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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsMANDAGON || (sequel currently in production)
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io3 creations
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« Reply #40 on: March 19, 2016, 10:28:57 AM »

Congrats on the game getting Greenlit! Smiley
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blindskystudios
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« Reply #41 on: April 05, 2016, 10:20:39 AM »

First things first
We recently became greenlit! Took exactly 2 weeks and 3 days, so cheers to those who were able to vote, share, follow or look at the page, anything really - Mandagon is our first PC release so every little helps!

In light of this I thought I'd share a little bit of the games evolution. Since we started this blog relatively late in production I figured a little peek at how things started might be interesting to someone!

Those of you who follow this dev blog well will know of our project { adam }. It was during production of { adam } that I started playing around in my spare time, mucking about with pixel art and colour, to counter balance the work I was doing on { adam }.

The result was this -



A little lackluster admittedly but fine for a learning project



You'd jump about, collect yellow skulls and score points because why not, video games!

So I continued to play around more and expanded the level -





To get a bit serous for a second - It was around this time that my family suffered a pretty serious loss. I shan't bother you with the details. In the fallout of this loss I found myself unable to focus on { adam } properly and ended up working obsessively on Mandagon - Morning, noon and night for a good few weeks.

It also led the game to have a more coherent, somewhat paternal themed narrative. This shifted the setting from vaguely Asian to the more focused Tibetan philosophical vibe you see now.

After showing the rest of the team the work I'd been doing we decided to push Mandagon to a finished product in order to help us spread our wings on the Steam market, in the hope that we'd be well versed by the time it was adam's turn.

So with the help of our lead programmer and fellow designer we began refining the gameplay cycle. Initially our mechanics were pretty minimal, with the focus on atmosphere and the quiet little narrative.

Since then I've been working on the art stuff, all be it at a more healthy pace!



A bunch of stuff was cut and new things were brought in - And of course the devil is in the detail!



At this moment in time we're working hard on expanding the gameplay, limiting/enabling how you traverse the environment to make things a bit more dynamic. I'm also completely redesigning the level layout from the ground up to accommodate this. Hefty work for a small, free game - but if a jobs worth doing its worth doing well ( and 3 or 4 times over apparently!).

We look forward to showing you more as we progress!

Also -
Congrats on the game getting Greenlit! Smiley
Cheers buddy! Smiley
« Last Edit: April 07, 2016, 11:23:44 AM by blindskystudios » Logged

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« Reply #42 on: May 09, 2016, 08:24:48 AM »

So we've been hunkered down rebuilding the main level in Mandagon as well adding a few new features. We're getting pretty close to the end now so I figured I'd post a small flurry of new screenshots!











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« Reply #43 on: May 18, 2016, 12:13:15 PM »

We're so very close to finishing Mandagon - From a visual stand point the game is nearly all there, Audio and sound fx are well under way. The majority of remaining work lies in the hands of our programmer. So lots of back end work, balancing how obscure/mysterious we can be with exploration and story prompts before the game becomes unplayable!

So while programmers program, artists will art -



We've been toying with the idea of releasing an art book and sound track as DLC for a couple of £$£'s while still keeping Mandagon a free game. What do you reckon?

________________________________________________________

Also since this is a dev log, probably a good time to log some development! I thought it might be fun to break down my level design process -

Apologies if any of this is rudimentary to any of you. I was pretty new to this when I started on Mandagon, so I thought I'd share what I was able to learn along the way!

So it goes without saying Mandagon is built mainly from tile based pixel art. Very early on I was playing around to figure out what resolution to work in - After a lot of mucking about I settled on 32 X 32px for my tile size. I personally found it to be a good balance between detail and representation (if that makes sense?).

Pyxel Edit Was my work horse at this stage, and still is. Can't recommend it more strongly, it's still in its beta stages right now so it has its little quirks here and there, but it has served me well Throughout!

Next step was actually figuring out how to build levels from tiles - Mandagon is like the second or 3 game I've worked on, and I'd never worked with tiles before, so every day's a school day!

My googling brought me to a little program simply and aptly named Tiled Map Editor.

So I had my first tiles and my tiled map editor, well equipped to begin mucking about! I was also teaching myself a bit of C# at the time, so with my 32px scale locked in I was able to play around with the relationship between level size and player movement speed - I had one test with a smaller map and slower movement speed, another with a massive map and a speedy player.

Once this became a full project for me and the rest of us, we had a bit of an internal discussion and landed somewhere in the middle, not too fast, not too slow, not too big, not too small. I then began to build the level you can see in our Greenlight trailer

After a modest but mostly positive reception on the Greenlights we were keen to deliver. Discussions led us to add new ways to traverse level and bump up the exploration side of things. So to compliment this I decided to scrap our original level and rebuild from scratch at double the size - que countless sleepless nights.

All that left me with a map that needed to be 187 tiles by 248. Throughout all this I realised classic pen and paper wasn't gunna be much use to me and my work process - I wanted a way for my layout sketches to feed directly into the final build. Also working at full scale in Tiled was just too daunting. So here's what I did -

I already knew the exact size of my map, that was locked in. So I just made a Pyxel Edit canvas that was set so one pixel equaled one tile, 187px by 248px. I had a colour pallet to represent my main tile sets. This gave me freedom to sketch chunks of the level as I would on paper and then zoom in to work on specific sections with more focus.



Then zoom back out, paint in joining sections and larger chunks. Zero back and fourth between sketchbook and computer. And then, knowing the players max jump height/distance, I could run my cursor through the map to see if there were any dead ends or sticking points.



Once I was as happy as could be with the layout, I saved myself a PNG, brought it into Photoshop, then, since my final tiles are 32 by 32, I just multiplied the resolution by 32 to get my full sized map.

I could just drop this full sized image into Tiled as a base and start layering up the final tiles



Once I'd got the basics in I could test the level for real and iron out a few creases



And finally, after a bit of back and fourth between building and testing I felt safe enough to start getting my detail and polish in.

 

This is the stage I'm at now, adding new tile sets when needed, and still optimizing sections of the level as I go. Although it's mostly the aesthetics that I'm working on now.

So Mandagon is only a matter of weeks away now and it's mostly polish and shine left to do. We're super excited to get it out and see what ya'll think of it!

 
      
« Last Edit: June 10, 2016, 04:07:40 AM by blindskystudios » Logged

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« Reply #44 on: July 13, 2016, 03:32:43 AM »

Over the past few months we've been expanding Mandagon's little world, adding lots of new bits and bobs. We're ha heart beat away from release now, so in the meany mean time we've put together a little trailer showcasing some of the new content Coffee




Along side this we've also been working on a digital art book. Just a collection of in game art, sprites and alike. We'll have some promo and concept art in there as well






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« Reply #45 on: August 05, 2016, 04:16:35 AM »

Ah so we managed to finish it! Mandagon is available now for free on Steam! Thanks to ya'll for following along here and providing input and friendly words to keep us going! Beer! Gentleman Coffee

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« Reply #46 on: September 09, 2016, 04:19:14 PM »

Oh cool I never saw this thread; I played the game during a stream a few weeks ago and enjoyed it a lot!  Thanks for making it!
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io3 creations
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« Reply #47 on: April 22, 2017, 12:17:59 PM »

Enjoyable short game.  I especially liked the highly detailed background visuals. 

I wonder about the jump visual effect though.  Visually, it seems a bit "too powerful", i.e. something that I would expect after picking up a power up.  Or did it have a relevance in terms of the spiritual context?

Oh, I encountered a bug when riding the elevator down.  I looked away for a short while from the screen as the elevator started going down and when I looked back the character left the elevator (shown in pic)  but at least I could move around (i.e. didn't get stuck) and could continue playing the game.  Only happened once.
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« Reply #48 on: April 25, 2018, 07:16:03 AM »


Hey, so we've started work on a sequel to Mandagon titled Mandagon: Bones of Clay.

You can follow the dev log for this new project here

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