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Sindrel Song - Stages 2 and 3

6 years ago2,034 words

I'm making good progress on this, finally!

I said in the previous post that it'd likely be a week before my next one, but it seems better in general to write shorter posts more often than gargantuan thought dumps that are more difficult to... well, difficult in general. So here's a report about my progress with Sindrel Song.

Giving myself a timetable has been very effective, and I've been really productive for the past three days. Well, from like 7am until 2pm anyway; after that, the exhaustion catches up to me and I can't do much more. I have been making progress though, which I'm... I was going to say quite happy with, but I always notice flaws that need tweaking, then when I tweak them I notice more, and there's this pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction because of the imperfections. But there's also a feeling of achievement and forward progress too, and that's the feeling I'm trying to focus my mind on.

For weeks, Sindrel Song's main mechanics were done, but I only had one character and one stage to play around with (Remedy). I intended to add the other five at some point, and I already finished the music for them a while back, but having to make the character models and decide how to handle the backgrounds and animations and things seemed like such a gargantuan chore that it acted as a wall, blocking me from moving forward. Now that I've forced myself to surpass that wall, it feels like progress should be quicker from this point.

So yes. I've actually got a video of the second stage, in the same irritatingly low quality as the other one (I've not found the time slash energy to set up a better program, even though someone recommended some in the comments of the other post). I don't intend to do this with every stage, partly because I don't want to ruin the surprise of discovering them yourself as a player, and partly because I feel they're far more enjoyable to play than to watch, but I thought I'd do this one as well to show the variation between them. This and Remedy's stage have very different tones (ha), and the third one is different as well. Hopefully that'll keep the player's interest. It's interesting actually trying to create these different feelings of music using the limited notes and instruments that I'm having to work with...

Anyway, here's the video:



And here's an image of that so it'll show as a preview (as usual):



Obviously the animations for the other character are missing (though Glimmer has some new ones this time), which is largely because I have to figure out how to actually do them. He's meant to strike his shield with his hammer to produce notes, and each of the six 'petals' would produce a different note, meaning that he'd need different animations for each note. It's something I intend to do with every character - I already did it with Remedy - so then you can watch them play, but it's challenging for technical reasons. Especially since the animation would have to start a split second before the note sound to look right... which is not a trivial thing. I'll come back to it and sort it out probably after the six stages work in their most important forms.

I find this stage quite fun to play, and I keep going back to it; earlier I played it three times in a row just because I found it so alluring. Not so much the music itself, but the joy of participating in it, and effectively performing a skill. I don't know if other people will feel that way, but I hope they might. I've not tested it on mobile yet though, and I'm concerned that some bits of the melody might have quick jumps that would feel awkward and frustrating using the touch screen (I've been using keyboard keys). I'll probably have to experiment a lot with things like rhythm and input format during the play testing phase.

Oh, and the character in that is called Hammer.



He represents the Toughness rune, which is the opposite of the Feeling rune that Remedy represents. It's kind of like having a low Disagreeableness trait using the Big Five System. Tough people would be casually insensitive to others' feelings (not cruelly, it's just that to them, facts trump feelings), and would see many things as battles, debates, or challenges in which they must fight in some form. It's not a bad trait obviously, and having this attitude towards the world would lead to effectively and rapidly climbing whichever status ladder they choose.

I quite like how well it worked out for this character. I chose Hammer as his name because it has musical connotations (pianos use hammers, for example), and a hammer is a tool that can be both a weapon and a means of building, development. It also looks like the letter T, which is the toughness rune. It naturally followed that he'd use an actual hammer as an instrument, and I chose a shield too because I felt it was interestingly unusual, but similar enough to real instruments to not be completely infeasible (gongs, steel drums, etc), and of course it makes him look like a warrior. He's also supposed to look like the modern version of a 'warrior' though, which is the kind of businessman who'd seek professional power, who'd try to conquer others in the world of work, to reach the top of the ladder; he's wearing a tie for this reason, which of course looks like a hammer as well. He's topless and his pants are short though to fit with the tribal/tropical visual theme I'm using for the sindrels. He also has a hammer motif on the front of his pants, mirroring the design of the tie, and fitting with the general look of belt buckles and the... whatever you call it that goes in front of the fly on pants. Sindrels don't have genitals, because their reproduction doesn't work that way, but male genitals are of course associated with the pursuit of power in our world, so it's an amusing little addition that he's got a hammer design where his would be, though that wasn't intentional.

Also, male sindrels have wings... or rather, they're meant to acquire wings in their six days of life, to reach the top of the mesa where the females live (I talked about that in ∞ this post ∞). These originate as large plant petals which are part of the bodies of plant-like monsters, so defeating them in combat is required to acquire these petals. The wings aren't part of the sindrels' normal anatomy, but the symboliote (head parasite, which has a connection to the brain and mind) can extend root-like tendrils out of their back, which suffuse through the large petals like veins in a leaf, or in an insect wing, allowing them to be moved despite lacking muscles or bones.

Hammer acquired his wings early in his life, and wears them proudly. He 'won' consistently in his six-day life, enjoying mating success and social privilege, but sees his transcendence of death as the greatest victory of all. He believes himself deserving of such immortality. He's not conflicted about it at all.

(I like my character designs because I try to be clever with them, but I always feel that it's a personal pleasure that might be lost on most other people, who'd rate designs based on how 'cool' or 'cute' they look superficially... and I don't think this design is very aesthetically cool really. Still, I hope some players would notice these design details and appreciate them!)

By contrast, this is stage 3:



That one involves this character, Dolour:



He represents the Grave rune, which is kind of like introversion with a blend of neuroticism; Grave people are pessimistic, introspective, they think and worry about everything and tend to find fault with everything including themselves. Someone Grave + Tough might be grumpy, while Grave + Feeling might be 'sensitive'.

Dolour is very much the 'sensitive' variation. Completely unlike Hammer, he was a failure in his six days of life. He never even acquired any wings, or scaled the mesa. He's never charged the gem of (that is, mated with) a female. He took Hearth's offer of immortality because he felt that his life was empty and without meaning, and hoped that existence away from the frantic, genetically-determined six-day game of life might offer something more profound and deeply fulfilling. It wasn't that simple, though, and now Dolour wonders a lot whether death might have been a better escape from the pains of living. The darkness is where everyone was born from after all, and where everyone is meant to return eventually. He's conflicted about it all, though; he doesn't want to live exactly, but he doesn't want to die either. It's a very different take on the situation to Hammer's, and I think it's so interesting exploring these different interpretations of the 'gift' of curing death.

Design-wise, this one's not as clever as Hammer. He's wearing full, limb-covering clothes to suggest insecurity and hiding away, and he's wearing a sindrel's skull on his head (quite impractically, really) just because it's morbid. I quite like his head feathers drooping out of the eye sockets, both to suggest tears, and to show a sagging listlessness as opposed to Hammer's alert sense of drive. His hair is long and unkempt because he's the opposite of the sleek, superficial status that defines Hammer.

Though the wintrels are all losing the pigment in their skin and turning white, both Hammer and Dolour are newish to immortality, so their original colours are mostly intact. Clearly, Hammer's bright blue, which means he's genetically blessed, and Dolour's dark grey, meaning he isn't.

(Using the vernacular of the online places I've been lurking around lately, Hammer is a 'Chad', and Dolour is an 'incel', though I didn't have that in mind when making them.)

Dolour's sitting down, and I've included a basic rock for him to sit on as part of his model. This is ugly and very much temporary though, and I'll have to decide how to handle it later. I've been planning to redo the environments in 3D, in which case his seat would be part of the level's model, but if I decide to keep (refined versions of) the 2D painted backgrounds, I'll have to come up with another solution. I'd paint a rock into the background behind his model, but there are issues with it being misaligned on some screen sizes. It's one of the many trivial but important problems I've had to add to my long To Do List, which I'll tackle once I've sketched out the whole game. It seems best to do that, than to make each level perfect before moving onto the next.

Dolour's song is slow-paced and uses the dark mode. I've found it quite difficult to play through myself, and it's not as fun for me as Hammer's stage at the moment because of that. It took me several attempts to finally complete it! I keep wondering whether the difficulty will be off-putting, or appealing... I mean, it's nice, in a way, to succeed in your first attempt, but it's also satisfying to repeatedly fail - but get further each time - before eventually reaching a hard-earned victory. People have to have a reason to be invested enough to keep trying though, and I don't know whether they will with this or not. I'll have to see how people feel during the play testing phase. If it's really off-putting, I can always do the easier variants of these songs like I talked about before.

Phew. That's way more than I meant to write about all that! So much for shorter posts! Maybe you found it interesting though! Obviously I've put a lot of thought into all these details, so I do like sharing that.