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[bram_dingelstad]

For this week, I want to share some progress on the adventure system I'm working on. Last week, I shared the barebones version of the overall system, so now I want to zoom in on two sub-systems that I made!

Story and narrative

Any good story has a narrative and some good world building to get you into the game. Clarice Clairvoyage should be no different. In order to make story segments work, I need to have several things setup: a way to store stories, a way to render them & a way to interact with them.
For this system, I chose to use a long array/list/table of multiline strings. Every "story" (meaning a small interaction per island) is basically 6 items out of that list. The only thing I need to do is take a random starting point that is dividable by 6 and run a piece of code that interprets those items. That sublist consists of:

• Prompt
• The correct answer(s)
• The success message
• The failure message
• Success entity (scroll/other adventure/ability/etc)
• Failure entity (remove spell/combat/lose health/etc)

Then, I render some text and give the player the option to craft a spell based on their current inventory of scrolls/pages. When the spell is cast, it's revealed to the player if they used to correct spell for the situation. In reality, I'm looking at the 6 items to check if the result matches one of the expected ones. When it does, I give the player a reward otherwise the fail condition is met and run.
I can use this system to do small one-off choices like this, or to provide a deeper lore to the game!

Crafting

Another important part of the game is being able to craft spells together permanently. Yes, you can combine spells at any point of the game, but longer chains take time (which you won't always have)! Besides that, it's nice to sometimes not have to combine all the parts of complex spells. Some spells aren't even possible without a crafted component involved! Another use for the crafting island is a way for you to make your consumable spells permanent. Consumable spells will have a whiter looking scroll instead of the current color and can only be used once, instead of repeatedly. So will you use this spell once? Or will you wait until you come across a crafting island?

It's based on the same underlying combination system as the combat system, but this just deletes the ingredient spells from your inventory and rewards you with the outcome! With all the scrolls/pages you'll get in Clarice Clairvoyage, you can build your book of spells in whichever way you want!

I'm already working on another overarching system that's a little bit more complicated which I'll cover next week: puzzles! I found out that the systems I'm showing you have a lot of similarities, which means smaller and more efficient code and more tokens! I'm currently hiking against a strong 7200/ą8192 tokens! Which is getting too close for comfort.
Next week, I'll share more about puzzles and saving some space off of the cartridge.
Thanks for reading!
~ Bram

[Alain]

That's great progress on many fronts. The idea of chaining/crafting together sounds like something I could enjoy a lot!

[bram_dingelstad]

That's great progress on many fronts. The idea of chaining/crafting together sounds like something I could enjoy a lot!

Thanks! Re-using a core mechanic everywhere in PICO8 is a godsent so far, saves a lot of tokens/code!

[bram_dingelstad]

First off, I want to thank everyone that's bringing the view count of the TIGSource post to ~1400 views & the follower count on Twitter to 50! I appreciate it, if you've been following along since the beginning, but havent left a comment yet, please, let me know what you think! I'm getting closer to making a playable version and with the people that commented will surely be the first few that I'll contact for a playtesting session!

TL;DR:

• Made a generic puzzle system that combines scrolls/spells
  
• Found out that all other (non-combat) systems can be replaced with that system
  
• Reduced code size by a lot
  
• Getting closer to all the systems being feature complete, and therefor to testing!
  

This week I want to focus on some improvements on one of the final systems that the player gets to interact with. Funnily enough, this system turned out to be so generic, that its gonna replace all of the other non-combat systems reducing code!

Puzzles & Rube Goldberg machines

I'm gonna go ahead and say it: I've never designed puzzles. Puzzles are hard to quantify for me yet, since I haven't spent a lot of time working on them or understanding what makes a good puzzle. Because of this skill limitation I wanted to tackle this problem from another direction. Turns out, the spell & scroll system that I have is enough of a puzzle for the players by themselves (based on player testing). Finding another puzzle mechanic would also cost a lot of code space, which I don't have.
Then I remembered about Rube Goldberg machines. You know, the ones you see on Youtube? It's basically a long string of cause and effect that bring small interactions together into a big chain of events. These machines are interesting to watch, because it's not immediately clear to what is going to happen or what is going to be the effect of some part of the machine. And here's where I found out a cheap alternative to puzzles: Make a bunch of Rube Goldberg machines, but just with pieces missing!

This meant that I could make a bunch of "Spell Machines" that create different spell combinations, with one of the scrolls missing! This solves a lot of problems mainly:

• I can dynamically remove scrolls from a puzzle to the scrolls that the player already has
• The player can learn new spell combinations through solving a puzzle
• It brings another layer to the spells that the player has in their inventory

Making the system

One of the first things that came to my mind, is that I can use the PICO8's still empty Map Editor to make these machines. Technically, I have all of the sprites as a single tile, meaning I could put them into this map editor and interpret them in code later. This means that I didn't have to give up more space in the form of data on the code side, keeping this system relatively lean for the amount of content it will give to the game.
The next thing was about making the puzzle "resolve" or "work". I decided on using a thing called "movers". For now they're  just arrows pointing in 2D directions (Up, Down, Left, Right) that push an adjacent piece to that direction. This would cause certain scrolls to overlap and them to combine, using the already available combo system.

Once these movers get close to a "Magic" scroll, it resolves. Behind this magic spell, there's always another spell to represent what your spell should become, to give a player a hint to what the puzzle should resolve to. Also, the magic scroll doesn't effect the scroll combination, but actuates a spell like it does in normal combat. During the puzzle, it has a similar goal. When a mover encounters a magic spell, it deletes the mover. Once all movers are removed, I check if all of the remaining scrolls are in pairs. And if so, you've solved the puzzle!

The next step is just making a lot of these and adding a lot of different directions and other tricks to keep the player on their toes! I'm not sure what constraints I'll give to the puzzles, maybe I'll add a time limit. Perhaps I just give the player a 1 time chance to solve it, meaning if you fail, you don't get a reward. But I'll get to that with polishing and balancing the gameplay!

Optimising systems with the puzzle system

As soon as I got the movers into the puzzle system, I noticed something: the puzzle system was a seemingly complete version of a spell combining system. But up until this point I had used custom systems (that take up a lot of code) for the crafting and story systems. If I make a custom puzzle for both crafting (meaning max 2 spells) and story (meaning put any spell without knowing what it should resolve to) I can reuse the puzzle system for those systems as well, I just need to evaluate the results differently! For crafting, whatever the result is of the two spells, you just get as a new spell while removing the two parts. And for the story, I just check the result with the desired story outcome! The result is that I can delete a lot of code that was unnecessarily complex!

Another thing I figured out, is that if the spell system gets too big, I can always choose to make the spells resolve through the Map Editor as well. Since every scroll is just a result of another pair of scrolls. I could just make groups of 3 scrolls/elements in the Map Editor, make a piece of code that looks for the pair in the map editor and reads the 3rd element as the outcome! I don't have the need to implement this yet, but if the need arises, this could save a lot of code space for the spell/scroll system!
I still have to perfect a lot of parts about the puzzle system as well as the other sub systems in the game, so we're still relatively far away from a public build.

Public build + some thanks

I've decided I wanted to make a little deadline for myself, so as of this post I'll try to get a playable build ready for Mid April! And with that I want to thank all of the ~1400 views on the TIGSource post as well as the 50 followers on Twitter. If you're not already following, I'd really appreciate if you do, it helps out a bunch for the project in the long run. Also, if you're a regular on this post, please leave a comment to let me know what you think! Do you guys prefer the general overlook format of these posts? Would you guys prefer a technical deep dive? What should my next post be about? Let me know!

Anyways, thanks you so much for taking the time to read this post!

~ Bram

[Alain]

I've decided I wanted to make a little deadline for myself, so as of this post I'll try to get a playable build ready for Mid April!

That's super exciting, I'll definitely check it out and play a bit! I really like your devlogs and it is obvious that you put a lot of effort into them. Keep up the great work!

[bram_dingelstad]

Thanks Alain! 

[bram_dingelstad]

Hey guys, I took some time off last week to enjoy Easter with my family. I also didn't have enough content since I worked a bit more on the puzzle system. So without further ado, let's get into this week's devlog.

TL;DR

• I worked on enemies in the overworld; ships that sail towards you if you get too close
  
• I dusted off some of the enemy code and simplified it
  
• Made some plans to expand the game outside of PICO8
  
• I got vacation, so I can work more on the game for the next 3 weeks
  

Combat encounters and how they happen

Unlike all of the other calmer and more puzzle-like adventures in the last few instalments of the devlog, the ones that I've worked on this week are little bit more hectic for the player: combat.
In Clarice Clairvoyage, you encounter enemies on the seas and fight them with your deck of spells. This is the only part of the gameplay that happens in real time and where the combining of spells needs to happen quickly, or you might not make it! In order for the combat to have a real place in the game, I've decided to represent combat not with an island, but with other ships instead!

The GIF above is an early test version, but basically the ships work by following a set path around an island. When the player approaches these islands or ships and enters the red circle, the ship will start following the player instead. With the use of correct spells, you can circumvent these ships or outrun them. Just get on to finding the proper combination!

With an updated render call to make the ships point towards their target, they already feel much more alive!

Encounters with enemies

As soon as one of these ships gets really close, you can expect to be boarded. But boarded by what? Or by who? That's the job of the encounter generator. I basically made a list of all of the enemies available in the game, and gave them a score. When starting an encounter, I have a simple "enemy budget" that determines the difficulty of the upcoming fight. For now, a higher budget means more difficult enemies or simply more of them.
Another problem I keep running into is the amount of tokens I'm allowed to use, so making the enemy code smaller and better is a priority now. This is why I decided to remake most of the enemies that I made in the past, although their behaviour and looks don't change: a lot has changed under the hood to make it more simple and less verbose in code.

Once they're boarded, it's either you or them, so prepare to stack some spells and let them know what it's like to fight against a wizard apprentice! It was really fun to see the mermaid work again; I didn't expect it to work as good as it does after a quick simplification. The enemy code is still one of the biggest and chunkiest parts of the code, so I might need to a whole lot more of simplification to make it work.

Modding PICO8 into something bigger

Okay, so I've talked a lot in the devlog about building a game within the constraints of PICO8. Honestly, it's been very fun and a little overly ambitious thus far. Clarice Clairvoyage is a game that works with several somewhat complex systems that are hard to keep under 8192 tokens of code. This is why I've decided to continue the actual full game development of Clarice Clairvoyage in PicoLove, a Love2D implementation of PICO8. This means that I get to keep working in the same APIs and aesthetic as PICO8, but take a lot more liberties when it comes to the programming of the game.
I won't do this yet, as my goal is still to make the demo of the game fit in these 8192 tokens. Instead, the additional content that the systems need (like additional spells, stories, enemies etc.) are being added in the "full" game later on. This basically means modding the PICO8 fantasy console to have a little bit more RAM and ROM. I pray that the PICO8 purists forgive me!

Vacation

I got three weeks off from my regular day job! This means that for the next three weeks I'll be able to dedicate a lot more time to development of the game. Like I said in my last post, I'm trying to have a playable demo ready somewhere mid April, so that goal is still in place. I'll be posting the same amount (once a week), however it will likely just either have more content, or more condensed content.

Thank you for reading!
~ Bram

[Alain]

Nice update, Bram! The combat encounters look interesting, being boarded seems to be quite scary. Make sure to also take a few days off from gamedev during your vacation

[bram_dingelstad]

Nice update, Bram! The combat encounters look interesting, being boarded seems to be quite scary. Make sure to also take a few days off from gamedev during your vacation

Thanks Alain, I'll be sure to take some time off also! Thank you for the kind words!

[bram_dingelstad]

Hey everyone. I'm a little late on this week's update; should've probably posted it this weekend. I was busy making the game and taking a little break, so it got postponed to today!

TL;DR

• Reworked spells to be more unique and bind more to gameplay ideas
• Redid a bunch of world/map rendering and enemy code to conserve precious code tokens
• Added an anchor to stop the ship at any moment and an animated sail!

Reworking spells

Some of the feedback I got from early playtesters is that the spells didn't feel or act unique in the game. So rather than relying on very similar spells to do similar things, I decided to divide the spells with different kind of functions and make sure that every element has a particular kind of gameplay flavour. Besides that, I also wanted to do a pass on the spells in general to see if I can small-ify the code a bit to conserve tokens.
I ended remaking the "Missile" spell to only work with the single fire element and made the other single element spells have radically different functions, rather than an elemental version of the missile. This also further divided the flavour of fire in gameplay, as it's not the primary element needed to do an attack. This makes sure that the different elements will communicate their function to the player and that a potential combination with fire can result into an attack spell! Also, the double fire spell results into a fire-y wave of flames! It doesn't move the sail anymore, since that functionality is dedicated to the air element!

For the water element I decided to focus mostly on crowd-control based spells. These spells have a form of relocating or temporarily changing the state of an enemy. The single element spell turns into a beam of water that jets enemies away when they're hit! This gives the player the ability to keep certain enemies at a distance. It's also the only spell that is aim-able during casting, making sure that the player can use the spell for a slightly longer time to enjoy the effect.
For double water spell I decided to go back to an ice spell. This basically re-uses the fire-y flames-like spell with a colour change and temporarily freezes enemies in place, which gives you some time to combine your next spell or get away from a sketchy situation!

For the rock element I chose to use a more defensive flavour. The original "steel" spell that I had did something similar, but now I decided to make that the base effect for a single element rock spell. If you recast the spell you just add +1 to your shield capacity! However, your shield capacity is still determined by the amount of rock spells that you have!
For a double rock spell I decided to do something a bit more funky. Double rock yields sand and when used, it slows down time! I haven't implemented this yet, but this should be one of the more interesting spells to pull off!

Redid rendering of islands, enemies, etc.

I looked into some of the code that I used to render the islands in the overworld and figured that it used too many loops in a row. I flattened those loops and took back some tokens! I also slightly reworked the way that the data is generated for the docks and the islands themselves. This caused a lot of headache and some reimplementation of those features to use the new data format.
I also went over all the different enemies, figured out what they had in common and started stripping all sorts of code and smaller features that are either unnecessary or don't contribute anything to the gameplay. I also decided to scrap the blob enemy, as it was a little too similar to the zombie enemy.
In the end, it gave me a lot of tokens that I can use to make the rest of the game better, so yay!

Pretty sails and anchor! Oy, matey!

Some of the other things that you might've seen already in the previous gifs are the new animated sail and anchor. The anchor was a small addition to give the player a way to see when the ship is coming to a stop and give the ability to make the ship move when the player desires it.

And for the final gifs for this week, I have something I'm really excited about as it gives a lot more of a windy/sail-y feeling to the game: the animated sail! It started as a small experiment on custom line drawing functions with sine and ended with a cool looking and dynamic sail! I started by drawing a sine wave pixel-by-pixel from one point to another by moving a cursor with a certain  directional vector. Once that cursor get's close enough the endpoint (which is just the distance * the directional vector), the drawing stops! Next, we just add a little sin function to the cursor so it goes up and down in a 90 degree angle relative from the directional vector and you've got yourself a little bendy line drawing function! Here's some gifs of it being developed in a separate cartridge and being used in-game:

That's all for now! Thank you so much for taking the time to read my devlog again. If you haven't already, please follow either me or the project on Twitter! Hopefully by the end of this week/next week I'll have a demo ready that y'all can play!

See you then!

[Alain]

Great update as always! The spells look nice and seem to fit well. I think the bendy sail makes it a lot easier to understand what it is good for and makes the ship feel more alive and interactive.

[Devilkay]

wow! The design is amazing! 

[bram_dingelstad]

Great update as always! The spells look nice and seem to fit well. I think the bendy sail makes it a lot easier to understand what it is good for and makes the ship feel more alive and interactive.

Thank Alain!  I hoped that the sail would communicate that. Glad it does

wow! The design is amazing! 

Thank you Devilkay!


I got another update coming soon, I've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to get the (now late-April) demo ready. A lot of things were radically changed and hit the token/size limit multiple times. I have a todo list smaller than 20 items before it's ready. Let's just hope it doesn't have a,b,c,d,e or f subitems haha 

[bram_dingelstad]

Hey everyone! So quick little update: I've failed to reach the mid-April demo deadline (obviously).
This is due to late-April being the end of Q1 in fiscal terms, and unfortunately _everything_ taxes and financial related has a deadline then. Turns out I forgot to do a bunch of stuff for my company, so I had to go and sift through about a years worth of stuff and two forced COVID-19 moves and 2 dead harddrives to fix everything.

Everything is fine now, I'll hopefully be able to continue development as planned. I'm still really close to making a playable PICO8-based demo. I've got a concepting session for the title art today, a commission with a wonderful pixelartist to make it and a cool music jamming session next week to bring some nice little tunes and SFX to the game!

Soooo, stay tuned. Nothing too big this week, no big articles. I'll let y'all know if that changes!

Thanks!

(Also note, also for the mods, this thread/topic seems to randomly lock at times? I have _no_ idea why. But it might explain the lack of responses I've been getting vs the amount of views. Anything I can do to fix this? Thanks!)

[Alain]

This is due to late-April being the end of Q1 in fiscal terms, and unfortunately _everything_ taxes and financial related has a deadline then. Turns out I forgot to do a bunch of stuff for my company, so I had to go and sift through about a years worth of stuff and two forced COVID-19 moves and 2 dead harddrives to fix everything.

I feel you, a lot of my time has recently been eaten up by tax and business related stuff. Not as much fun as working on the game itself. But what needs to be done needs to be done. Your progress is still great!

[bram_dingelstad]

Hey everyone!

It's great to be back making games full-time again! Since my last post back in April a lot has happened in my personal life. I had to recharge for a while and make some decisions to be happier overall. This decision has led me to get back into making videogames full-time! So without further ado, let's jump into it!

TL;DR

• Made general improvements to the game and did bugfixes
• Reworked the start of the game
• Added music
• The PICO8 version is gonna release soon &  I'm working on a demo release in the near future!

General improvements to gameplay & bugfixes

When I left the game, it had a lot of functionality and semi-polished ideas that needed a lot of work in order to be reliable. Last week, I've been busy trying to pick up this work and make the game playable without running into a game breaking bug or small inconvenience. Some of these additions, fixes and changes include:

• A redone sail animation to work with the actual wind direction
• A fix for the boat turning fully for a < 5 degree turn (doing a full 360 every time)
• A fix making enemies spawn a little bit more consistent
• Make docking easier by just colliding with islands
• Screenshake when you use spells
• Reworked cloud animation in map view

These changes make the game a lot more coherent, robust and finished.

Reworking the start of the game

A lot of work has been done to make the beginning of the game a lot more straightforward and easy to get into. The original design had the player choose from an array of randomized spells to add to their spell book. Most playtesters found this confusing and after evaluating the design, it was actually pretty obsolete. Now the player has the ability to add 1 spell to their spell book to improve their changes of navigating the harsh seas. After a first play through, the player has access to more advanced, but one-time-use spells.

Besides that, the player now has access to smaller heads up messages on the bottom left of the screen. These messages will let you know about objects you can interact with in the world. A lot of players seemed to be struggling with finding out what they can do on the ship and this seems to have resolved that problem!

Added music

I finally got over my irrelevant fears related to making music. I haven't done a lot of music making ever but I decided that this is the game where I wanted to give it a shot. This week I took that shot and got some really decent sounding tunes. They're not the best in composition and they could use a little bit more work to feel like really nice and coherent songs, but the base vibes are set!

Link to song

The title track is meant for the opening sequence of the game where the player gets their impression of "Clarice Clairvoyage". Hopefully, this track will set up the expectations of the game!

Link to song

This track is meant for most of the travel and sailing gameplay. This tune is accompanied by a soothing sound of waves in the game, to give the player the feeling like they are really out there, commanding their boat towards adventure.

The future, demos & more

So, now that we have most of the game ready, what are we waiting for? Well, a couple of things.
The game is still limited to the inherent limitations of the PICO8 console. Hopefully, I can release the PICO8 version of the game with most of the gameplay in there soon. Afterwards, I plan on porting the game to Love2D where we can fully explore the possibilities with the spell system and Clarice's world.
When that happens, I'll be ramping up to making a full demo of the (eventual) Steam release of the game. We're currently working on getting everything ready for the Steam page launch. When I need your help, I'll let you know!

Thank you for reading; I would really appreciate if you follow me or the project on Twitter.
You can also shoot me a message over there. Also, I'm available for hire on your Godot projects, so hit me up if you need help!

[Alain]

That's exciting news. I'm happy for you that you are working on video games full time again and are planning a Steam release for Clarice!

[bram_dingelstad]

Thank Alain! Super quick update in between: I'm a Steamworks partner now! So that release a step closer!

[bram_dingelstad]

I had a really good time finishing up on the PICO8 version of Clarice Clairvoyage the last few weeks.
In this post I'll quickly go through the last things I tidied up and about some of the next steps for the project. I won't be sharing the builds of the demo just yet since the Steam page isn't live yet and I want y'all to be able to wishlist it immediately if you enjoy the game

TL;DR

• The demo is ready to be played and will be released soon!
• The project will be ported to another engine & is gonna be generally improved
• An extended version of the demo will be available later this year/beginning of next year
• I need you to follow me or the project on Twitter
  

The demo is ready!

Last time I needed to finish up on some smaller things before the demo was ready. Since then I rewrote and reworked the adventure system and reward generation. After that it was mostly about balancing the enemies and rewards so that the experience becomes enjoyable, accessible and a little bit spicy in difficulty. I also rewrote some of the music for the gameplay and added a bunch of sound effects for spells and other happenings in the game. I really learned that adding smaller sound effects and screenshake can be the difference between a fun little interactive toy and an engaging game or experience.

Afterwards, the main priority was smoothing out the gameplay and polishing the living crap out of it. I also looked critically at some parts that I can improve for the sake of performance. I felt like a 90s programmer trying to get every ounce of performance out of an NES game. I added a few tricks like low quality rendering of certain elements when spells are used (you can guess which elements if you'd like!).

Porting the rest of the game & other future plans

It comes to no-one's surprise that there's only so much game you can cram into a PICO8 cartridge before you run out of space. I'm happy to share that the current cartridge of Clarice Clairvoyage uses all 8192 tokens it has available to it. With some updates here and there there might be a token removed, but the idea still stands: the game is too big for further expansion on PICO8.
Therefor, I've decided to port the game to another engine to keep adding content such as spells, enemies and puzzles! The base gameplay isn't going anywhere though, so if you like the PICO8 version, chances are you're gonna love the full game as well.
I'm still evaluating some choices for porting, mainly Love2D with PicoLove or using Godot with a Lua extension to handle some of the leftover gameplay code from PICO8. Who it'll be I'll announce in another post, but I assure you it's gonna be worth the switch!
All of the art, music, design and programming was done by me in the PICO8 version of the game, on a Raspberry Pi 400. And although I love getting my hands dirty and challenging myself, the rest of the development will include a lot more talented artists that can make prettier and nicer sounding things than me. A bigger version of the demo will be released at the end of this year or the beginning of the next. Besides that, I'll be switching to my Macbook Air for the rest of development which has a slight performance increase over the Raspberry Pi

Thank you all so much for following me along thusfar

If you're not already following me or the project on Twitter, you should! I really need your support over there. You'll also be in the loop on when the Steam page goes live so you can further support me!
If you're reading this on the PICO8 BBS forum, this will be my last devlog on here since my PICO8 journey ends here. However, I'll be back in a few days/weeks to share PICO8 cartridge with you!

Thank y'all so much!

[Alain]

Nice, congratulations on the demo, Bram! It is also great to hear that you will continue working on Clarice in another engine. I'm looking forward to see the game grow.