major role also, and that was a new one for Super Daryl Deluxe. Up until now no creature, aside from flying enemies like crows and buzzards, have ignored gravity. I didn't want her to behave like a bird though so I had to come up with something completely new.


You can see me testing the fight out in these gifs. The red boxes are her attacks, the blue is her hitbox, and the green signals her flinching, which means her current attack/movement is cancelled.

I'm hoping that she isn't too difficult. I wanted a really intense fight that strikes fear into the player for what's to come, as she's the first glimpse the player gets of the main antagonists.

I'd welcome all feedback on her concept and the fight, I'm still a bit unsure of it myself. And I hope we can get the art in for her within the next couple of weeks to really get the full effect.
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« Reply #17 on: November 10, 2015, 02:13:42 PM »

Chapter 2 is coming together nicely. I think we're about 85% done with the content of the chapter, with just a couple of bosses and some smaller stuff left to add.

But that also means a lot of balancing and playtesting. Also, I need to add new Equipment, Quests, NPCs, and skills. It actually sounds like more work than it actually is, though.

I've been working on a few side quests that involve Daryl investigating dimensional rifts in the classrooms. Sometimes he will run across a giant portal with an NPC standing next to it. The NPC asks Daryl to close the portal in return for a reward.


Inside the portals are small instances where different areas of the game are mashed together, like the Desert area and Battlefield area from the History classroom. Daryl will have a certain amount of time to complete an objective before the portal spits him back out and reseting his progress.


These are fun to make because they let me manipulate the environment in even odder ways, and I can introduce enemy combinations that we would normally never have.

The goals are going to range from clearing the map of enemies, to solving puzzles, to racing through the map before the time runs out. We'll see how it goes. If Daryl finishes in time the portal is healed and the NPC gives him the reward. Everyone wins!

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« Reply #18 on: November 24, 2015, 08:42:55 AM »

I've been doing a lot of game balancing and tweaking for the latest chapter, and Dan has just sent me some very rough art for the boss I posted about a couple of updates ago.

Because I've been adding other content to this chapter I haven't had the chance to actually swap her animations in yet to see how they will work out, but I do have a few gifs of them that I'll show off.



The next step is to actually add these to the game to make sure the timing and range is correct for all of them, then Dan will go ahead and create the final art for her. In the meantime I'll continue finalizing the content for this part of the game.

For reference, here is the final design we settled on for her character:

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« Reply #19 on: December 07, 2015, 05:29:17 PM »

A pretty exciting update:

We entered the Taco Bell Indie Game Garage back in September, and we were one of the winners! We won $500 in Taco Bell gift cards, but the important part is that we have access to a forum with a few industry experts where we can hopefully make a few steps toward making Daryl successful.

I'll be posting a blog post on their website soon, but for now there's a short game montage featuring Daryl on their home page:

https://www.indiegamegarage.com/
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