Slipping, Fixing and Playing

I'm really slipping on these blog posts and progress on BOA, I'm just not feeling it. On the other hand, I have been working on the next version of All Gone Soon 2, simple stuff like re-scripting a few hotspots, changing the default walk speed, contemplating finding another voice actor to voice Giles (a genuine Essex voice might be better, right?).

Recently I've given myself some more time to actually play some games, I've spent quite a chunk this week on In Verbis Virtus, a gimmicky game that uses voice recognition where you say out spells in their made-up language to cast them in-game....it's so effing cool! XD (though it seems the more spells I learn the more the voice recognition messes up, it's still pretty decent but there's like two spells that are incredibly hard to get right, still fun though- now that's a good game, to be so enjoyable, it transcends the problems). If you're interested you can take a look.

Another game I'm spending a lot of time on is Red Fuse, I've never been a big puzzle gamer, but I've definitely spent quite a chunk of my time blowing shit up; it's oddly satisfying. You dispense bombs that roll around in a cavern platform and try to blow up a bunch of rocks that have gems in them- trying to figure out the physics and using which tools to help move one bomb to the other is where most of the fun comes in really. You can check it out over here.

So I'm not really feeling BOA much these days, I'm still itching on working on a horror themed game, maybe I should just follow my instincts? I could always work on both for now and then kick myself in the ass later.

--Iddie

Back again!

Hey guys! (if there actually are people who read this blog).
I haven't forgotten about BOA, but I did put it to the side for the whole month of August to concentrate my efforts on this month's MAGS competition.

Download link here

A sequel to my January MAGS entry, I tried to be really ambitious with this one (no pun intended). I'm quite proud of what I had managed to churn out, although again it isn't exactly what I originally had in mind, it actually came close to plan B.

And so I will continue on with work and updates on BOA, even though I'm kinda itching to work on a horror game right now, heh.

Not like I dont have a bunch of notes for those...

It's good that I managed to release this game, I managed to break my years hiatus between games *knock wood*.

--Iddie out.

Just another simple update

I actually completely forgot to add a post on the 28th. I guess you can't really say "completely" since I'm writting it up now, but I'm human, so I get to make contradictory comments sometimes.
My mind has been in quite a weird state for a very long time now and things are just getting more and more pathetic really; that's a different story that I'm going to leave vague and I'm going to stop here about that.

So the game, I'm still working on the intro, the animation I'm working on is a bit choppy atm but it might work well enough, as soon as I complete the bare minimum for that small clip at the begining, I'm going to work in the middle then jump around the sequences so the quality of work would balance out if I ever get a bit lazy, that's usually the way I work, when I do stuff like this; I'm non-linear.

I also sketched the speech portraits of all the main characters I thought up so far, I was thinking of showing it in this post, but now I think I might keep it for the next post or maybe I won't show it till the demo release, who knows? I'm just not feeling it today.

Not like many people actually check this blog...I dunno, whatever.

--Iddie

Full Motion Videos- ish

I was supposed to write up this post last night, but I guess I just got too tired and forgot about it, funny since the whole day I was like, "gotta write up that post", well here it is:

So I'm doing it, an FMV intro,  think this will be the only FMV I'll make for the game (unless I decide to make one for the very ending, probably not, this one already feels tedious to do on my own).

I'm keeping the colouring and general art style simple, it doesn't have to be overly perfect as long as I do it. I even debated forgoing adding the shadows, but I think it just looks a little better this way. The pictures above are pretty self-explainatory; sketch, line, fill colour, shade.

This intro vid is going to be 1:20 minutes long, that's gon' be a lotta frames, maybe I just shouldn't be too bothered if it ends up looking a bit choppy? Stop being too much of a perfectionist and learn to get things done, right?

NB: This is the vilian character named "Mal" (French word for "Bad" subtle eh?). While sometimes I think his hat makes him look like he's cosplaying a girl scout, his whole outfit is actually mostly based on a picture of the Chancellor Sir Thomas More.

--Iddie

Ready for my close up (?)

So this is something that I drew up much earlier in the development stage but hadn't touched on since (yeah I'm really behind with production progress, at least I'm still blogging about it *knock wood*).

I was conceptualising the main character's face (mainly whilst looking at pictures of young Jennifer Connelly and Rachel Leigh Cook). I keep debating whether or not I should go for my usual "realistic" style (when it comes to speech portraits) or go for a more anime/manga style that I used to do when I was younger, it would be (if I were to go with the style above) easier to draw for animating if I really do end up choosing to do a couple of FMVs for the game (not too many obviously and probably quite short, so this would raise the question of where to strategically place these FMVs.

I really have been slacking off, tomorrow I really should kick myself up to work on that opening theme music; do the fun stuff to keep yourself interested.

--Iddie   

A few inspirations

So last night I realised that I still hadn't worked on anything new for the game (B.O.A) since the last blog post. I had planned to compose some intro music and maybe storyboard an intro vid to go with it, draw up some title screen concepts too maybe... but I got really tired and went to bed.

That being said, I'd like to share some of the videos I keep going back to for inspiration (in no particular order):

1) Breath of Fire 3

So goddamn simple (of course after waiting a while in the title screen, the game would load up an in-game graphic cutscene that explains how dragons are -thought to be- extinct).
While conceptualising B.O.A, I did take inspiration from this to include a mural in one of the locations the player will go to, to expand more on the history and mythos (did I use that word correctly?) of the game's universe. So making an 'intro vid' with that mural panning across would make sense if it is somehow related to the main plot. Quick note to self that no one else would really get- the necklace = orphan found instead of ring in org game idea? or rather ev-stone orphan use untuk good is = ev-stone orang jahat dalam boa use?- Had to write that down quickly lest I forget, sometimes ideas just strike like a migraine.

2) Legend of Mana
Like many games of it's time, its intro is basically a gameplay montage. The whole point of doing that is to give a taste of how the game is going to be (Dr. Obvious has his game face on).
This makes sense for a big epic AAA title RPG, but since I'm making a free indie adventure title, I'm not sure that's really needed, maybe however, I could throw in some quotes from the characters; adventure games are nothing if not story driven.

Also, I really like the music here. This intro shows some of the locations you'll visit, so maybe I could incoporate that somehow in my intro as well (maybe a panning view of a castle, cave, temple and/or forest?).

Wild Arms

This freakin' intro won an academy award or something (look it up). Like an experimental film, this intro is less direct on what the game is about and concentrates more on feeding the player's visual pallete. It's more in line of what I'm thinking of doing, though probably not as elaborate; at the moment, I'm the only one working on this game after all.






The Elder Scrolls: Arena

Wait... what?  It's not from a JRPG? I'll be honest the title of my game "Book of Akiva" was heavily influenced by the title of "The Elder Scrolls" and I wanted to have something like this (via a book visual) to show after the player selects "New Game"; a bit of cheeky exposition before the real game starts.








Honorable mentions:
Other intro videos that has nothing that I hadn't talked about above.

 Breath of Fire 4
Can you tell I'm a big fan of the franchise?














Azure Dreams (PS1)

I have always loved this one as a kid, the music is epic, the editing is tight, the visuals are just so damn puuurrrty. There's a Game Boy Colour remake that has a much, MUCH simpler intro, it's kind of "meh" but I'll include it in this list as well, since even that is giving me ideas.







Azure Dreams (GBC)

See above.


...that music is so goddamn cheery...

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story

Summon Night is a franchise I'm not all too familiar with, I picked this game up recently and lost a lot of hours on it (my eyes were so red after the first play through).

The intro though... damn that's effin' short, and I thought the intros to Breath of Fire 3 was short (Then again in Breath of Fire 1, Ryu does a little He-man thing and lightling strikes, that lasts a few seconds before going into the title screen).





Man... how many times did I type "Goddamn" in the blog post?

--Iddie

Figuring out the speechbox

I don't think 'speechbox' is the actual term, it's probably 'textbox' but AGS has a user-friendly textbox option for speech, however I hadn't figured out how to make it so that it not only used my own custom image for the box, but to have the face portrait within the box. This is my work-around.

Maybe one of these days, I'll look over this blog and make a guide, 'how to' PDF or series of videos for anyone who'd be intersted in a more coherent explination of things.

I'm definitely going to need a proof reader, while I am confident with my spelling and grammar, when it comes to explaining how things work, I'm often quite a mess (as evidenced in the video).

--Iddie