...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.