These first couple months of the year have been ridiculously busy. As we prepared for this year, we knew we’d have more expenses in preparing for our Kickstarter in February of 2025. Therefore, I (Dan) took on a second side project for a few weeks that would help offset these expenses. Concurrently, we also added a couple of contractors that were assigned with one specific task, as we wanted to get these figured out sooner rather than later. As much as I love working with others on this project, I didn’t realize that managing all of these pieces, on top of my full time job and side project, would consume so much of my time. February ended up becoming one of the busiest months of my life. To top it off, our dog ended up hurting his back, and one of our cars got into an accident that made it undrivable.
Despite all of the hurdles, we managed to get a lot accomplished in the past couple of months. This is mainly due to the awesome team we have, crushing it, while I was getting crushed!
Concept Art
Corinne was tasked with three pieces since we last posted: King Archon, Weapon Shop Guy (working name) and the Advisor (working name). Below are these illustrations:
On the Eve of Remembrance, King Archon’s son fell severely ill. King Archon issued a decree that if anyone could find a remedy to heal his son, they would be rewarded beyond their wildest dreams.
Indeed, Velare has been rebuilt into a great land. The Withering did not succeed in our destruction. However, my hope is still fragile. The prince, my only son, fell severely ill on the eve of Remembrance. Surely you all have been informed about the Royal edict I made concerning the prince… If anyone can find a remedy to heal my son, they will be rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. Remembrance is a solemn holiday for us Velareans, and interrupting this is uncouth. But how devastating would it be if the future King of Velare were to perish! I beg of you, citizens of Velare… if anyone has a cure, please step forward!
– King Archon, interjecting during the Remembrance Ceremony
Weapon Shop Guy (working name) is an enthusiastic smith that is in charge of Castle Town’s Weapon Shop. He is one of nine siblings, who are all brothers. Ironically, all of them are weapon smiths, because it is the family business, but nobody in the family is really into weapons or fighting in general. They are just really good at their craft! Their job is to go around looking for lost or dropped weapons out in the field, and then to bring them back to the shop and make them stronger.
The Advisor (working name) is Velare’s royal advisor who is exceedingly well versed in Velare’s ancient history and society. The Kingdom has always had a royal advisor that’s tasked with educating the king on kingdom matters. Because of the Advisor’s eccentric style, most people, including King Archon, assume he is an archaic, senile, conspirator who wastes his time on myths and fairy tales. One of the Advisor’s duties is to oversee Remembrance.
Music
One of the ideas we’ve had for a while is that when enemies come on screen, the music changes into a more intense version of itself. We’ve finally began testing this theory with some great success! Currently, in most places, we have a really out-of-place track that I (Dan) ran through an electric guitar through to test. The proof-of-concept test worked well. We then began replacing a couple of the bad electric guitar tracks with something real, and the proof-of-concept became a great addition to the game. The seamless transition between the main track and the enemy track really helps sell the idea that something bad is onscreen, and that the player needs to do something about it!
Along with the enemy variations, Tyler has also been composing as well — mostly rearranging some older pieces we have had as placeholders. Below are a few samples:
Castle Town Day
Castle Town Night
Castle Town Enemy
House Theme Day
House Theme Night
House Theme Enemy
Pixel Art
Tony has been crushing it as always on the pixel art end. First, we decided to finish up the Minotaur animations:
When we added the Minotaur Shield Bash animation, we realized we forgot to finish the Reptile Shield Bash animations. Below are those:
We were able to get much of King Archon and the Weapon Shop Guy’s basic animations done:
Features
The good news about preparing for a Kickstarter is there won’t be a whole lot of brand new features, as we are essentially polishing up the existing ones. The bad news about preparing for a Kickstarter is that we are essentially making the game twice. Therefore, much of these features that we are polishing will most likely end up getting repolished in the future. That’s the nature of game development / releasing a demo!
What this means from a blog post standpoint is hopefully we can do a lot more showing instead of telling! Which, projecting myself (Dan) onto the reader, is amazing, as I don’t like to read!
One of the first things we added in January was for NPC characters to essentially block the players path. That way, the player can’t go into areas they aren’t supposed to reach yet:
One of the feedback items we received was in regards to trying to break a boulder or a crust with a weapon that is unable to. Before, we were giving feedback that it was breakable. We fixed this by adding some visual effects, as well as a new sound effect:
A major item we’ve been working on is making the Dojo teach the player all the different skills one can learn throughout their adventure. We have completed all the ones that will be available for the demo. Below is an example of a lesson:
A few months ago, we introduced the titular enemy, the Violet. In the last few weeks, we had the ability for Violets to be in a dormant state. As vicious as the Violets can be, they only attack when they are attacked. We also introduced an easier Violet variation, the green variant:
Tony did a great job adding the dormant / non-dormant animations:
Updated UI
As you probably noticed in the videos above, we’ve overhauled our UI. We hired a contractor, Josh Morrow, a seasoned UI / UX designer who has done many projects of his own. There were a few things in our UI that we knew weren’t a great UX. We had some ideas of our own, but we wanted to take a step back and have an outside perspective take a look with an unbiased / fresh pair of eyes.
Our main goal was to fix a couple of the painful parts of the merging mechanic of the inventory, but what we got was so much more! We’re still in the process of implementing everything. Most of the “so much more” parts will have to be showcased in an upcoming blog post. But for now, here are a few wireframes that we were given, along with Tony’s beautiful pixel art enhancement:
Implementing all of this has been the task of mine for the last few weeks. Most of it is implemented based on the wireframes, but there are a few missing pieces. Overall, merging is going to be much more streamlined and easier for the player! We reduced the “number of clicks” from 4 to 2!
The other important piece with our new inventory system was to make sure the player knew that weapons were merged, as well as understanding that their inventory capacity had increased for a given list. Below are some animations that Tony created:
Mac / Resolution / Gamepad Updates
One of our investments was purchasing a new Macbook to test the game on. One of the positives of Game Maker Studio is that theoretically you write your code once, and “it just works” on any other platform. This generally would be true for our game as well. Except, if we recall from our first post in 2023, under the Path Finding Part Two section, we built a C++ library to make path finding work much faster. This was a DLL that only worked within Windows. Therefore, the game would boot up, but our Soldier enemies would not know how to get to its’ target. This is no good.
One of our other contractors these past few months was Hyreon, who helped take our DLL and turn it into a Mac version, called a DyLib. Hyreon was able to figure out all the DevOps around Apple’s nonsense (e.g. Xcode) and get our game working on a Mac! Below is a screenshot if you don’t believe us!
Ironically, the next topic we are going to talk about is the resolution and how we fixed it, and of course this screenshot above is slightly messed up. Windows mode on both PC and a Mac still has its issues. But, we managed to get resolution scaling to work properly in fullscreen resolutions. We even went through the trouble of supporting 16:9 and 16:10 ratios (looking at you, Steam Deck)! We noticed the resolution all messed up originally when we booted the game initially. I (Dan) had admittedly only been testing on 1920×1080 resolutions up to that point, so we definitely wanted to spend some time cleaning that up for our frenemy, Apple and their weird resolutions.
Finally, when testing on a Mac, we realized that controller inputs were not all universally recognized. The simplest way to explain this is the Xbox controllers (and XBox type controllers) use what is called XInput, where Nintendo, Sony, etc. use what is called DirectInput. XInput has support for roughly 18 buttons, while DirectInput can support many, many more (e.g. motion). XInput works natively on all modern Operating Systems, while DirectInput requires additional drivers and other nonsense to make it work natively.
Steam automatically makes our favorite DirectInput type controllers “just work”, which is a big reason why many PC gamers use Steam. Don’t worry, we’re planning on release our game through Steam (more on that in a future post!). But for now, if the player happens to play the game with a DirectInput device, a message will popup stating as much, and what to do to fix it.
Other Notable Updates
Despite what we said at the beginning of the post, we still managed to add a few other functionality updates as well:
- We’ve improved the ability for NPCs to find and stand in their starting location, if that is the intention of the NPC.
- Obviously one of the big things showcased in this post was the message box that NPCs use to talk. Updating that dialog took a lot of refactoring, especially determining if the dialog is supposed to be for a cutscene (i.e. showing a portrait) or normal (i.e. showing a little tail).
- Since we had a few new contractors help, there were some things they found, in which we me made some improvements on. Specifically, the beginning sequence, making it more intuitive on what to do. We also moved some of the story exposition so there was less of a story dump right at the beginning.
- We updated to the latest version of GMS (2023-11). And then this week, there was a new version released!
- We added a few more cheats, specifically for moving around and capturing game footage.
- Kennedy made her first round of text updates. We built a little text editor, forking svelte-jsoneditor as a base.
- We hired a QA contractor in charge of hardware, making sure the game works on different platforms, as well as determining the minimum requirements for the game.
Conclusion
There was so much not covered in this post, that pretty much happened in the last week. This may or may not involve the updated name / logo of the game, as well as a rough trailer. Stay tuned!