“Well, Karja, how are things going with Wildhollow? Last you were moaning about art and design changes - how are things progressing?” Since no one has asked me that question I’d better ask it myself. And, because I’m so kind to myself, I’ll even answer it! First, here’s a small work in progress screenshot:
Our brave hero tries to break the ice with a couple of inept adventurers in town.
Wildhollow Status Report
Art
- Characters - progressing very well, thank you. No worries there.
- Backgrounds - as seen above, things are moving along. I’ll get the town background soon, and more shortly after that.
- Animals - they’ll be next after the characters.
- Other - so far, just my own GUI elements. We’ll see what happens there; this will be taken care of relatively late.
Design
- Story - the major storyline is complete, but all the quests aren’t specified.
- Puzzles - yeah, well, there’ll be more adventuring than puzzling, that’s for sure.
- Management - the animal management parts are pretty defined, but only on paper…
- Dialogue - coming along nicely! Most of the first location is complete. I’ll have some inspirational fluid (read: beer) one of these days, call upon my muses (read: listen to Tom Lehrer and Stephen Lynch), and get some more writing done.
Programming
- Adventure - the adventuring framework with locations and dialogue is pretty solid.
- GUI/Inventory/Management - rudimentary but shouldn’t be too much work to fix.
- Effects - no sparkles at all yet!
Audio
- Music - I have some music that seems suitable; I’m waiting with it though.
- FX - no worries. I have a good library of sound effects to dive into.
This sure sounds depressing… But not to worry. Most of the progress will take a major leap forward Soon(TM), and then things will start accelerating a whole lot. In March I was scheduling a summer release, but - not surprisingly - it will probably be a release just after summer instead. A playable demo should be available in June, a working version in July, and if people don’t find the game too crap it should be available in August.
But I really have to start working on Spandex Force 2 in parallel with Wildhollow in order to get both games done this year…
I simply have to brag about the awesome character art that’s been pouring in lately for my adventure-puzzle-management game Wildhollow! Take a look at the cast so far:
Tiny, tiny samples of the characters in Wildhollow. Tiiiiny tiny tiny!
It’s going to be a whole lot of characters, and a whole lot of fun! I’d really like to write a bit about the story and the characters, but I’ll do my best to not spoil anything. And either way, things might always change before the end, so I’d better not say too much just yet.
One thing I can say though is that I’ve re-thought the beginning a bit. Originally I thought of giving the player loads and loads of things to do from the beginning, but that’s just…a bit overwhelming. Instead I’ll focus om the adventuring aspects first, and maybe some puzzles, before I bring in the management bits. Essentially, you’ll have to progress a little into the game before it really opens up. Not to worry, though - it won’t be like a dull tutorial. Just… Focusing on other aspects of the game, in the beginning.
When you start the game you have to solve a few easy quests and gather enough money for your first ranch upgrade before you can start buying animals. That’s when the game will begin properly; when you’re able to breed animals and create new species. But I have a suspicion that there’ll be quite some adventuring and puzzling even after that.
Enough ranting for now. I’ll just briefly mention that it’s a female dog to find background art that fits…and is affordable. I might have something going now - I’ll just have to wait and see. Stay tuned for Wildhollow news!
I’ve been a lazy bum lately - my new puzzle/management/adventure game Wildhollow is progressing very slowly. This last week I have only written one dialogue, and added eyeblink and speaking animations to the dialogues. I’ve tried to defend myself with the fact that I’m still waiting for some art in order to test the dialogues properly…but the fact is that I still have a lot of work left on the puzzle and management parts of the game.
First of all, I need to decide where to apply puzzles. I’m thinking that the player has to capture wild animals in order to get new traits and fresh genetic material to crossbreed with the existing animals, but I haven’t decided on the puzzle mechanic for these captures. Also, I haven’t decided what other puzzles should be present. Puzzles when the player breeds animals? Gambling in towns? Tasks the player can perform for various people in order to earn money? I’m still undecided…
And this leads to the second big issue: how the game economics should work.
In Spandex Force I decided early on to have a number of resources: money, reputation and experience. It made sense to have many resources that have to be gathered, which enable different things in the game. Money allows you to upgrade your base, buy powers and get artifacts. Reputation decides your rank, affects the difficulty level of the minigames, and decides what artifacts you have access to. Experience decides your level and what powers you have access to. There are many other kind of resources and checks in the game (clues, power levels, etc) but these are the most important resources and checks. It wasn’t completely trivial to come up with this structure, though: the biggest task was to try to think of a scheme in which the player always has need for all of the resources.
In my first Spandex Force designs, money essentially became useless after a while. I partly solved that by raising the base upgrade costs in the later game, but even that would have made money completely irrelevant after the last upgrade. So, instead I went for a solution where you can only have a certain number of powers and artifacts at a given time. This has made people annoyed, but it was a carefully selected choice in order to make money useful throughout the entire game - there’s always a new artifact to try, or a new power to try out. (Well. At least for a long while.)
Now I’m facing similar problems with Wildhollow. I’ve cut down on the number of resources to one: money. Yes yes, I’m a capitalistic pig who can’t see beyond monetary power, but it was the only thing that would make sense. Granted, there are lots of other things to keep things interesting: items, animal food, animals themselves, etc. But money is the common thread throughout - every item and animal has a value.
But how can I make money useful throughout the game, except as a score-keeping mechanism? In order to make money relevant, there need to be things that have a cost. “Well duh,” the reader sighs. But this isn’t as easy as it sounds. What can I introduce into the game that the player wants and/or needs? Food for the animals, of course. Items that improve the animals. Upgrades to the ranch. But then what?
And, more of a problem, I’ve almost decided that the player should be able to sell his animals to make room for new and interesting breeds. But this will generate money - and I still have no real solution to the what-to-spend-money-on problem. It’s easy to fall back on the upgrade solution. You need to collect cash to upgrade your ranch. Then you can breed more expensive animals that you can sell in order to get more cash you can use to upgrade your ranch. …But after the last upgrade, this economic setup will crash and burn like a tinder house in hell. (Unless it’s Dante’s version of hell.)
I’ve been trying to think of ways to get around this:
- The tired old cliché: you’ve borrowed money in order to build your ranch in the first place. When you’ve paid off your debt you’ve finished a vital part of the game! Go you! This is actually surprisingly tempting, and would work very well. But it’s not a solution - it just delays the point of economic failure.
- Capturing animals costs money. You can capture new animals but this costs something. I don’t know why exactly - it could be bait for the animals, or one-shot items used to capture beasts… This is still vague and undefined.
- There’s no way to capture wild animals; you have to buy all your animals at the market. I don’t like this solution, but irritatingly enough it would solve a lot of things. This would mean that you could never get an animal for free, so, while you might make a profit on selling it later (after some grooming and taking care of), it wont be as big.
There are probably hundreds of other things I could do. As I’m writing this I’m starting to realize that point number three makes way too much sense for my own liking - I just might be forced to go for a combination of one and three. …With the possible addition of just capturing a couple of magical beasts in the wild…
The regular readers of this blog is probably wondering what I’m doing right now.
“You’ve reached fame and fortune with Spandex Force. Have you taken the money and gone on a cruise or something? Have you bought a house in Monaco? Have you bought a space shuttle?”
Alas, while Spandex Force inded has sold decently I’m still not able to roll around naked in cash. But I have been finding ways to spend my hard-earned cash on art for Wildhollow, my upcoming adventure/management/puzzle game. More specifically, I’ve been trying to find art for the game!
The character art was very easy to decide upon: I loved the art for Spandex Force, so I took a few days to come up with an insane storyline and then sent a list of more-or-less strange characters to the secret artist located in a secret country, and asked her to come up with more-or-less strange designs for the characters in question. Oh, and by secret I mean not secret at all. But I’m not writing her name here, ’cause then she’ll be able to find this post when she googles her name, and she’ll see how I’m flaunting her excellent artwork downsized by a million per cent, saved as a lousy JPEG, essentially making it look like a smeared patch of mud instead of the brilliant character art I received.
Anyway, here’s the first completed art delivery for the game. The male hero:
Smeared patches of mud that once was great art.
See the expressions to the right? If you thought I was going to repeat the static dialogues from Spandex Force you’re incredibly wrong! This time there’ll be mouths flapping and our brave hero or heroine will show emotions. KarjaSoft is moving into 90s technology!
Aside from this I’m estimating a dozen backgrounds and another 20-something characters, plus a world map, plus item icons and puzzle elements. Dang, there’s going to be a lot of art!
Spandex Force is out of the door, and it’s actually done reasonably well - I’ve more than recovered my expenses for the game, and I now have some dough to spend on my next project, Wildhollow. I still haven’t decided on that name; it’s hard to find a good name for the game when I don’t even have the game design completed yet! I’ve gone from a straight sim/management game to a puzzle/management game, to a management/adventure game…and now finally I’m considering a management/adventure/puzzle game.
Mind you, it’s not like I’m changing my mind every day. I kept the next to last design for over a month, and it’s just the latest week that I realized that puzzles probably will be needed for variety. I’ve skipped the simulation ideas since I want a simpler game; I want people to be able to click around and get it easily. The adventure parts are definitely here to stay, though, and I think a little management is good for both body and soul, so it’s remaining as well.
Now, what’s this about adventure parts? Here’s an ugly sketch of a rural fantasy town:
In the game you’ll be met with loads of screens like this. You’ll see towns, dwarven fortresses, dragon caves, and other locations, and in each location you can click on things to make various stuff happen. There will be items to pick up, people to interact with, stores and houses to enter, and lots of weird dialogue. One thing I noticed from making Spandex Force is that I like writing dialogue…and believe it or not, but Spandex Force’s story has received a lot of praise. So, it seems logical to me that I ought to expand on that a little. Spandex Force was linear, but this time around I’ve opted for a much more data-driven game structure which allows me to create dialogue trees and puzzles and many weird things….which is essentially what I mean by the adventure part of Wildhollow.
Making things data-driven as opposed to hard-coded is a relatively new thing for me. Optimally I should’ve gone for a scripting language, but I’ve chosen to have a bunch of XML files instead. Here’s an example of one of the locations mentioned above:
<location id="3" bg="301">
<hotspot x="428" y="200" image="600" item="Compass"/>
<hotspot x="208" y="308" image="665" location="4"/>
<hotspot x="428" y="700" image="664" location="2"/>
<hotspot x="528" y="400" image="664" dialogue="501" if="Compass" else="500"/>
</location>
Granted, it’s not much to look at, but it allows for a surprising amount of flexibility. What’s described in the snipped above is a location with ID 3 that has a background with ID 301. It has a number of hotspots that either lets you pick up the item named Compass, go to other locations, or trigger a dialogue. The if/else is used to make checks against certain items. I.e., before you have the compass clicking that hotspot will always trigger dialogue 501, but once you have it you’ll trigger 500 instead. This can be applied to locations as well: you can’t go though the Unnecessarily Dark Forest before you have a compass, for example. (’Cause otherwise you’d get eaten by grue. Grue hate magnetic needles, see. Nah, I’m just kidding, this isn’t part of the game.)
Of course, that doesn’t sum up everything you can do with these location descriptions - I’m adding attributes describing how the hotspot should look, what flags it should check against, and lots of other things. But I just wanted to give a general idea of how I’m structuring the game. Not that you’re any wiser now; guess you’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out!
Hat-trick! I haven’t been blogging much lately, but today it’s the third day in a row! And I have a very interesting topic to bring up: hidden object games, and why I hate them.
First things first: hidden object is a genre that give you a screen cluttered with items, and it’s up to you to find all the correct ones within a certain time limit. That’s it. Seriously, that’s it…and still, people love these games. A few days ago I tried a number of popular titles such as Cate West: Can’t Remember the Rest of the Name, and Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia. I had tried a number of these games about a year ago, and expected that a lot had changed. But no, it’s still almost the exact same gameplay. The presentation was brilliant, but the gameplay didn’t fascinate me at all.
Okay, I have to admit that there have been some changes: today’s games often feature heaps and heaps of different kinds of minigames in between the find-the-object screens, and these minigames are often very fun and exciting. Unlike the main screens.
Back to my dislike of these find-the-object screens. At first I thought that it was a fluke that these games did well, but it seems pretty proven that people love this style of game; and the point was driven home to me just when I was getting fed up with Abra Academy: Returning Cast after 15 minutes. I’m paraphrasing the conversation that occurred:
“Sweet mother of f-ck! I’m so bored at this game! I’m uninstalling this right now!”
“Hey, what’re you playing? Let me see.”
*Click click*
“Okay, are you done now? Seen enough?”
“Wait a sec…”
*Click click click click*
“Come on! I’m bored! I want to do something else!”
“No, wait! I have to finish this level!”
*Click click click…*
To my amazement I saw someone get instantly hooked by the game I was bored to tears with!
I started thinking about why I don’t like the gameplay, and I think it can be summed up in two things:
- I really really don’t like spending too much time just looking at a single screen.
- Too linear. I get very annoyed when I have to find ten random objects for no apparent reason. Adding a thin story on top of the game doesn’t help; I don’t see a reason why I can’t pick up any other similar objects, or try different things to find out which objects I really need. I think it smells too much of someone ordering me what to do, when I want to decide the best path for myself.
Now, time for an interlude. My new game, with the working name Wildhollow, will be a sim/management/adventure game where the main goal is to breed exciting (and valuable) new breeds of animals that you can sell. However, in order to do so you need to bring new genetic material to your stock. That’s where the adventuring aspects enter.
At first I thought of something along the lines of Harvest Moon. You’d breed animals and, once you have young animals, you could bring them along to travel the world and expose them to various mutagens give them new characteristics by magical means. This would be how you evolve your stock and eventually breed the most valuable animals. But I soon dropped that idea; it sounds pretty far-fetched to carry around your animals, and it would cost a lot to make everything animated like that.
Instead, the current game design revolves around static screens. You have a world map where new locations will be revealed continuously; at first you may only see your farm where you can watch your animals run around and play, and a nearby town where you can buy new goods, talk to people, or find items that are lying around. Talking to people and finding the correct items will eventually lead to other places, and the world will expand to show more people and items and even more locations. This is quite obviously derived from adventure games.
But all of the sudden something struck me: one thing that you always do in an adventure game is to look for items half-hidden in the background. Just like in the hidden object games. It may be an obvious connection to you, but for me it was slight shock realizing that a genre I love share features with a genre I cannot stand.
And the irony grows even more: just the other week I was asked if I’m pondering a hidden object game for my next project. “Not at all!” I replied. ….But I probably will end up with some hidden objects in my game. It kind of annoys me to think that when Wildhollow is finished there’s bound to be people comparing it to hidden object games, even though the inspiration comes from completely different places.
This has to bee the coolest thing ever: a cloned pig has had its genes altered to make it glow fluorescently green! And the fun doesn’t stop there - the manipulated pig has also bred piglets that also glow in the dark. In other words, the specialized genes have been transferred to the next generation without any external intervention.
Robin Lovell-Badge, a genetics expert at Britain’s National Institute for Medical Research, thinks that this technology could potentially be very valuable for growing organs for transplants. Personally I couldn’t care less about that: I’m just waiting for the day we get glowing pork chops! Think of the fun!
Speaking of genetic manipulation I’ll have to mention my new game project, with the working title Wildhollow: in the game you’ll get to combine mad scientist desires with cute fluffy animals. The design isn’t done yet, but the current vision is that you’ve inherited a farm and your task is to bring the farm around from near-bancrupcy. How? By breeding animals; and in particular, by cross-breeding animals and applying mutagens to create new types of beasts!
Of course… The game won’t mention either the word genetics or mutation. It’ll all be covered up by politically correct terms like “breed your animals and discover strange new creatures.”
Stay tuned for more information next month; first I have to complete Spandex Force!
