...and what came of it.

As I mentioned the other day (this update took much longer than I anticipated) I will finish off this retrospective look at this phase of the game's development by showing some art.

I can say, without a doubt, this post is the most revealing yet about the world I've been steadily working on. Some of the things you will see have been integrated into the current game, some are still up for decision, some I hate and will abandon in a dumpster when nobody's looking; This is the creative side of what I've been up to for a year, and it's kinda exciting to show it all. I suggest clicking on the pictures to see them in their native (high) resolutions.

Monster Sketches!

So, I've talked at great lengths about mechanics and game-play, but those those don't come to life without worlds and creatures to show them off. Here we have a various assortment of monster designs, spanning across the game's different areas, and representing the general vibe of the game itself.

A visual element that's been key to the whole atmosphere, and a running design choice, is trying to foster a sense of always being watched. You'll notice many of the monsters are very ocular-centric. Also, even many inanimate objects have faces, or weird markings to suggest anthropomorphism. Of note, while I lumped all of these guys together, not all of them are enemies. Together with the feeling of being constantly observed, I want there to be a certain amount of uncertainty when encountering the game's inhabitants. The keyword here is paranoia.

guess my current favorite cartoon and win nothing

I also mentioned equipment and items in the last post. Here is a look at some items and various gear I drew up. I whipped up the sprites next to the various hoodies rather quickly for this post--they aren't necessarily reflective of what they might look like in the game--if they appear at all. You'll also notice a key (a reward for completing one of the secret stages. Collect all of them, and open a super secret door somewhere!) A weird sword (intended to be her final weapon, after a lengthy series of ordeals throughout the game) a shoe (the previously mentioned item that lets you jump on enemies instead of fight) and a cat with a saddle. He's not the titular Kitty, but instead was going to be a mount of sorts that you rode on during transitional segments. They would provide a break in the the game's usual format, switching it up to a side-scrolling shooter for a little while as you collected items, and rode to your destination for a little variety. You may also notice the sketch in the bottom left, of the player in her "best" equipment. All the stats and flavor text you see there was planned to show up in the inventory/menu system.

wtf is going on here

Lastly, a look at some sketches of a few planned spells. I wanted there to be a fairly small number of these spells, but for each to be very visually distinct, and decidedly weird. As an example, for 'Silver Lining' there, the planned animation would be the player's casting animation, followed by the uneasy looking cloud drifting into view from off screen, gagging a little, and then vomiting a delicious rainbow on you that...somehow heals you. Look, don't think too hard about it. I told you this was supposed to be weird.

Just to reiterate, these are all sketches--I slapped a quick digital color job on them, but these are not what I would consider finished pieces, and weren't really for anything but my own reference. I'm also staying fairly tight-lipped as to whether or not these assets will ever be put in the game, or integrated in some way--mostly because I don't even know yet myself. So, just take them as they are--experimental, brainstorming sessions.

on what might've been...

I've intentionally been coy about a lot of the actual mechanics of the game because, honestly, they have been in flux across some very different states. I've touched on this a little bit in prior posts, but I'm going to go over what I think of as the game second's big revision, and probably one of the more interesting times in its development. Mostly because it's neat to talk about, but also as proof of concept of an idea I still want to explore later on.

the premier of an actual enemy design!

As I've mentioned before, it all started off as a beat-em-up, became a JRPG homage, and then switched engines for the last time, and became a platformer. The platformer idea seemed like a great entry into into game development, eschewing my increasingly complex goals to focus on something I might ACTUALLY get accomplished. Also, as a gamer myself, I just love the genre. They were my first type of games, and my fondness for them has lived on. This isn't a new sentiment in the indie scene, I understand, but I just view this as a testament to the creative brilliance of the guys and gals making these old games back in the 90s.

It was supposed to be simple. Rudimentary physics (as you can see in one of the first post's videos, you can push objects), have friction and gravity--basic stuff. Jump on top of enemies heads to dispatch them, collect spirals for points. It would have slower, more deliberate pace, as you'd die in one hit (unless you got a shield item), and could collect extra lives. The concept got a little more complex when I introduced save points, and special stages, but I tried to keep things within the realm of a Super Nintendo-era platform game.

...and thus this mock was born.

During this process, I was naturally going through tons of ideas, and a lot of the previous concepts from its different iterations across various genres still lingered around on the drawing board. More specifically, the RPG ideas still floated around like vengeful ghosts, and as I started getting more experienced with GameMaker, I started figuring out ideas, as well as discovering free-to-use code to build off of. The platformer parts were solid, and there was enough there to make a full--albeit simple, game--art assets not included. But I started getting bored with one of the game's core mechanics--combat...

I had no intention of scrapping all the work I'd put into the plaform parts, though. So, the new idea would be to try and implement a turn-based battle system into the game fluidly. It didn't take too long before I had the ground work for the game flow. You would still navigate the levels as per before, but when you bumped into, or jumped on an enemy, you then switched into the battle system.

As for the battle system itself, it was to be very simple, as you can see in the mock-up above. For your options, you have the Spiral, which opens your MAGIC menu, the Sword, which lets you choose a target to ATTACK with your currently equipped weapon, and a Box, which would open up the ITEM menu. Besides that, it was planned to be fairly standard turn-based fare. After fights, you would accrue money, which you could use at shops to buy new items, and equipment.

I decided that there would be no character levels. The game would have RPG-like stats, but they would be adjusted solely by the items you would find, and equip throughout the game, or by special events you encountered. These core stats were:

-  LIFE (how many hitpoints you have before you hit 0 and die)

- MAGIC (you would acquire "spells" through the game you could cast for specific point costs. As you explored the game and found floating spirals, they would both give you more magic points to cast with, and new spells as you hit certain numbers of spirals found)
    - STRENGTH (how hard your character attacked a target)
   - DEFENSE (how much damage is negated when attacked by enemies}

To increase these stats, you would buy/find items and equip them. You would have 4 equipment slots:

1. WEAPONS - You use these to hit things with. Adds STR.
2. HOODIES - would grant HP, and sometimes defensive perks against certain things like elemental damage. May also recolor, or slightly alter appearance of player sprite.
3. ACCESSORY - odd-ball items that gave extraneous, sometime useless, or just quirky side effects.
4. FEET - Would grant you passage across different types of terrain, alter jump-height, as well as affect how you approached combat. What I mean by that is allowing the platforming to come back into play. Once you reached a certain point (not terribly long into the game) you would get your first pair of shoes that would allow you to jump, Mario-style, on your enemy, dispatching them without going into the battle system. You would instantly get the same money amount from your kill.

unused menu art

I wasn't trying to kill off the reason for using my battle system when I made this decision, but diversify my options. This first pair of boots would come into play sometime after the end of the first chunk of similarly-themed level, or "world." The game encourages a Metroid-esque amount of exploration and backtracking, so I anticipated players coming back and forth between the worlds. Having to grind through the same battles over-and-over is tedious (especially since your incentive to grind out progress wouldn't be the same as in a more typical RPG, what with levels to acquire.)

There would be a further caveat to all of this though, and that is terrain. The game registers various ground types in its mask data and character hitboxes. For example, take a look at this little horned-fellow you've seen a couple times now.

Those horns aren't just aesthetic; If you jumped on his head, you would lose health. If you had the aforementioned jumping shoes, you would still take damage, and go into battle. You would have to wait until you found a pair of shoes that specifically allowed you to walk and jump on spiky surfaces to utilize the quick fights, in this case. The last element to this is that, even if you had the appropriate type of footwear to quickly dispatch your foe, if you couldn't physically land on its head for the jump, you would still go into RPG fight mode. This would allow me place bosses in, say, a narrow corridor, forcing you towards the more strategic fight to mix things up, or because I wanted to show off a particular monster design, or because I just wanted to be a dick.

her face is all creepy because, you know, magic.

This is post quickly got out of hand, and I'm not even done.

Seeing as this has been a much larger effort than I anticipated finding, cleaning up, and arranging all of this old art, I'm going to leave this last screen-shot of the most current version of the game's battle system before it got scrapped. You can see at this point that the perspective had shifted (this is important, but for that's for another post), the GUI has changed completely, and now you can have fights versus multiple opponents!


Alright, I'll finish this retrospective later with some sketches of enemies, equipment, and some spells.

back from the dead and lots of words

It's incredible how time flies. Or maybe just how unaware of its passing I am. It's coming on a year since my last update now, and while that's not some great tragedy, I feel like I could do better--especially in regards to my progress on my game. So I am, and so here we are.

Kitty Come Home is still very much alive. I realize that announcing that to four followers seems at least a little questionable, and that the italic stress probably didn't help much, but it's more for me than anything else. The game is still alive and perhaps even more alive than it was this time almost a year ago, honestly. A lot of things have changed, including my own expectations, and desires for the project.

For the next several of updates, I want to catalog just how wildly the game has changed since it's inception almost two years ago. A lot has changed since I originally started things up, as I have mentioned before. Speaking of things I've mentioned before, I'll start this self-aggrandizing nostalgia trip by showing the evolution of the player character sprite.

I warn you now--this will be a long post, full of half-baked, video-game/art-hipster rants. If you stay for the whole thing, I'd appreciate it you leave some spare change in the empty PBR on the counter there.

Anyway, in an earlier post, I briefly brought up the evolution of the character but pixeling her was a completely different beast, as I found, and in many ways ended up becoming a cyclic process where accidents, or changes I made while trying to make a pixel version, lead to inspiration for the pen and pencil version. This was my first true foray into pixel art, and I definitely learned some things along the way...

OMG WHO IS THIS

Because I enjoy setting nearly impossible goals, I decided that this game would be my crash course into not only pixel art, but learning how to animate. This eight frame animation is the culmination of over several weeks of work, looking at people like a maniac as they walked past, studying my own body language, and--naturally--watching cartoons.

An element I always wanted to strongly emphasis in the game was the player character. She represents the player's emotional tether to the game world, so every pixel needed to feel right. This first version just didn't accomplish that for me. While I like the color scheme (fun fact: green, purple and orange are my favorite colors), they didn't pop with some of the planned backgrounds of the levels, which would be rather dark themselves. Also, the lack of proper shading robs her of any depth--it's hard to tell that there's distance between her legs (stop it; you're better than making the obvious joke there), for example. Also, still being new at this game graphics design thing, I came to learn than using black as an outline color robs you some options as far as later color usage plays out. It also forces a certain emphasis on the 'blockiness' of the pixels, and makes it feel kind of flat. A last complaint was the hair. It was a prominent feature in her design (and a reference to another game character, which we'll touch on later). I felt that it was poorly animated, hid too much of her face, and because of its color, obscured the intended reference. And so, revision two was born!

getting closer

Nothing but an improvement in every way, as far as I'm concerned. Ditching the outline was one of the first things to go, but then it came down to colors. Choosing her color palette was one of the hardest designs of the creation process. I wanted her to look visually distinct, very quirky and eccentric, but also like she "belonged" in the game (which is quite surreal) somehow. The player needs to be seen at all times (excluding game-play-related-reasons) and the colors seems liked they popped well with the planned color palette of the game.

He left leg is darker now, so you can more easily identify that she's standing at a slight angle, which is completely pointless to point out, But The More You Know! She also has a slight bounce, which, coincidentally, was voted-in overwhelmingly by the females I asked. I only bring this up because I was initially opposed to the idea. Female sexuality in video games is handed with a disappointing lack of grace, in my opinion. Now, I actually appreciate the decision, though not for any sexual reasons or anything weird. Anyway, I didn't want the fact that the player character was female to be distracting, but wanted the fact to still be noticed. Which is sort of hard to do, a bit of a paradox, and I'll be damned if there isn't probably some social commentary in there somewhere.

You also might've noticed her posture actually changed as the sprite was revised. This was a deliberate change as I redrew her. The game has a definite story, though it's meant to be vague, and often confusing. In her original incarnation, the character is almost slumping, and I can imagine her a little downtrodden. That is exactly the kind of reaction I want the game world to have on the player, and that's why I decided it was a cheap trick to animate the player-character in such a way. 

Anyway, I tried to make the character a little more indifferent, I suppose; Give her the look of somebody just out for a normal, everyday walk, SPECIFICALLY to juxtapose with how weird, and mind bending some of the planned stages are. I want the player to be the one the says "what the fuck is going here?" at their computer; not draw a character that tells the player that they should be talking to their monitors. Which is just crazy anyway.

Here we have the "final" iteration of the character sprite. Unless I get hit by some crazy inspiration, this is the one I'm happy with it, and think works wells. Something that always bothered me was that I had trouble animating her braids, due to the pixel size and how small they were in conjunction to the rest of her face. It took completely redoing her face and hair, to make room for more features. It's incredible to me though that, in just moving around a few pixels, there is quite a bit more personality than from the one above. She even has a mouth and visible eyebrow!

Friends have suggested she was based on somebody, or that she looks familiar, but her true inspiration would be a couple of sources, actually. First and foremost, surprisingly enough, would be Link, from The Legend of Zelda. The hair, the pointy hat. It seems incredibly obvious to me, but nobody's ever picked up on it before. At any rate I wanted to give a nod to a series of games that, while not my favorite by any stretch, encapsulate something truly special--going on a huge adventure.

Lastly, her color choice was loosely inspired by Terra, from Final Fantasy XI. So there you go.

EDIT: Just as an incredibly nerdy curiosity, all of the sprites used on this post today are from the game, just blown up to exactly four times their actual size for clarity's sake.

taking it to the next level

An initial challenge going into the project was figuring out exactly how to go about level creation--it seemed like there were a couple of ways to approach it, and I wasn't sure which would be the best course of action.

At first, being naive and inexperienced, I hoped I could simply open up a new image file, draw them out, import them into the game, define surfaces, and be done. The idea was that they would be more organic and stay closer in appearance to my artwork.

I learned very quickly that this just wasn't going to fly. Besides the issue of collision (or, how the game detects your character is walking on a floor, or pushing up against a wall or object) proving to be a giant pain, the issue of dimensions, and keeping them unified and cohesive also gave me issues. After all, the character can only jump so many pixels high, so if, for example, I accidentally made a wall just a little too high for her to scale, I had to go back and redraw--a time consuming, and frustrating process.

Preliminary sketch of the first world's tileset.

From there, I went back to the drawing board, and decided to use the more traditional method of developing tilesets--this would allow me to create a set of  'blocks' that I could more easily place and fit together, making it so I didn't have to draw levels in passes, but instead allow me to fit them together in pieces. If you were lay a grid over the game, you'd see everything is basically cut up into 32-pixel-high by 32-pixel-wide chunks. This not only gives the game its 'retro' look but also gives me a set of dimensions to work with, allowing for much tighter level design.

The process starts with first deciding on the basic look of a tileset. I use graph paper, and just start drawing out a world design. The graph paper is useful for a couple of reasons; first of all, I can't draw a straight line to save my life, so there's that. Also, it lets me rough out how I want to start cutting up the art into chunks.

A deceptively simple looking set of tiles derived from  the sketch above.

From there, I use the sketch as a reference, and start creating the tiles themselves, cutting up the original art into a set of reusable tiles. The tricky part here is to keep the feel of the sketch intact, while creating tiles that are fairly multi-purpose. I try to make it so I can easily reuse tiles, and fit them together in a plethora of different ways so I have the freedom to map out further levels without necessarily needing to draw a new tileset every time.

From there, it's time to import the tileset, and start finally laying out the level itself. This is a slow process (I guess that goes without saying--there's no part of this entire project that doesn't seem to suck hours away at a time). It's also really fun, because it's like putting together a puzzle. It's especially exciting when you figure out neat ways to place your tiles together that you didn't initially plan for.

Starting to come together!

Masks!

Something to note here for those that are interested. As far as the game is concerned, all of this is basically background art in the game world--if the character object was placed on top of this, she'd just fall through, as there is no collision code to any of these tiles. That's where masks come in.

Naturally, there will be more than one tileset in the game. If every tile had it have its own collision code, as I added more and more tiles, the necessary memory usage would go up, and potentially bog down the game. If a rather simplistic, retro-looking game like this were to slow down my computer, I'd just think it was sloppy. So, to combat that, I have a set of simplistic, single color tiles that actually have the necessary collision code attached to them. These go on an invisible layer over the level art, and give the character something to stand on.

Now you're thinking with masks!

You can see here how the game 'sees' the level surfaces. While this method saves me memory, the game actually can detect collision per-pixel, meaning I can have more intricate surfaces than just simple planes and slopes. I handle these on a case-by-case basis, depending on the needs of the level. Also of note, and not shown here, are surfaces you can fall through, surfaces with low friction (slippery, ice floors for example), ladders, and moving platforms you can stand on.

So, the basic layout of the level has been determined, and the masks are laid out. At this point, it's time to dress things up a bit, and start adding backgrounds, foregrounds, and various other game objects...

By no means finished yet, but you get the idea.

And that's all there is to it!

on theme and atmosphere

Yeah, I'm still alive;  I've just been busy with other things lately, and as a result the game hasn't been getting quite as much attention I would like. Fortunately, life should be slowing down a bit in the next couple of weeks. While I haven't been able to really put in much work on the game itself, I've been steadily churning out concept art and ideas, so it hasn't been a total bust.

Usually the first question I get asked when the topic of making a game comes up is "what kind of game?" Depending on how familiar the person that asks me is with gaming, I'll usually say one of a couple things. Either "it's like the old Mario games" if they're not too big into the scene, or "an atmospheric, story driven 2D platformer--like Super Metroid with some light console RPG elements" if I think they're suitably nerdy.

I bring up Super Metroid because it was one of the first series that truly felt 'atmospheric' to me. I instantly fell in love with the sense of loneliness and isolation that the game was drenched in--I hope to achieve something similar with Kitty Come Home.

You see, despite the cutesy character designs, something I've been working incredibly hard on is juxtaposing that outwardly cuddly appearance with an ominous ambiance. My goal is to create a game that initially seems playful and inviting; but take a closer look at the characters, creatures and environments that make up this world, and you will see a quiet, sinister madness that I hope is a little unsettling.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call it a psychological horror game, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the heavy influence the first three Silent Hill games had on some of the choices I've made for the game's themes and settings.

If I can make go "awwww" and then immediately make you at least a little uncomfortable as you play, then my mission will be accomplished.

thoughts on character design

I kinda have a thing for character creation; if somebody were to ask me what the most enjoyable part of this project has been thus far, I'd easily say coming up with, and designing the main character and her story.

The origins of the character are sort of convoluted. Originally, my plan was to make a side-scrolling beat-em-up (think Streets of Rage, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade games, or more recently, Castle Crashers) featuring my friends and acquaintances as playable characters and NPCs. The whole idea was that hopefully it would give me some solid animation experience, and be an incredibly dorky present to my game playing friends.

As I started fleshing out ideas, I started running into problems. One, I'm incredibly self conscious when it comes to portraying people I know in art, and the whole design process was getting bogged down by wondering if the people I was making caricatures of would even like them at all. Two, I really wanted to tell a unique story, and using my friends as characters really closed me off in regards to what I felt comfortable doing.

So, I saved all my resources, decided to shift gears, and start a console-RPG in the vein of some games that shaped my appreciation for the genre--namely Earthbound, Phantasy Star IV, and the earlier Final Fantasy games (namely 1 and 6).

An early sprite-sheet for the Protagonist

Something I decided early on was to pay a respective nod to old RPG heroes of yore and make the character a silent protagonist.

This is a sort of polarizing concept amongst RPG nerds, so if you're not familiar, allow me to explain. The silent protagonist is an old game convention in which the character you play and are meant to identify with is completely mute throughout the game (except for perhaps specific dialogue choice options, depending on the game.)  Examples of this style of player character would be Link (or whatever you chose to name him) in all of the Legend of Zelda games, Crono from Chrono Trigger, and Ness from Earthbound.

I like this kind of character because it throws back to a time where games still required a fairly healthy imagination to truly bring to them to life--Video games represent a very unique story telling medium; I feel like a lot of these older games have kept their magic because they very cleverly keep a balance between showing and telling. They managed to evoke emotion because there was a certain amount of projecting yourself into the shoes of the main character, getting to run around and explore a new world, with interesting people to interact with, and monsters and challenges to overcome. These games became very personal experiences to me, and that's the big reason I think the silent protagonist is still a viable element to immersion in a game.

Unfortunately, this incarnation of the game quickly sputtered out as I ran into problems with the engine I'd chosen for it--RPG Maker VX. My inability to fine tune specific elements of the game made me ultimately abandon the engine, and start looking for a new platform.

But, I digress.

So, about the character in her current incarnation. She's gone through several revisions throughout her inception, originally starting as little more than a drawing exercise on a boring day at work...

kinda creepy now that I look back on it...

...to getting some pretty heavy refinement and becoming one of my first forays into pixel art...

..to getting some further changes, and finally ending up as one of my favorite characters I've designed in a long time.

A WIP loading graphic that will appear before the game launches

It's been a long road, but I'm very happy with her at this point. I feel strong character design is one of the most crucial elements of getting people to empathize with a story, and something I've put quite a bit of focus and energy towards. Here's hoping it pays off!

into the void...

An interesting old game trope I don't seem to see as often anymore is the inclusion of special stages. Besides mixing things up (usually both visually, and through specific gameplay mechanics), in my mind, they remain a quintessential video game hallmark, and thus I decided very early on that I wanted them in my own game.

Kitty Come Home will have five (or, that's the plan, thus far...)psychedelic special zones, accessible from certain levels in each world. The main goal for these levels is to snag 100 floating collectibles littered throughout--the caveat here is that their designs will be far more fiendish than the layout of the normal game areas, and to collect all 100 items, the player will need to be on top of their game and maybe even replay the zones several times to learn the best paths.

To make up for an increase in difficulty, once you discover a special level in a particular zone, an entrance will be available in that world's hub zone, so you can go back and try again if you don't complete it the first time.

And yes, there is something pretty neat to be had if you manage to finish all 5 stages...