Dev Take Tuesday - A Small Tribute to Carrie Fisher

Like many others today, I’m saddened by the death of actress Carrie Fisher. As a huge fan of the Star Wars universe—including the movies, books, and video games—I first appreciated Carrie Fisher for her role as the iconic Princess Leia. But later in life I started to also appreciate her honesty and candor in interviews as she discussed her problems with mental health and addiction. I think it’s important for me to remember that she wasn’t just about unconventional hairstyles, creative insults, metal bikinis, or even her skill with a blaster. Carrie Fisher was royalty off the screen as well.

Image found on this Huffington Post article

While writing and developing the characters of Alkanaur, I’ve always known that mental illness would play some role in shaping their personalities and backstories. I’ve personally dealt with depression and anxiety, and people close to me have had even more acute experiences with mental health. At this point, I haven’t written any specific dialogue, so I’m not sure how much of our characters’ problems with mental health will show. However, I do promise that all our characters’ struggles and experiences will be treated with respect, openness, and sincerity. Hopefully—in some small, small way—that will be a fitting tribute to Carrie’s legacy.

Showcase Saturday - Steam Greenlight and Skelattack

When I mention that I’m making a video game to friends and family, many people are curious how we’ll take our game to market. I’m going to use this showcase Saturday post to give a quick explanation of how we plan to get our game to consumers: Steam Greenlight.

Image found on Steam's website

Steam is essentially a digital storefront for nearly all computer games on the market. With few exceptions it’s safe to say that if you’re into PC gaming, you know Steam and use Steam. Steam used to curate all available games on its own, accepting titles from known publishers and then reviewing games from smaller companies to see if they belonged on Steam. With more and more independent (indie) publishers trying to get their games on Steam, the company decided to use a new crowdsourced approach called Greenlight.

So once our game is a little farther along—we’ll need to include screenshots and a nice trailer that show polished gameplay—we will enter Alkanaur into the Greenlight process. Once there, people can vote whether or not they’d be interested in buying the game. If we get enough attention, our game gets “greenlit” and we reserve a spot on Steam’s digital shelves, so to speak. From that point on we’ll continue to develop our game until it’s ready for release. Another nice feature of this process is that we’ll be able to build a community on Steam and keep receiving feedback to improve.

With so many games trying to be greenlit, the first few days of being on the front of the Greenlight page are vital. After you slip further back in line, you rely on other avenues to get visibility on your personal Greenlight page. So we’re hoping for a big first day, but if we don’t get greenlit right away, we’ll just keep spreading the word. Both Robby and I are confident that we’re making a well-designed, polished, and meaningful game that belongs on Steam, but it might take some extra work to make sure we get the necessary visibility. When the time comes, we’ll be reaching out to everyone for a bit of help. We’ll let you know!

In the meantime, I’d like to showcase a fun game called Skelattack. I’ve been following its progress on Twitter, and I think it has a unique character design and some fun gameplay. Skelattack is currently in the Greenlight process, so if you have a Steam account head on over to this link and check out the game. There’s even a demo version for Mac and PC users.

Characterization Takes Time

I recently finished the television series Supergirl. In the first few episodes, I had some reservations. I sensed way too many tropes and flat characters. Add that to the fact that I’ve never exactly been enamored with Superman as a concept, and I was about ready to drop the series altogether.

Fortunately a good friend convinced me to give it a bit more time. As the season went on, Supergirl’s supporting cast became much more vibrant. In fact, two of my least favorite characters—Cat Grant and Hank Henshaw—became my two favorite characters by season’s end.

High-power CEO Cat Grant from the show Supergirl (image found here)

Characterization takes time. If you want characters in your TV show, movie, or video game to develop, you need to give your audience sufficient time with them. If the characters change too fast, the development won’t seem realistic. And if you don’t change at all, you end up with flat characters that will never really capture your audience in a profound way.

In Alkanaur, we wanted to provide our audience with fun, insightful, and sincere characters. On the other hand, we also know that many tactical gamers want to focus on the gameplay with minimal distractions. Our compromise was too split most of the character building from the tactics battle system. While actions in the battle will influence character relationships and conversations, those conversations will take place in separate, optional events that we’re calling “tavern moments.”

These tavern moments will have characters sitting next to each other and discussing the most recent battle, and as relationships deepen their conversations will become more profound and open as well. As a writer and storyteller, I—of course—hope that players will participate in these tavern moments. With sufficient time, I think that they’ll fall in love with our characters just as I fell in love with Supergirl’s characters. However, I’m also glad that people who want to get right back to the core gameplay will have the option to do so.

Balancing Innovation, Pragmatism, and Patience

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Terraria, the action-adventure sandbox game from Re-Logic games. With over 200 hours played at this point, it’s obviously held my attention for quite a while. I was discussing the game with my wife tonight, and I initially said that the game was perfect. Or at least perfect for the game it was trying to be. But, to her credit, my wife pushed me to keep thinking about what I would change. And I did eventually find some (small) issues with the game.

My number one issue is inventory management. Terraria’s dev team does an amazing job delivering free, content-rich updates, and those updates have added some helpful features for managing all your stone blocks, countless potions, and leftover furniture. The system of storing items in various chests is still unwieldy, however, and I find myself irked when I spend an entire play session reorganizing my chests simply because I needed to expand my home.

The much, much harder question is: what would I change? I’m not sure there’s a great answer here. You could get rid of all chests and just have a global inventory, but that would take some of the survival and resource management mechanics out of the game. One big “home chest” that you can’t move but holds everything? That would lead to a massive mess of an inventory and creates a huge problem if you do have to move the chest for some reason. All of the “fixes” I came up with in my own quick brainstorm had serious drawbacks as well.

Not every conundrum in game design has a clean answer. For example, in Alkanaur we’re always looking at ways to speed up combat for the player, but no matter what there’s going to be some pauses in the game. When we chose to make a turn-based strategy game, we simultaneously chose not to have the responsiveness of a real-time action game. Of course, such thinking can stifle creativity. If designers always left things the way they were, we’d miss out on a lot of great innovations. I think the key is accepting that every design has a drawback, while at the same time pushing ourselves, constantly asking: what could we change? 

Showcase Saturday 12/3

Hope everyone's having a great weekend!

On our Showcase Saturday this week, I want to show off a pixel art concept Robby and I have worked out for a character we're calling Sentinel for now.

Sentinel focuses on defensive abilities using her humongous tower shield. Her parents were too wrapped up in their own busy lives to take care of their several children, so as the oldest daughter she learned to take care of those around her. Now she takes her protective personality to the battlefield as a member of the mercenary team.

For these pixel art character concepts, Robby and I work together through various iterations until we find an art concept that fits the gameplay and narrative niche for that character. It takes a little longer to get it right, but we want each character to feel unique and look fantastic.

Returning the Right Way

On Black Friday I spent most of the day binge-watching the entire new mini-series of Gilmore Girls. When I first heard that they were going to return to the Gilmore Girls universe, I was ecstatic. The witty writing, overwhelming amount of references, and loveable characters in the first seven seasons make it a television series I’ll never forget.  But as excited as I was for the revival, I was equally nervous. As fast food teaches us, some things are simply better the first time. Would the new season, set 10 years after the final seventh season, end up like reheated French fries?

Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. While I don’t find the season gripe-less, I think the writers did a great job delivering something familiar yet new. The four episodes weren’t simply sappy nostalgia trips—I saw a great deal of character development, and I think I gained new insights into most of the main characters. I can’t go much farther here without spoilers, so I’ll stop.

What does this teach me about game development? You gotta return the right way.

With Alkanaur, we aim to make a return of sorts. We absolutely want to make a game that will remind people of Final Fantasy Tactics. As I’ve considered the mechanical design, plot, and characters for our game, FFT has always been a reference point. And when you set yourself a strong reference point, it’s easy to simply rehash or reskin the old game. After all, it’s beloved—why “fix” it? However, if a game wants to successfully return players to a game from their past, the developers need to make sure they also take that game somewhere new.

And so I continue to look for ways to set Alkanaur apart from the wonderful tactical RPGs of the past. Like FFT, we have a two-job system to allow players creative freedom in building a party, but the primary and secondary class system in Alkanaur is distinct. We’ll include character progression, but with a new experience system. We’ll tell a great political-minded story, but players should gain some new insights from the narrative.

Just as I learned to love—and resent—the residents of Stars Hollow in brand new ways in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, we need to present gamers new challenges, new experiences, and new joys in Alkanaur. 

Happy Thanksgiving

I took most of the week off for Thanksgiving (and Gilmore Girls), but you can expect our usual blog schedule next week. I hope all of our followers were able to eat their fill, without feeling too sick afterwards.

Whenever I have a little time I've been working on our sprite sheets. Working on each frame individually can be tedious, but the final result is worth it. We finished a good portion of the frames for several characters in our demo, but since every character can fulfill any class role we need to have a wide assortment of animations ready for each character. So I've been working on filling the animation gaps here and there.

One of the most recent animations I worked on was a punching animation for the character we call Runic.

Runic gets angry when he punches

See you next week!