Hey people!

The weekend is here and with it comes… work! Not to worry though, I won’t work myself exhausted through the entire weekend. I’ll let myself have some free time as well.

I thought I’d post another little teaser screenshot, since I’m pretty satisfied with how the background art turned out.

Ta-dah! Interactive scene, holy shit! As you can see, the sprites are still placeholders. The game is shaping up now though, and it’s looking pretty good.

That’ll be all for this short post. Have a good weekend, remember to chew on tasty stuff.

Marcus out.

Hey interwebs!

Midnight progress post again, for yesterday, of course. I worked on finishing up the introduction sequence and then making the background for the interrogation room, and integrating the already scripted interrogation sequence between Francis and Gabriel (whom you’ll get acquainted with when the game’s release, wink wink.)

It turned out there was a small portion of the dialogue tree missing, which was an easy fix. I then worked on splitting up some (way too long) sentences, putting pauses where appropriate and such. So, basically, the first interactive scene is now in the game. Yay!

It’s just a few days of work time left for the project, so I’ll try to get some stuff done during the weekend. If I just work at the same pace as I’ve done before, the game should be properly finished without problem.

That”ll be all for now. Now, I’m gonna play some Amnesia!
Sadly, I haven’t run into a shit-pants-moment yet in it. Fingers crossed that there’ll be one during this play session!

Marcus out.

It is time again, for another update on the progress for My Burden to Keep!

Today (or technically yesterday as it’s past midnight now) I worked on integrating the introduction sequence into the game, complete with the characters moving too. I got the first two thirds of the whole introduction into the game, the only thing that’s missing from them now is the animations. Pacing, line breaks and movement was tested several times before I was satisfied with how it all played out. I’m picky with these sorts of things, hopefully it’ll show somewhat in the final product.
At first, I ran into a problem with the script for the second part of the intro that I coded today. As always though, the problem turned out really simple to solve (one of those “oh, herp derp”-moments.)

I also got the basic architecture done for the scene outside of the apartment building, rendering it out with some fancy ambient occlusion. All it needs now is some colour, and it’s finished.
I might put up a video tutorial on the method I’ve used for making the backgrounds. I find it’s a very efficient method. It doesn’t look nearly as good as hand-painted backgrounds (old-school LucasArts and Sierra style), but it does have a bit of that feel still.

Anyhow, that’ll have to do for today. There’s work to do tomorrow as well, and I should get some sleep in preparation for that.

Peace, dudes!
Marcus out.

Another day of work!

Today, I worked on a puzzle design for the game, where you have to enter a sequence of numbers accompanied by directions to turn a dial on a safe. It was originally meant to be a test, but the design worked so well that it’ll probably work its way into the final product as it is, accompanied by some illustration though. Right now, it’s just a text box convincing you that you are in fact turning the dial on the safe.

I worked on integrating the first draft of the dialogue trees into the game as well today, which turned out to be a pretty painless task. I tested my way to where to put line breaks so that the dialogue lines didn’t become too long. I also integrated the dual perspective dialogue tree into the game, where you control two different characters and their responses. I was afraid it would be too confusing at first, but it turned out to flow pretty smoothly. There’s only a pair of choices for the second character, so I might try to break up the dialogue into a few more choices to make the player more involved.
After all, the lines that are currently in the game are just from the first version, I suspect there’ll be a few things to change along the way to really get all the emotion and character traits in there.

I also worked on a background today, trying out a new style. It involves both 3D modelling and 2D painting, a mix of both worlds, so to say!

This is what’s in the game so far, visually. Please note however that the characters are just placeholders I did way back for the prototype.

That’s all I have for today. Tune in tomorrow for another episode of ‘Adventure Game Development Shenanigans’!
Or, you know, come back tomorrow for another semi-interesting blog post?

Marcus out.

Good evening, people of the interwebs!

Today, I’ve finished up the first draft of all the dialogue in the game. It was quite a lot of work, but now it’s ready to be proofread and then, it’s more or less ready to be implemented into the game’s script.

One of the later scenes involves you trying to convince a person to give in, and depending on what you choose to say, that person might or might not surrender peacefully. It’s up to the judgement of the player to determine which choices will lead to a calm surrender, or which of them that will lead to a more intense conclusion.

I received feedback from one of our teacher on the course yesterday, and she really seemed to like the story. That’s a great compliment, coming from an experienced book author and all, so I’m really psyched to see if the story holds up as a game as well.

To not leave you guys without anything interesting to read, here’s an excerpt from the dialogue scripts;

“You mentioned that everyone left the party.”
“Yeah, well, the mayor asked us to stay as the last attendees were leaving. He said he wanted to discuss things with my father.”
“Did mister Scott seem upset, troubled?
” Hmm… I would say he seemed worried more than anything, so I guess troubled would be an accurate description.”
“Interesting. What happened then?”
“Mister Scott asked me to go back to my father’s apartment and take Emily along with me, if she so desired. I guess they wanted to discuss things in private.”
“Understandable. Elder adults are often like that, uncomfortable in serious discussions when others are present. So, you and young miss Scott left for the apartment. Your father stayed for how long?”
“I’m not sure. He didn’t come back to the apartment, not that I noticed anyway. Come to think of it, he mentioned that he only had one key.”
“With regard to this information, we may assume that he stayed at the mansion. Logical, a manor of that size must contain a few guest rooms.”

That’ll be all for today. Look out for more stuff tomorrow, hopefully there’ll be some visuals to show off then!

Marcus out.

Another project has begun, and thus, another project needs a logbook! From this day forward, you can follow the progress on my current school project, going under the temporary title “My Burden to Keep”. It’ll be a short adventure game in the classic point and click fashion, revolving around a murder mystery and the people affected by it. It is a collaborative effort being made by me, Marcus, and I’ll be responsible for the design, background art and story aspects of it while my classmate Lukas will be responsible for the characters of the game.

Today, I finished up the GUI elements for the game, which means the gameplay ‘shell’ is more or less ready for action. You can alter commands between Walk to, Examine, Interact with and Speak with, much like in older LucasArts and Sierra titles. I’m using the Adventure Game Studio engine and I must say that the workflow with that engine is really smooth and easy to get into. Highly recommended for point and click adventure fans!

The most important part that I worked on today was writing dialogue and some pseudo-script for some of the scenes in the game. Dialogue will be a large portion of the game, so there’s certainly stuff to do. I finished up dialogue for the first four scenes in the game, which turned out to be a lot of text. For fans of story heavy games, I’m estimating there’ll be a good amount of interesting stuff for you to feast on! Awesome, right?

Other than that, there isn’t much to say. Progress is at a good pace and so far it looks like the deadline won’t be an issue at all. Let’s hope it stays that way!

Marcus out.

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since my last post. I haven’t had much to report lately, other than the fact that the Captain Condom flash game has been uploaded to the site (see the projects tab.)
Yeah, I’m a bit late with announcing that it’s finished, since it’s been finished for a good while now. Oh well, better late than never!

Life flows on as usual. The current course we’re undertaking at school is one I’ve been looking forward to; story design. For the first two weeks that’ve passed, we’ve been assigned to come up with a story, re-iterate it as needed after first feedback, work out a game manuscript and synopsis fit for a two weeks project and prototype the idea.
All has gone well so far and I’ve teamed up with a classmate from the game graphics course for this final, two week project iteration of the storyline I came up with. I won’t reveal too much about it yet, as it hasn’t officially kicked off yet (not until tomorrow) and there might be heavy and/or light changes in the storyline, whatever we see fit.

The game is going to be an adventure game, traditional point and click style much alike the 90′s games of LucasArts and Sierra. The key element of the storyline as it currently is is a murder mystery, which will be solved through the eyes of two protagonists.
But, as I mentioned before, much of the story might come to change. I’ll try to update regularly as we progress.

Until then..!

Marcus out.

I’m not too fond of Flash, really. Progress is being made though, and it’s looking pretty good so far (in a funny way.)
Soon, everyone may take on the quest that is being Captain Condom! To fight for revenge against the nasty Virgin Supremacists, whom have spread a toxin over all of Safeville, rendering all men impotent for as long as four months! Serious crimes!

More will be revealed. Until then..!

Marcus out.

Hey all! Thought I’d break the Dungeon Fantasy-pattern with some Breakthru: Extended related news. Not much, but some little bits of updateness.

While riding the train back to my hometown to spend the ‘free’ week at my parents’, I booted up the laptop to tinker some more with the revised platform engine that I’m going to use in Breakthru: Extended. Mainly, what I did was I coded in platform behaviour, i.e; pieces of solid blocks that you can walk in front of but also land upon. It’s a common feature and wasn’t too hard to code. It did have to go through two iterations before becoming fully functional and bug free though. Anyhow, now it works and pretty damn good too!

The other two little bits I added were a landing sound for when the player impacts with the ground (nothing too hard to sneak in, dunno why I didn’t do it in the first place.)
Last, but not least, I also took the time to comment some of the old code that I had ported over (uncommented code is a big no-no, once things start to get complex!)

Tl;dr, I’ve coded platform behaviour (platforms that you can walk in front of but also land on), snuck in a landing impact sound for the player and commented some old, uncommented code. Not much, but a small step forward is better than nothing!

That’s all for now. Look out for more news soon!

Marcus out.

Yup. Late report again. Though, this time, it’s a report for both Wednesday and Thursday, so today’s report is in sort of early! Sort of.

Anyways, I’ve implemented the graphics that my teammates made more or less completely now. There are two enemies spread out across two maps (a forest scene and tower scene), and all races and sexes respectively have a sprite representation in the world (though only if they’re the party leader, of course.)

Since only the first character can currently become the party leader, it is wise to put your favored character first. If you, for instance, like playing as dwarves, make sure to put him at the very top of the party. Keep in mind that he’ll be slightly slower in movement than humans and eleves though.

There’s not much else to report, other than the fact that the time for the project has come to an end. By the end of these two weeks, I expected I’d have a demo ready and playable. To some extent, I was right. It’s not as much of a complete demo as I’d wished, but it’s at least playable, with a couple of maps to explore and enemies to encounter. Although it may not be a very long demo, I am still proud of what I managed to achieve during the period code-wise. I ventured out into previously uncharted lands in terms of coding and program designing and actually did get something out of it. A system that is, to a great extent, very customizable and broad in terms of how it can be used.

For the next few days, I’ll consider releasing it on here. I’m hesitating to release it immediately as I might have a possible, alternate plan for the project. I’m consider finishing some last few things further and then releasing the source files, as a sort of open source, Game Maker based RPG engine. Although it may not be entirely complete even if I finish up some more stuff, it’ll be a helpful push in the right direction for someone who wants to make a game of a similar nature.

We’ll see how it goes. Eventually, there’ll be at least a project page up for it, with some screenshots and perhaps even a video. Whether or not it will be released as the short, short demo it is, or if I decide to release it as a (messy) source of help with building RPG systems in Game Maker, time will only tell.

Last but not least, I must repeat the words I uttered during the presentation of our game today. I mentioned that I’ve always respected Nobuo Uematsu and Yoshitaka Amano for the great artistic work they contributed with to the Final Fantasy games. After this project, I’ve found a lot of respect also for Nasir Gebelli, whom coded the first three Final Fantasy games. How he found the patience to program such complex systems is beyond me. Then again, I am an aspiring designer, not a programmer. Anyhow, kudos to Nasir for his contribution to the early FF-games. I’m impressed, to say the least!

That’s all for this post and for the project too, I guess. When I finally decide on what to do with the game, you might see another post about it on this blog.

Until next post; keep on gaming!

Marcus out.