Characters That Make Sense?

We are nearing the end of September marking the end of our second iteration. Unfortunately, we are behind on character concept art and animations, but we have made a lot of progress on environment art.

Harry has put together (I assisted a little) an almost completed tileset for Bydale, which is the first town in the game. This is more than what we had planned for environment development for the month of September. Hopefully, by the end of next iteration, we will have a completed Bydale. Ryan will even start music development for Bydale next month. The good news is Bydale is almost built; bad news is we need to burn it down.

Even though we haven’t made too much progress on character art, we have been discussing the characters’ appearances to have them look consistent to their age, origin, and class. Since the main country in the game has a very medieval setting, we are borrowing cultural appearance when designing the characters.

Admittedly, we have been focusing on the male character design a lot more since the first party members are all men. We are using the medieval cultural view on beards when designing the male characters. Beards are representation of power and masculinity. While the male characters do not have facial hair during their standard appearance (younger), they will eventually sport beards during their adult appearances.

This decision slightly concerns me as I believe it is good to have a diversity of character appearances to appeal to different audiences; however, at the same time it makes sense in this world and is a great way to show a drastic increase in age for the men. Does anyone else have an opinion?

Isometric Vs. Perspective

It's funny how you can mentally trip up over such a little incident.

This past weekend, as Joe mentioned, we got quite a bit clarified and laid out on Spirits. Now, we're getting some environment tilesets together and a question came up:

Wouldn't isometric be a cool viewpoint to employ in the game?

Okay, well, that's great. I mean, sure, it would be fantastic. While I'm not totally into the idea of an isometric viewpoint in 2D RPG games, extra definition on buildings and landscape assets can't hurt. But now comes the fun part. Having the game play in an isometric view means that the tilesets will need more work, since they're at a 45-degree angle. When it comes time to add edges and smooth out the assets we have, we won't simply be able to reuse those angled edges for everything. Not to mention - since we're using RPG Maker, our first "release" as it will, is going to be as a PC version, where the primary means of controls are UDLR arrows.

I'm not sure yet if RPG Maker has an isometric mode, but if it doesn't, that means we get to reserve half of one tile for each separate edge piece we want to produce.

Now, for the other option - proceeding with perspective design. A lot of RPGs re-create that "retro" feel by keeping the buildings and all the environments in the perspective style, where most everything is square, and facing front. I don't see any harm in doing this, mostly because it's simple to use when using a tile editor, and because I don't think much is lost, especially in the way of measuring the grandiose nature of buildings. You can still establish height and length in perspective view, but depth becomes the issue, and even then, it's really only half an issue because of ways around it - like shading.

Not only am I currently more into the idea of perspective view because of the aforementioned, but also because Spirits is our first real GAME as a team. Heck, it's our first game as individuals. No one is to say that it's a bad thing to stay simple, especially if it's suited for the project you're working on. It makes sense to flaunt your abilities, but if that flaunting is at the sake of time that can be well-spent on hammering out the remainder of an already-lengthy game creation process, maybe it's not worth it in the end. Personally, I think it's possible to have a great-looking game simply by having great artists working on assets that are suitable for the style of the game you make. This is why we're not looking to recruit a 3D modeler for our game. It's the same reason why.

Creative boundaries are frowned upon by a lot of people, because no one wants to limit the possibilities they can achieve when working on anything, games included. But sometimes creative boundaries are necessary because they prevent you from turning your great idea into something unsure of itself, a product or outcome that is a mixed bag of results. In this situation, putting our game into an isometric view produces results that will vastly change the impact made on our demographic - on the people who love RPGs and generally know what to expect when looking at RPGs. In order to not confuse them, it's important that we don't make a change that doesn't make sense. Plus, it's an uncommon thing used in RPGs - I can't remember the last isometric 2D RPG I played. I think I'd just be confused.

Moral: Breaking down the barriers for creative purposes can sometimes break down any barriers of expectation that people may have. Creating this project in that way may turn off some loyal fans of the genre, and all for a mostly unnecessary reason - to be different.

First Iteration Complete!

It is hard to believe that it is already September, and we have completed our first real iteration. Unfortunately, we have nothing pretty to show this iteration, but we have made a lot of progress on project definition, gameplay definition, high-level story definition, and recruitment.

We even came up with a goal to have the entire opening sequence of the game playable by May 2012. This is up to the part where Joseph and Myles enter the slave camp.

The majority of the tasks that got done in August were lots of high-level documentation, which is great. Ryan and I put a lot of focus in the battle system definition, and we defined a lot of the functional requirements and character abilities.

Additionally, we did some recruitment, and we now have a pretty solid art team. Yeah, we still don’t have a dedicated Ruby scripter yet, and we could always use another person to focus on animations. Yeah there are a lot of animations…. If anyone on the team has any recommendations on either a scripter or an animation that would be awesome.

Long-Term Planning (TL;DR)

So, alright. Maybe this won't end up being a strict weekly update, down to the day.

Last night, Joe and I hammered out a lot of timeframes on VersionOne for when we need to see art assets coming in. Right now, we're planned up through May 2012. It seems like we're looking forward too much, but I think we're being fair, considering the amount of the game we'd like to see mostly functional by then.

We've decided that come the end of May, we'd like to see the first 5ish hours of play in the game to be mostly, if not totally functional. This means, complete with all battle assets, environment assets, character art, text/dialogue, music, sound, and programming with the battle system/levelling system, along with the above content's implementation into RPG Maker. Since this is under a year away, this seems a bit hectic for our first goal, especially because this project is a "free-time," unpaid project for all of us right now.

That being said, I think our views are realistic and feasible. Much of this goal will help us out with the rest of the game; the battle system and several other functionalities will last throughout the whole game. We should have something visual to show for our current "tl;dr" status, soon.

If you're reading this, thanks for keeping up on our progress.

9 Years Later

I guess we are on level 2 of writing blog posts, but this is level 1 for me.

This past week Ryan and I have made a lot of progress on the high-level Spirits story. We compiled a list of major events that needed to happen between the start of the game and the final boss, and literally sticky noted them all around the room. The work we did is reflected in a document we put on Dropbox.

The story is very clean right now, but there are parts of it that need a lot more flushing out. One of the biggest problems we are having is trying to integrate adult forms of the characters into the game. We do think it would be awesome for the player to feel the progression of the adventure by giving them adult character art, so this is something we want to integrate. Here are a few things we have decided... or vetoed:

• We do not want adult character art to be tacked on. "Hey Caden! You lost a lot of your hair moving from one screen to the next."
• We do not want a "9 years later" to appear on the screen. There is absolutely no point.
• We are not against time-travel, but it should be done right. Time-travel is not a theme in Spirits. I personally would like to avoid the complications of it.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?

Also, Jenni, Ryan, and I all met in person for the first time yesterday. I think it was great for some of our team to meet, and I want to try to do this as often as possible.

The Ball Has Begun to Roll!

So as of today, we've got seven (Count 'em, seven!) people officially interested in joining the team/working on this game with us!

So far, Joe and I have been working on a lot of the technical aspects of the game, including battle abilities, weapons, anything to do with numbers, really.

We have one person who will be working with the battle system and mechanics, and we've got three to five interested artists - this is great, because this game will likely be very art-intensive.

Everything is chugging along, and Joe got a lot of work done over the weekend on the Battle Doc. I think we're ready to start stitching some assets together as soon as we get some!

That's all for now! More to come as soon as we have something we can show!