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[thefoolishbrave]

I added you social reach by an incredible 23 XD

So your kickstarter comes out tomorrow ? Holy molly!

Wednesday! Thanks for your support bud, every little bit helps!

It's a little bit disappointing that people aren't rallying a little bit more but I believe in my project and will just keep pushing ^_^

[Stricle]

Yes, keep pushing! I'm rooting for you!

I had never heard of Thunderclap before. Maybe that was the reason few people participated. Idk.
If I had some tips about getting more people to know your game, I'd totally tell you. But we're at the same boat.

[thefoolishbrave]

The time has come! Just finished launching the Kickstarter page and I guess it's up to the universe now! I hope it's a success but if I somehow manage to secure some increased visibility I'll be happy, although I don't know how long it'll take me to finish it if it isn't >.>, most likely, I will just continue learning to code and trying to make the existing art sexier because that would cost a whopping total of ZERO DOLLARS :D


If you'd like to show your support you can back the game here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1296644525/cynical-7-the-misadventures-of-tris









Also before I go I would just like to point out the fact that McRobberson actually gets buttslammed now...

[thefoolishbrave]

Day 1 ended on a high of 27% funded and I'm hoping the momentum continues!

Tris managed to get himself out of his cardboard armor and earned enough XP for...:




If the game manages to hit its goal before the campaign ends there will be some teasers for future content! I know there was 1 backer from TIG and I have a feeling I know who it was

It's too bad I haven't found a consistent following here but I think it'll happen with time and perseverance  ^_^

[SchriefFighter]

I've done a few Kickstarters in my time, and 27% at the end of Day 1 is a great place to be. Use it to try and wow some people and get them to pledge! And never give up hope! The KS isn't over until you see the countdown clock strike 0.

[thefoolishbrave]

I've done a few Kickstarters in my time, and 27% at the end of Day 1 is a great place to be. Use it to try and wow some people and get them to pledge! And never give up hope! The KS isn't over until you see the countdown clock strike 0.

thanks for the kind words, i'm hanging in there! hoping for the best and putting my best foot forward, if this doesn't work out though my back up plan is to finally learn to code, which will hopefully open lots of new doors for me! i mean, i plan to do that anyway but it's a slow process when you're juggling other things!

[TonyManfredonia]

You've got a great head start! Almost $2,000 and 24 days to go. With a bit of press and more outreach, I think your goal is in sight.

Keep it up!!!

[thefoolishbrave]

It's been quite some time since I've posted and I happy to say most of this time was spent in the lab improving DON'T GIVE UP to what is it now! I'm working on a new demo for June with new story telling, areas, and a completely redesigned battle system based on all the feed back I received!
 
I was scared it might be soon, but what the hey! The first big change is the cover art! I'm super pleased with how it came out and it really conveys the tone of the game pretty well :D I plan on giving the Mystery Man more air time this time around!





The next is thing I want to share is a sample of the combo moves you can expect in the game!



In this sample, Tris leaps into the air and fires a missile at his enemy, hitting the ground and running back to do more damage!


I'm looking forward to posting a lot more content, updates, and preview on all the stuff I've been working on since last year!

Thanks for reading! :D

If you are interested for some reason in trying to old demo you can find it here:

http://tacopizzacats.com/

[Al_B]

AAAAAAYYYY! Glad to see you're still pushing on this. I caught this on Facebook. I'm rooting for you!

[thefoolishbrave]

AAAAAAYYYY! Glad to see you're still pushing on this. I caught this on Facebook. I'm rooting for you!

nice! it would be ironic if i gave up on a game called.... DON'T GIVE UP

glad to see the hours of posting on social media at least reaches a handful of people! gotta start somewhere :O

[thefoolishbrave]

Combat Update!

So going forward with these posts I want to definitely try to show more of my process in both thought and design- I know people say you should share everything you do in your dev logs but I’ve always kind of felt that was more in a “something is better than nothing” sense and that what people really wanted to see was the final result.

I’ve sort of found that that is only true depending on your execution and people will take interest in your process if you’re captivating in its presentation, so going forward, I will try to be a bit more in depth with my milestones and such :D


Previous Combat System





So, in the first demo “Cynical 7” the battle system made the player feel that they were fully at the mercy of the enemy. This is usually true to some extent with most enemies in any kind of game, whether it’s the hordes of enemies in beat em ups, the power spiking bosses in RPGs, or the progressively harder AI in fighting games.

But with all of those in beat em ups you can usually combo a number of enemies at once, grind levels to becomes strong in RPGs, and master the game until the AI submits in fighting games. But in Cynical 7, all you could do was wait for the enemy to line up within your attack line and hope you got off a hit or two. That combined with the relentless enemy attacks ended up making combat more of a chore than I wanted it to (even though I didn’t feel like it was a chore- but I might be biased)





So the most important thing for me with this new demo was to completely revamp the battle system, with one major focus, giving the player more control with perks to be gained for its mastery.

The new battle system has two phases: Enemy Turn and Player Turn





Enemy Turn

During the enemy turn combat will play out a lot like it did in the first version, the player will dodge the enemy and try to land blows of their own. One major difference is this time around the player will also be able to parry attacks as well. These parries will take timing to execute but pulling them off in succession will grant the player a stackable buff :D


Player Turn

When the enemy turn ends the player turn begins. During the player turn Tris will get into hand to hand range with the enemy and be able to unleash and assortment of combos on the enemy triggered by the player in real time! Players will have to pull off combos in order to execute special moves like Harutaru Missile and Pogo Pounce! Different moves will have different uses and some might debuff or do more damage depending on the enemy and its status! The key to this system is knowing what combos do what and executing them without tripping up to maximize your turn!




But how do the turns flow?

The active turn is decided by the “momentum meter” which is much different than the one from Cynical 7. In Cynical 7 the momentum meter decided how quickly the player could move and dodge enemy attacks. In Don’t Give Up the momentum acts as a “timer” between turns. During the enemy turns the momentum bar depletes until it reaches the “break point”, once that happens the enemy’s guard is broken and they enter “exhaustion” status and the player turn begins. The player can also deplete the enemy’s momentum by landing ranged attacks and successfully parrying.





Once the enemy goes into exhaustion the momentum meter begins to regenerate until it fills up at which point it becomes to enemy’s turn again. During that regeneration time the player can execute combos and special moves on the enemy.





The phases see-saw like this until the player or the enemy’s HP is depleted!

The combat is going to be the first thing worked on early June so while I’ll only know if this system is balanced when it goes to test, it certainly feels good to me on paper, we’ll just have to see!

Thanks for tuning in to this edition! :D

[thefoolishbrave]

Hope everyone's having a great weekend!

For this screen shot saturday I have an early screenshot of the upcoming combat!

As you can see, the two phases of combat are in! Next week we'll hopefully have some fancy combos to show off :D

I will post a more detailed log on Monday! :D

[thefoolishbrave]

Here we go again!

My last post was a quick peek at the first instance of combat! Since then it's mostly been prepping and polishing assets for the new demo and only a handful require cleanup or adjustments.

Right now ironing out the look, feel, and balance of the turns and speed.

Since the last version we've added:

Cumulative Damage- Instead of throwing out a bunch of numbers each time an attack lands, each attack is added to the old total, as you hit higher thresholds of damage, the numbers will get bigger and more rewarding!

Combos- We added the first player turn specific move, the downward strike! More to come!




Player and Enemy Buffs, indicated by the icons, I'm glad they are implemented but are currently a bit ugly stationarily floating with the characters, I've already come up with a solution for this!




Tris has a better animation transitioning between turns




Enemy Size reduced (although now I think he looks too small, so we'll play around with it a bit more as I think to accomomdate the new format the battle area needs to be reduced as a whole)


Here is a gif of it all slowly coming together!





Well social media has eaten up more than enough time for today, time to get back to it!
If you are digging the game please show me some support on social media, I could really use it  

https://twitter.com/tacopizzacats
https://www.facebook.com/dontgiveupgame/

[thefoolishbrave]

Hey Folks! Time for another update!

One thing that has changed since I started this journey is I have slowly stretched my pixel art skills, I've even found time to tinker around and do promo pieces like this one of Tris's room:






With that said, one thing I've been reluctant to do is redesign an enemy sprite, partially because it was extra work if i'm honest, but mostly because I didn't know if I could actually pull it off when it came to more complex movements, but I went for it and I'm happy unveil McRobberson's evolution!




Now, he know longer has to be upscaled to death and I won't have to here about pixel border discrepancies! I feel accomplished!


I've had about a week now to tinker and improve the battle system over the past week and it feels REALLY fun and unique. You're always doing something and have opportunities to increase your output both during the enemy's attack and during your own!

Check out 2 samples from both the Player AND Enemy Turns!



 


All the core pieces are in and we're slowly working towards polishing things!

I'm looking for ward to unveiling ultra move transitions, special moves, and some new effects planned like adding even more hype to damage!




Until then!

[TonyManfredonia]

These new screens are fabulous! Forgive me, but I couldn’t find the post where you explained the title change. Why did you move from Cynical 7 to your new title? It’s a good one, but I’m just curious. Keep it up! 

[thefoolishbrave]

It's been a while since my last update and there's a good chance I'll proooobably miss a couple of things that have happen since the last post so today I'll just talk about the UI.

The UI in the last demo... wasn't much of a UI, it was a bunch of components slapped into a section of the screen and I tried to make it as minimal as possible to avoid the player needing to look at it too much!





Well, the theme for this demo was SEXY. Make. Everything. Sexy. As possible as I can.


So the UI got an update, enemy sprites got an updates, and I even stepped up some of my work with effects!


But back to UI- the 4 5 major things that needed to be addressed were:

Player Buffs/Debuffs
Enemy Buffs/Debuffs
Enemy Guard Meter
Special Meter

Originally player buffs were going to follow the player, but I found that to be cumbersome, and well- ugly!





So I carved out a little nest for them on the left side.





Next up was enemy buffs, I think often times players rather see an enemy be visually effected OR not have to look somewhere else to keep track of an enemy's ailments, ESPECIALLY with real time, so the enemy buffs will stay with them. This works because the player is FAR more mobile than the enemy's in the game.


Enemy Guard Meter is actually pretty similar to the old system, except to avoid confusion it's hanging out with the enemy on the right side of the screen.



The special meter worked okay before and remains unchanged, there's a possibility of animating the meter itself expanding the sword once its full but I have reservations about having it take up any further real estate so we'll see! (probably not though, I tend to not like making extra work for myself to flesh out an idea i'm unsure of from the jump)





So that was all sorted out, but we still have this BIG. FAT. SPACE. in the middle. Gosh, it feels like something is missing here. Trying to wrack my brain for a solution, EUREKA! It came to me! What about some fancy way to be SEXY about switching the turns?

I'd actually chosen a sound for the turn swapping which was a "dj scratch"... so... what about having a spinning disc in the middle?! Brilliant!





So what does it all look like in the end?






So there we have it, a new sexy much more legitimate looking UI for the battle system! Now let's see it in action!





With that out of the way most of the new items for the demo are finished! Some bug checking and polish remains but I'll be sure to flesh out another feature before it's done! :D

Thanks for reading!

[thefoolishbrave]

Greetings!

MUCH has happened since the last update, what exactly do I mean by much?

Well, the demo is 99% done and the trailer is 100% done and dropping as soon as tomorrow!

I’ve been posting in depth devlogs a lot less because, as much as I’d love to write about my progress, it’s a bit deflating seeing posts I take a decent block of time to write up, sink like a cinder block without any interactions - I much rather spend those couple of hours working on some more game stuff and spreading out the updates at crucial milestones.

The last thing we talked about was the battle system, I think so far I’ve mostly covered the new mechanics but none of the new lore.





While I’m really pleased with my first attempt at writing a game script, there is always something that a game maker can never do, and that’s see the project through the eyes of someone on the outside of the project. I realized pretty quickly through let’s plays and demo testing that a lot of people thought the game was mostly a comedy, or about pizza.






Well, yes, the game is definitely meant to have humor stuffed in wherever it can, but that was originally intended to offset the darker themes in the game, my mistake was having the first demo build up to the serious turning point, and in this demo I actually lead off with it. It COMPLETELY changes the depth and perception of the game.





The last trailer I made was a blend of composited scenes and some in game footage tweaking, where as this trailer has about a minute of just straight up gameplay. I’m really pleased that the game is at a point where I can stuff that many scenes into a trailer and still not revealed all the story there to tell.





This demo has come a LOOONNNNG way,







and while TIG has certainly never fawned over my project, I certainly hope I at least have a handful of you rooting for it as it heads for Kickstarter for the 2nd and final time this August 15th :D

Tristan

(also, DON'T GIVE UP: A Cynical Tale is a name I love but I think DON'T GIVE UP conflicts with way too many search results, songs, books, games... basically just about everything so I think A Cynical Tale has to start taking the forefront)

[thefoolishbrave]

It's that time again! I finished the official trailer a little over a day ago and released it this morning! I've been getting really good praise on it, so please be sure to give it a watch! :D

[thefoolishbrave]

I released the demo yesterday and would love it if you could download and rate! It's probably around 40 minutes of gameplay. Yay! :D



You can grab the demo on Itch or Gamejolt :D

https://trisbee.itch.io/dont-give-up-a-cynical-tale

https://gamejolt.com/games/dontgiveup/354865

[thefoolishbrave]

Demo Link:DON'T GIVE UP A CYNICAL TALE DEMO




Don’t Give Up: A Cynical Tale is the sassy comedic tale of Tris, an anti-social, cynical game developer  and his quest to confront his inner demons. Balance the hilariously dysfunctional tragedy that is your social life all while facing off with the phantoms of your inner conscious and those that would claim it.

It's a modern story focused RPG with real time battle and an original fighting system that gives both the enemy AND the player real time turns!

DON'T GIVE UP: A Cynical Tale is the official name and reinvention for the title Cynical 7 I've been working on and it features a new battle system and story telling.


         












Combat

The uses an ebb and flow between the player and the enemy, where the player has a defend phase where they can do things like earn buff and deal light damage, and then an offensive phase where they have a certain amount of time to freestyle and dish out combos to the enemy!



In this gif the player just executed a combo move where he leaps up, fires a missile and runs back toward the enemy in order to dish more damage.


Here's a peek at the battle UI!




The Main Character




Tris

An aspiring game developer who suffers from anxiety and chronic “people disliking disorder”. He moved to Threeson 4 years ago after the “incident”. An unemployed introvert with only a handful of friends, Tris desperately seeks to find some sort of fulfillment in his life before his time (and his bank account) runs dry.

Likes: Anything with pork belly in it, especially pizza, mmmm
Dislikes: Social media zombies


Thanks for looking!