Showcase Saturday 11/19

On Showcase Saturdays, I'll post a screenshot, gif, short video, or other type of update on Alkanaur's progress. Sometimes I'll post a similar update on another dev's project instead, because I follow a lot of indie developers that do cool stuff.

One of those dev teams is creating an awesome 2D arena shooter called Crashnauts. The developers also live in our home state of Utah, and we first met them at Salt Lake Gaming Con. If you like Super Smash Brothers, Towerfall Ascension, frantic action, or squishing other players with a drop-pod, check out this gameplay trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqkwEkt3PP8&t=2s

Nathan, Nords, and Emergent Narratives: A Recollection of Skyrim

Hi everyone! This post will be my first Throwback Thursday review. While you can expect the same type of info that you’d find in a traditional game review, the format is a tad unconventional. Since these are retrospective reviews (with some games over a decade old), there’s no reason to provide a typical pros/cons list with a rating. Instead, I’ll be traversing each review with a narrative perspective—small, focused stories that explain how my life and that game intertwined.

Nathan, Nords, and Emergent Narratives: A Recollection of Skyrim

I sit outside my professor’s office, my right leg nervously bouncing up and down. I’m nervous because I’m excited; I’m nervous because I’m scared. I found a possible topic for my critical theory class, a higher level course in UVU’s English program. Usually, I scrap together a thesis a couple nights before it’s due and begin the whirlwind of research and writing necessary to pass. But this time I have an idea several weeks in advance. This is new. This is why I’m excited, and this is why I’m scared. What if he turns it down?

Professor Gorelick invites me in. I look around his office. It’s cleaner than most English professor’s offices, and there are several Rorschach ink blot tests pinned on the walls. Professor Gorelick has studied Freud, Lacan, and other psychologists extensively.

“Professor Gorelick…” I begin.

“Please, just call me Nathan. I post memes on the projector during our classes, after all,” he says wryly.

“Okay. Nathan, I’d like to run my research paper concept by you since it’s a bit… avant-garde,” I say. He nods, and I continue, “I’d like to use a video game for my literary reference: Skyrim.” I wait as he briefly mulls over my suggestion.

“Sure,” he says with little hesitation. Phew.

And that’s how, about three years ago, I began to write a literary analysis of Skyrim. In the following weeks, I made sure to brag on social media about my homework, which involved a second play-through of the popular role-playing game. Most Skyrim fans will be unsurprised that I decided to make my character a stealth archer. The homework was mostly just to familiarize myself with the game and characters, because I already knew the topic of my paper: emergent narratives.

Bethesda’s Skyrim was my first real foray into emergent narratives—the stories born from interaction between players and game mechanics. And these were the stories I shared in my paper.

One of your first companions in the game will generally be the shield-maiden Lydia. Due to her ubiquity, most people have some type of story about her. These stories have nothing to do with her non-existent backstory or her repetitive lines (such as the sarcastically delivered “I am sworn to carry your burdens” whenever you trade items). No, these stories come from the emotional attachment players develop with the AI-controlled companion.

In my first Skyrim play-through, I quickly grew confident in Lydia’s ability to soak up damage. I’d often let her engage with the enemy as I sat back and used spells or flanked the enemy with a melee weapon. Lydia was invincible—if brought to low health she would kneel down and stop fighting, and then enemies would ignore her.

Soon Lydia and I ran into a necromancer and his dragon pet, an encounter caused by my incessant wandering off the beaten path, an irresistible pull in Skyrim’s open and expansive game world. I relied on the same strategy, letting Lydia take a beating while I tried using some spells on the wizard. Realizing that the wizard and dragon were next to each other, I saw the perfect opportunity to throw a fireball and hit both enemies. After the fireball hit, both enemies were low. I rushed in with a sword to finish them off.

I imagine I said something haughty and dramatic and embarrassing to the screen in that moment, proud of my newest victory. As I looted the corpses, my personal loudness belied an uncanny silence from my speakers. Something sounded… off. But I couldn’t place it. The dragon bones and scales I collected were rather heavy so I turned around to Lydia so she could “carry my burdens.” Lydia wasn’t behind me. That’s why the game sounded so quiet—I had grown used to the sound of her footsteps behind me, her occasional comments about our surroundings. I frantically searched, and eventually came across her body. Just like the dead wizard and dragon, I was able to “loot” her corpse. I was devastated—my hubris at exploiting the near-death game mechanic had led me to a wonderfully horrific narrative moment.

Later I found out on an internet wiki that your followers can die if hit by an AoE (area of effect) spell after they’ve kneeled down to yield in combat. So I had killed her with my fireball. I felt guilty, even though I soon found a different companion as I wandered Skyrim.

This is the power of Skyrim, and the power of emergent narratives. The game designers probably had no idea that the game rules they designed for the player character’s companions would end up inspiring a compelling narrative around arrogance and guilt.  But I will never forget the genuine anguish I felt upon looting her corpse and the rebound of remorse when I realized her death was my fault.

Skyrim is an immersive, amazing game. That doesn’t mean it’s without fault. While I love the delightful feeling of discovery as you came across a new cave or bandit hidout, I am less enthused by the dull and uninspired main storyline. Whereas some NPCs have brilliant, fun moments of characterization (look up Ulfr the Blind), the main character’s growth is unrealistic and full of narrative dissonance. And for every time a random dragon encounter helps you defeat a difficult quest, another dragon encounter might kill a villager that provides an important quest.

While the academic paper I wrote was bold and new to the English department at my university, the concept of emergent narratives has been discussed frequently in the gaming world. As is too often the case in critical discussion of video games, people often pick a side—emergent narratives or traditional “on rails” narratives—and begin a shouting match. Should games go one way or the other?

I don’t think so. Even though I cherish my Lydia story and the other tales my own mind created through Skyrim’s interactive mechanics, I also cherish games that follow a traditional narrative structure, such as Knights of the Old Republic (which I will indubitably cover in a future Throwback Thursday blog post). The interactivity required for games mean that some measure of personal input will be required by the player, and that personal input will add extra emotional impact to the game’s plot and dialogue as well as any narrative created solely in the player’s mind.

Anyway, if you somehow still haven’t tried out Skyrim, I’d highly recommend it. Bethesda recently released a special edition of the game with some graphical improvements, so now is a great time to start. While many games provide similar opportunities for stories based off the game’s mechanics, Skyrim’s focus on inciting wonder and encouraging discovery set it apart.

A Quick Update and Our New Blog Schedule

We're sorry for the long delay with our posts, but Rob the Sky Games is back with a brand new blog schedule. We have continued our work on Alkanaur, utilizing feedback we received at Salt Lake Gaming Con to reshape our direction. I've personally been focusing on refining our world, characters, and game mechanics. Robby continues to program and digitally paint like a boss. We're both increasingly excited as Alkanaur gets closer and closer to release.

But we've still got a while to go. To keep our fans updated, we will continue forward with a new blog schedule that should provide a bit more structure. On Dev Take Tuesdays I will write short posts about Alkanaur's development that originate from another source, whether that be another game, a movie or TV show, or simply a life event. On Throwback Thursdays (original, I know) I'll write game reviews about my favorite games from the past. Hopefully those reviews can inform our followers about my personal design philosophy and taste. On Showcase Sundays, I'll upload a short post showing off something we made during the week, or I might choose to link to another game in development that I'm excited about. In addition to my regular posts, Robby will continue to post the occasional in-depth post on programming or art as he sees fit.

We also invite you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter!

Thanks, and I'll see you on Thursday with our first throwback review: Skyrim.

Empowering Players

This won’t be a long post, but I’d like to quickly share Rob the Sky’s design motto and explain how that motto influences our day-to-day design choices. We’re still working on our first published game, and we want to make sure that this game and all our future games possess a consistent design that fulfills our goals as developers. For this reason, all our game design choices will refer back to one essential question: how do we empower our players?

Empowering our players affects all aspects of design, from the narrative to the gameplay to the user interface. So we’ve developed a few key “pillars” that will support our overarching motto.

Meaningful Gameplay

We don’t think it’s fair to our players to limit them to only gameplay or only narrative. We don’t subscribe to that kind of binary thinking, and we believe that games can be an excellent vehicle for both meaningful narrative and engaging gameplay. We feel that the best games use gameplay to enhance and inform the narrative, and vice versa.

Strong Characters

We want our characters to feel real, to feel “human” (assuming the character is human, of course). Helping our players suspend their disbelief will give their actions and choices weight and meaning.  An assembly of flat, boring characters won’t allow our players to dive into the story like they want to. We also want to keep our cast of characters diverse so that all our potential players may feel represented.

Consequential Choice

We think a good game provides tradeoffs and significant decisions. Consequential gameplay choices allow a player to express themselves through their gameplay. However, we don’t believe in overloading our playerbase with choices simply for the sake of “choice.” We strive to have every gameplay decision offer competitive choices, instead of one clear path to victory.

Clear Design

If our players don’t know where to click, what to do, or why their character just died, that’s on us. We want to ensure that we provide clear feedback throughout the gameplay experience. That way our players will know precisely what happened and what they need to do next. When feasible, we want to give user interface choices to the player so that they can have a comfortable amount of input.

Of course, these four pillars don’t cover every aspect of design. But working toward them will help our games empower players and will help us make the kind of games that we always enjoyed playing. Have you ever played a game that exemplified one of these four pillars of design? Let us know in the comments!

Five (Less Apparent) Reasons a Convention Was a Great Idea for Our Indie Game

Alkanaur has technically been in development for over two years. We tinkered with concepts and story ideas for a while. Then we slowly learned how to build a game. As the project gained momentum we were forced to think beyond making the game itself and start thinking about marketing, publishing, and distribution.

Last summer, I attended the Salt Lake Gaming Con and had a blast. I saw great cosplays, watched some competitive League and Hearthstone, and attended a couple informative panel discussions. But my favorite part of the event was visiting with local indie developers for both board games and video games.

At the beginning of this year, Robby and I decided to set a goal to attend SLGC in 2016 even though our game was still early in development.

We narrowed our dev goals to completing a polished demo, so that we could give players a good taste of what to expect with Alkanaur. Our work became more focused. We met more often.  And in the final 2-3 weeks before the convention we exhausted ourselves until, with only a few days to spare, we finished our demo. It took me plenty of caffeine, and my partner had to take a couple days off from his day job, but we did it.

So was it worth it? Heading into the convention, we knew we could expect some playtesting and hopefully a list of sales leads. We watched for gameplay issues and kept an emailing list so we could contact interested players when we go to Steam Greenlight. And while we did reap some of those expected benefits, we also noticed several more. So here are five less obvious advantages from our experience at a gaming convention.

1. We Gave Ourselves a Clear, Measurable Goal

Unless you work in game development, it’s hard to grasp just how giant a video game project can be. And for a small indie team like ourselves, part of the struggle is simply knowing what to do next. When we decided to present a demo at SLGC, we set our first official development goal. As I mentioned above, that goal helped us hone our work and develop our own project management system. And after the convention, we both felt more comfortable with setting future development goals.

2. We Learned from Other Devs

At the convention, we spoke to a lot of visitors as they played our demo. But we spent even more time speaking to the other indie devs near our booth. We talked about convention dos and don’ts with the developers of Legacy of the Elder Star. We chatted with the devs behind Crashnauts about the merits of Unity 2D and Unity 3. We discussed the Greenlight process with the minds behind the fanciful We Need to Go Deeper. From these conversations and others, we made important decisions about our own game.

3. We Found the Essence of Our Game

Probably our least favorite part of the event (aside from the bugs) was pitching. But after making pitch after pitch, we started to get a better read of the game we were trying to make. It sounds silly—after all, we’d been working on the game for a couple years. How could we not know our game was about? Yet when players or press invariably asked unexpected questions, we were forced to find answers. Many of my personal design principles (which I’ll share in a future post) were revealed as I justified design decisions and explained gameplay goals.

4. We Received Emotional Feedback from Players

When we attended the convention, we were ready to receive plenty of gameplay feedback. We only had time for some very limited playtesting from friends and family members, and we knew that we’d find some bugs and balance issues. As I watched player after player lose—the demo might have been a little too tough for players new to tactics games—I found myself paying more attention to the player than the actual game. I noted our visitors’ moments of frustration as well as their moments of triumph.  For example, we had a couple young kids try out our demo. I noticed that they had a lot of fun even though they really didn’t understand the game. Eventually I realized that they simply enjoyed moving characters around the screen while the enemies gave chase, and I realized just how important fluid animations and an adaptive AI can be.

5. We Remembered Why We’re Making a Game

Like point #3, this point might seem a little esoteric, but I truly feel that this was by far the greatest benefit I personally received from attending a gaming convention. As developers, it’s easy to get tunnel vision on what the project needs to continue. Perhaps it’s even necessary for a successful project. Watching people play and enjoy our game reminded me on why I needed the project, why I needed to make a game.

Out of hundreds of players, only a few people actually beat our demo battle at the convention. I vividly remember one of those victories. A group of young adults all came in a group. Two of them played our demo while the others watched. One player lost fairly quickly, and soon all eyes were on the remaining player. Two of the three characters on his team had already died, but he had also eliminated two of the three enemy AIs. His remaining character—Clarion, our principal protagonist—fled from the burly enemy with only a sliver of health, kiting the enemy around the map and firing fireballs. The small crowd literally gasped as the tactic finally worked and the tough enemy collapsed. High fives were shared. The player stretched out his wrists and grinned. I looked over at Robby and we exchanged a small nod of satisfaction.

In short, our trip to SLGC 2016 was definitely worth it. We had to step out of our comfort zones, but we now feel revitalized and ready to take the next step in our game’s development.

2D or not 2D

Well, the convention is over and we survived. And now after a month, we're back at it. However, we received loads of great feedback and noticed some things that we could definitely improve. Since we never really posted a screenshot, I'll put one up so it can then be forgotten after I tell you our next move.

You might not be able to see, but the current version includes a very block-y 3D world with 2D sprites overlaid on the top. It made a bunch of things relatively easy, but introduced several problems that I believe were unnecessarily introduced by using 3D. I'll just name a few.

1. Making tiles that were dynamic pieces of art (for example, with grass that overlaps another tile) instead of obviously textured cubes is much easier (in my humble opinion) to achieve with 2D.
2. The performance was starting to drop a little, but that might have been my naivete with Unity.
3. I found a very nice asset to handle isometric tiles that vastly reduces the amount of programming necessary.

Aside from personal preference, I think this revamp was a good move. As this is our first project, I have been learning how to use Unity and program with their component based architecture. As with anything, there were growing pains, but I think I finally realized the best practices. I will admit that the code had grown from experimental to a patched together architecture. However, it was quickly becoming a monolith that wouldn't scale very well, so I decided to redesign it with a proper architecture and best practices. One of these decisions was to simplify things with a 3rd party library and to use 2D. The rebuild still in the early stages, but based on what I've learned up to this point, I think it will be a step in the right direction. In a later post, I will go over more details about what I've learned and my ideas about how best to utilize Unity.

The Story of Alkanaur

The story of Alkanaur is set in a good-vs-evil, gods-vs-gods, mystical, industrial, and chaotic world. However, despite these multiple aspects vying for attention, the characters are what ultimately drive this adventure onward. Almost everyone will find something relatable in the courageous, jealous, isolated, selfless, and eccentric personalities that will surface as the story unfolds. Characters will evolve and ideologies will clash in the epic story of Alkanaur.

As the main developer and artist (I should also say an amateur artist) on this project, and as a first time game developer, I’ve come to understand that a lot of work goes into the production of even a seemingly simple game such as this demo. While it might be of interest to some to thoroughly explain the process, I won’t bore everyone with the details. In fact, I’ll probably write only a little. Hopefully the images and occasional banter will prove entertaining for some.

Characters

Clarion

Clarion is the main character. In the words of Skye (our designer and writer), here is a brief description of her.

Clarion values independence, but also is very loyal to friends and family.  She has no strict code of morals, and she doesn’t love rules either.  Still, she generally will do the right thing and strives to always help others, even when it isn’t convenient.  She has a love for adventure and has always wanted to leave Ithaca (her island hometown) and see what’s out there.  She’s not overly pious, but she’s always tried to be respectful to the gods, just in case.

Clarion’s father has recently contracted a rare plague that is draining her family’s resources.  Her mother wants her to help with the family business, but Clarion knows that the money probably won’t be enough.  Also, working every day with her mother seems like a nightmare to her.  She decides to start a merc company and head for the mainland to make more money for her family.  That way she can have her freedom, see the world, and help her family.

Concept art (in relative chronological order)

One of Clarion’s main skills is her summoning ability. Knowing this will help you make sense of some of these pictures. 

Runic

More words from Skye.

Runic is the quintessential “gentle giant.” Most of the time. He cares for others and will often get himself into trouble by sticking up for those in need. He is easily offended and does not take criticism well. He will not usually speak unless asked a direct question. Runic strongly believes in the new Roman Order because he has seen how unfair the meritocracy system has treated him and others. He is fiercely loyal to his friends and family, even when he feels slighted or betrayed by them.

Runic was born with no magical powers at birth, which is considered a curse by the gods in this world. Large in stature, he performed physical labor from a young age to appease his parents, who detested him. With the onset of puberty, he started to develop strange runic markings all over his body that granted him some magical prowess. Thinking all his problems cured, he eagerly shared his magical talents with friends and family, but his issues only worsened. Any talents he had were considered impure and impractical, and he has been continually bullied and belittled all his life.

Concept art (again in relative chronological order)

Slayer

Of all the characters that we have worked on so far, Slayer’s personality is the coolest to me. Maybe I’m just pessimistic like I imagine her to be.

Slayer is a rebel who hates being forced into anything. One of the only people she’ll listen to is Clarion, because of their friendship since they were young girls. She won’t go out of her way to hurt others, but she doesn’t feel many moral obligations either. She’s rude and belligerent, but her pointed remarks are usually correct even though they’re sharp in tone. No one would call her a pious or devoted worshipper of the gods, but she highly values the current Greek ideals of individuality, intelligence, and creativity.

Slayer’s family members are all very much like her, which has led to a rather dysfunctional family overall. Like Clarion, she is eager to get out of Ithaca and see more of the world. Eventually, she’d like to live in Athenia—the bustling Greek city—with enough money to open her own business. She is loath to admit such an ordinary dream, and hasn’t even told her closest friends about that. Slayer received her battle prowess from Marshal school, which was kind of like a private school except with an arena brawl at the end of every semester.

Concept art (I think I remember the order of these)

There are other characters in the mix and more general details that we will most likely reveal later, but for the sake of brevity, I will cut it short here.