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Weekly Update - Nightmare Intro, Belief V2 (Side Project)

3 years ago2,303 words

I spent this week working on the dark dream intro, though it's not finished yet! I also spent about a day fiddling around with a side project based on Belief - a game I worked on briefly a while back - for the fun of it.

(I should really write these early on Saturday rather than last thing on Sunday...!)

I need a new computer! Probably! I've just spent the past couple of hours waiting around for various things to load, which is really annoying when I'm trying to do something, and it's a regular thing. I've had this computer for 3 or 4 years now, and while I don't exactly want some amazing gaming rig to play AAA games on the highest settings, I do use it all day every day for fairly heavy development tasks, and I don't even have an SSD... Even if I wanted to replace my computer now though (and I'd rather replace the whole thing rather than just parts), it seems the sky-high price of GPUs due to pandemic-related shortages makes it prohibitive. Ugh. I'll just have to endure the lag for now.

I've been fairly busy this week working on implementing the nightmare intro I've talked about previously. I was planning to include a video of what I have so far, but various computer frustrations prevented me from having one. It's probably best to not show it in a half-finished form anyway, so I'll just include some pictures and a summary.

It begins with Collie facing this thing called a Preyloot, which is a dream depiction of various travelling merchants etc who she mugged for food (as bandits do).



Here's a turntable of the model:



It's supposed to look like a human with traits of animals that might be considered prey of wolves (sheep, rabbits). The people she actually mugged were human (or Bold, rather), not anthros; this is just how her mind sees them. I love the name: a combination of prey, loot, and prelude, as in a starting event or piece of music! And I think it having an actual treasure chest (using the same model as the ones in the field) rather than just a bag or something is both funny and practical for how it's used in the scene!

The Beast looms over Collie's shoulder, telling her to mug the prey, to show that it's not just her being a psychopath:



Collie has a sword here (well, an untextured placeholder at the moment, but it's meant to be a sword), which she then uses to attack the Preyloot in a battle using a basic Slash skill (the only skill she has, and the same one some monsters use later):



(I wish I'd got a better screenshot of that! Oh well; I can't be bothered enduring the lag to get another.)

This is conceptually different to the monster-summoning, but mechanically you go through the same steps to use the skill (it just works like the 'innate' skills I had previously). I'm thinking that having the player pull the trigger themselves might inspire greater empathy for her later regrets about having done it.



Collie is immediately regretful; she only meant to mug the Preyloot, but killed it.



The Preyloot collapses, and the chest opens. Collie does this Zelda-style Item Get thing - the familiarity factor should hopefully make it funny, and should show this is a game that plays with tropes and doesn't take itself too seriously - as she acquires a comic about the Splendid Savitr. Obviously that cover - ∞ the most important comic book cover in the world ∞ - is not the one I'd be using! I'll need to draw one.



The view would then zoom in on the comic, and some comic-book-style text boxes would summarise who the Splendid Savitr is. I was thinking about having the camera zoom in completely, then the view fades to a 'real', animated model of Savitr posing in the same way that he was in the drawing on the cover, so then it was like you were getting immersed into the comic's world like Collie did... but it's a lot of work, so I might not bother.



The scene snaps to The Beast berating Collie for daring to think she could ever be one of the Seraphim, as she sits reading the comic. It's meant to hint that she's spent a lot of time reading about Savitr, since this is a dream conflating several memories, but I wonder if anyone will actually interpret it as that. HMM.

And that's as far as I've got so far; I'd say I'm around 60-70% done. Most of the work was adding various features that barely even seem worth talking about, but which take time; for example, for her to get the comic, I needed to make a comic model (or rather two - one open, one not), poses, code for spawning in the prop mid-dialogue, different speech bubble styles, etc. A bunch of annoying little things that add up and which are exhausting and ugh. At least I pushed myself to get through most of them despite not enjoying it though!

I've planned the rest of the scene; I just haven't incorporated it into the game yet.

I keep wondering whether this is the best way to start the game - maybe it'd be better to have some running around sooner, for example - but... ehh, I don't know. I get the feeling I'd have doubts whatever I decided to do!

Hopefully I'll have it mostly finished next week and can show the full thing in a video rather than trying to explain it.

Belief Again

I treat working on Atonal Dreams like work: I focus on it all morning and all afternoon on weekdays, but try (not all that successfully) to put it out of my mind the rest of the time.

During the evenings, I try to spend my time doing something else, usually some creative project or another. Last week I composed a piece of music every day, and I wanted to do the same this week... but ~the muse wasn't with me~ so my attempts were fruitless.

I thought maybe I could just play a game instead, but I couldn't decide on anything! I thought of another PS1 game I'd like to replay... but the emulator got stuck on a starting screen and I couldn't be bothered messing around with stuff to get around it. Several other games came to mind (I got Kingdom Hearts III in an Epic Games sale a while ago, for example, and want to replay the whole series), but they all felt like huge time and energy investments and I couldn't be bothered starting any. I randomly saw ∞ this thing called LEGO Builder's Journey ∞ recently, and thought of giving that a go since it seemed like one of those short, sweet experiences rather than some weeks-consuming epic (plus I loved Lego growing up and was intrigued by how they'd chosen to make this game around it, with no cartoonified minifigures in sight), but my computer struggled to run it, which was one of several reasons I want a new one!

I also got Celeste, which I've been meaning to play for ages, but felt some of the same professional envy I had with Undertale since it's got like a billion reviews... plus I don't care for the extremely pixelated look or difficult platformers in general, so I couldn't pass through the depression enough to get started on that either.

I should play something though!! Any suggestions?!

Instead, I ended up thinking about some of my own other games. I wrote ∞ this post ∞ last December talking about some old Flash games I wanted to put somewhere... which I haven't done anything with since then. Whoops!! I should, though, at some point.

In that post, I also talked about Belief; a game I worked on briefly in 2019, but which largely ended up having its major features (most notably the side-switching mechanic) absorbed into Atonal Dreams.



There's still a lot I like about that game though, and every time I go back to this video I made of it - or to actually playing through the section in the video, which is more fun than just watching it - I regret not just sticking with it and finishing it. I feel like those features would work better in Atonal Dreams anyway, maybe, but the absurd silliness of this 'social combat' still makes me laugh.

I have no intention of abandoning Atonal Dreams; I want to make that clear before I say anything else! But since I'd spent several after-work evenings basically just wasting time anyway, I wondered whether I could instead try to use that 'free time' to work on a revised version of Belief, for fun. I got into games dev in the first place because I find it enjoyable, after all!

I already tried that during the final days of 2020, though I was intending it as a remake of AFC - where players can make and share their own short adventures - and started with the field, but didn't get very far:



A quest-building game isn't really all that interesting to me at the moment, though. I prefer the other idea I talked about in the post I linked to:

Essentially, you, a custom character, try to spread a religion - which you can name - by travelling to procedurally-generated areas and having these social 'battles' with (also procedurally-generated) people. People you convince can come back to your island and join as your followers, eventually allowing you to build up a church, or maybe even bring your god into the world or something.

I love Atonal Dreams, but I can't really sit down and just play a session of it, since it's story-based. I like the thought of making something where I can create my own character and explore worlds that I don't already know every nook and cranny of! An interactive toy rather than a story.

So I spent a few hours yesterday building a basic prototype, based around the card-based idea I talked about in that post.



I'm using this model I made a while back:



I started with the UI here, since I enjoyed trying to figure that out for Atonal Dreams not too long ago. I've used very similar ideas here, and I like the results! I won't bother explaining all the mechanics or anything since I'm still figuring them out, but there is one idea I had that I want to at least mention.

Typically RPGs pit you against monster archetypes - ogres, dragons, etc - but Belief was intended to pit you against (comically familiar) human archetypes. I spent a while figuring out what these could be. In ∞ this post ∞ from October 2019, where I talked a bit about that, I included this image:



Ha, looking at that now makes me feel that probably shows my age a lot and the world has changed since those archetypes were around!

While trying to figure out some archetypes for this new version of Belief, I tried using the runes as a starting point and seeing what I could come up with for each of the 8 three-capital-letter possibilities. I ended up with these (they're all traced over the above model, which is why they're all women in the same pose):



I feel like a lot of people following Atonal Dreams' development don't understand - or like - what runes are supposed to even be, so I thought something like this might help make them less abstract maybe? Maybe?!? I don't know! (For people reading this, I mean; this won't be going in Atonal Dreams or anything.)

They're kind of like the equivalent of RPG classes, maybe, but based around personality rather than physical traits. Quick summary:


Artist - Sensitive, withdrawn creators of new ideas who are prone to mental issues.

Seer - Enlightenment-seeking spiritualists who have strange ideas about the beyond which they wish to share positively with the world.

Investigator - Paranoid sceptics of the establishment whose rough-around-the-edges approach leads to many arguments about their pet fringe theories.

Explorer - "Yay science!"-style eager advocates of fascinating facts, lore, and theories you might not know (think science/pop-culture-theory youtubers).

Commoner - 'Ordinary' people who just want to pursue their simple, mainly physical pleasures in peace.

Performer - Dramatic hedonists who constantly seek attention and sensual experience.

Bureaucrat - Grey-mannered form-fillers who devise and enforce the rigid rules society runs on.

Alpha - Domineering power-seekers who'll climb over anyone in their path to get to the top.



To make this clear again, I have no intention of abandoning Atonal Dreams! I've only spent like a day on this Belief version for the fun of it, and I don't know whether I'll stick with it for longer than a handful of days. I definitely won't be working on it outside my free time, at least! But I thought I'd share anyway since I've talked about it before and it's more relevant to the other stuff I'm posting here than some of the other stuff I spend my free time on (most of which I keep to myself).



So yes! I should have a video of the intro next week, I hope! Do you have any ideas for games I could play??