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Week 13 - Gameplay Demo Video!

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago919 words

I've reached a major milestone this week! The game's complete enough in terms of general features to show off in a gameplay video, so I've upload one to YouTube!

I won't ramble on; here's the video:



It should make a lot more sense of a lot of what I've already talked about in writing over the past few weeks. This is a pre-alpha proof-of-concept build though, so the final version is likely to change quite a bit from this, especially in response to feedback.

So I'm curious what you think just based on the video alone!



Here are some comments of my own as I rewatch the video now:

All the dialogue is just silly at this point! I used it mainly as an opportunity to show how the conversation system works, or at least how it looks, but also as practice for (re-)familiarising myself with these characters' general traits and speaking styles. While the area in the video uses the Dreamcave assets, it's not a reflection of the actual dungeon/chapter as it'll appear in the final game. I'll remake the room layouts and add actual plot-relevant (somewhat more serious) dialogue for that. It seemed pretentious to add something more serious to a video like this, but I wonder if people will get the impression that all the dialogue will just be stupid quips.

The characters are caricatured, especially Steele; I reread some of my old posts about this game recently, and a couple made a point of saying he wouldn't be as cartoonishly vile as he was in MARDEK in this incarnation. That's still the plan, but the ridiculous version of him in the demo makes me laugh.

I tried to at least show all the features in the video: field movement, character switching, battles, menus, the two camera zoom levels, etc. Menus don't make for a riveting viewing experience, I know, but I felt they were important to give an idea about.

Some bits would only make sense to people who've played MARDEK and/or Taming Dreams. I wonder how many people will watch this who've played neither!

A lot of the skills and equipment aren't finished yet. All item descriptions are temporary or missing.

There's this annoying jerking thing that models (or sometimes just their heads) do when they first appear (eg on the menu when it's opened), or they appear too brightly for a frame at the start of dialogue, for reasons I understand but haven't devoted the time to fix yet!

It really bothers me that I triggered the party dialogue between Steele and Deugan twice accidentally, and I almost replayed and re-recorded the whole thing for that reason, but I probably shouldn't indulge in that insane degree of perfectionism!

I really like the Cayvern concept and execution, and its 'Bat Breath' (which has the kind of layered conceptual appeal I like)!



Obviously there'll need to be some balancing of numbers eventually. It bothers me how often assists just do zero damage; I'll probably rethink defence.

Avenges also trigger multiple times - incorrectly, I think - in response to the Cayvern's AOE attack. It seems like characters might be using the wrong concord's percentage to determine their chance.

Moods have only been visually implemented, so Steele's Crazed mood here has no actual effect.



Also, actually making a video of this was an ordeal! I thought I'd be done in an hour yesterday morning, but it took all day. Mostly that involved waiting for videos to finish processing/exporting (which takes forever), then finding out they looked and/or sounded awful due to limitations of the video editing software I was using. I almost paid for the Pro version of the program I've used for a while (Lightworks), but instead found and switched to DaVinci Resolve, which I not only find more intuitive for my needs and more aesthetically pleasing, but which also has none of the export limitations that the free version of Lightworks has, and it doesn't cost anything. So I'll be using that in future. Good.

How tiring though! I had a bunch of plans for the weekend, but such a big chunk of it was eaten up by this. Oh well, it's done now, and making new videos shouldn't be as much of an issue in future.



So yes, this is a major milestone for me! I wrote in previous posts that I'd probably have a full playable demo before the end of February, which was naive, but I'm glad I have this much in just three or four months considering I'm making everything myself. (Would you be proud if you made something like this entirely yourself in that amount of time?)

The next milestone will be when I do have enough for a playable demo. I'll actually build the proper Dreamcave section of the game for that, but I've got most of the assets already so it shouldn't take too long. There are still a bunch more left to make, but I shouldn't have to spend a lot of time building the mechanics of core features, so things should hopefully speed up from here. We'll see!

First, though, I'm going to devote next week to fixing up the old versions of MARDEK so then I can upload them to Steam. It wouldn't be alongside the Kickstarter as I hoped, but maybe now's the best time for it. I'll need to pause work on this to see to that.