kingsnightwatch

[kingsnightwatch]

Kings Nightwatch Stopped, Ludum Dare 42 Jam, and other updates I guess

This is an update due the fact that I haven’t updated my tumblrs in a while and found a little time to do that just now :D

So, my game about little cute animals fighting with swords, is stopped and it’s ok it’s still there but I just had a haaaard time using Game Maker for the ambitious things I wanted for it so I started using Unity for it. In the meanwhile drew some cards or stuff and printed some stickers.

Then I was reminded by the software itself how non proficient I am with it. For it I started a pet (not really) project that is an action match 3 like Battle Chef Brigade but without the hunting. I made some progress-y and learned bunch of stuff about how Unity.

Then the ludum dare jam happened like a week ago, and I wasn’t gonna but it was so tempting to do. I tried to make some sort of 2d mario sunshine using physics but oh boi isn’t Game Maker 2 a pain. So instead I did the easiest thing i could think of the theme ‘Running out of space’, it became a sliding puzzle!

Link in here: https://calixjumio.itch.io/puzzle-42-running-out-of-space

People say it’s kinda hard so take your time <3

In the mean time I miiiight attempt some levels for the puzzle, just loved the idea of it and have been thought about making puzzles although that ‘this reminds me of a puzzle’ thing is totally happening to me now. My original plan of finishing the pet Gems project using Unity to then finish the cut version of Kings Nightwatch now is dwarfed by this ideas of making even smaller pet puzzle games, so I don’t exactly know what I’ll do (I’m also working on some little twitch emote commissions \o/) but I’ll try to continue posting in here.

So what about you? How many pending projects do you have? n_n;

[kingsnightwatch]

Weekly Monthly Dump ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Camp UI iteration process

Intro

I disappeared for a month hah, but at least hopefully can shine you some basic UI problems, I like reading how other people solve little problems so here is something about numbers and texts.

The problem

Originally I had the idea to include gigantic walls of text to explain what was going on. Soon after some GDC talks and other articles, and because I restarted everything in GMS2 because I don’t like finishing things, I decided to scrap everything out and came out into something that looks more like a boardgame than a book but then had the problem of how to communicate. The problem with having a lot of text is that it asks for too much attention, the additions while made everything clearer started to reduce visibility of the stories I wanted to tell and writing in proper english while having it as a second language SUCKS. Just look at this mess:

So I took ideas from the Elder Signs Omens and Dead of Winter games, as always, and made this in which every ‘land’ card is a location in the kingdom. Your characters would move to a location, then complete a task there if any (the little square in one side of the land) then the enemy spawns more stuff and repeat. This was one of the first iterations and at a point in which it was decent looking:

And I felt good, “ohoho I can do UI” “bwahaha actually making non game apps for so long has served for something” “suck it other me!”. Everything felt great until I asked friends about what they thought it was and got a whole range of different opinions. 

I was more worried about how to show that you get something, spend something, something is taken from you, etc. The diamond is like your coins, the purple spirals like enemy coins but thematically they are willpower and enemy scheming power. So since nobody actually knew what the icons meant I got a lot of useful feedback which for that version up there some people thought it was as if it described all the stats of the cat character, and that the cat in the corner was attacking the cat in the center of the screen. 

How did that happen? I said, well...

In retrospective it is easy to see how it tells people that each one is a stat modifier. First of all, the backgrounds for the elements around the cat card are the same and everyone had the combination of arrow-number-icon consistently (bad example to begin with), but the main icon is different yet in the same outlines. In reality left side are passive like effects, right side are buttons for the options on how to complete the task. Also since it became just icons and numbers people only saw that, when I asked what did you thought it meant even with other images they always thought it was a fight I think because it looks like a trading card game board, which is usually about combat, so my plan to make it show stories about how one of your units drives away a bully from a group of farmers was never going to happen. 

On the left side I made a list, the intention is to show as if it was the backside description and to give space to more effects that could happen, this are passive effects like when the time runs out, every ‘night’ or end of turn, or just by having that character there. Also I decided to switch the character meeple into a standing sprite, which wasn’t planned, to represent how you zoom into the details of the story. The right side to be more button like, since you have to choose one, and on/off states for them. People still gave me similar confused looks about the arrows and what each icon meant. Didn’t gave much importance for example to the ‘each night an activity on the farms gets tainted’ effect because it is kinda complicated by itself. But I was worried about people recognizing that you gain or lose resources, and that the little squares are tasks.

So instead of arrows I tried adding numbers but it was weird to see every single resource with +1 or -1 so instead tried to put them together but still had to add the minus “-” and I hated it, probably because of the red but I don’t have any more colors for that. Then tried to use inverse icons to represent negatives (see the first row of black diamonds) but it was weird, interesting yes but it wasn’t working. Right now I’m ok with this slash icon (this is a game about sword fighting after all) to show that your coins and foes funds are being cut.

Takeaways

Asking people actually works wonders!, and it is an iterative process so it never ends. I was getting anxious because mine didn’t have focus, but after asking about what friends thought each interaction was, specially out of context, I got a lot of great insights, for example that they didn’t relate the green magnifier tokens as something good so I made them lightblue similar to the willpower/diamonds/coins. Or how they got totally misdirected in the original version which meant they were making relationship of concepts that I wasn’t able to see at the moment, but it was pretty dumb obvious.

Anyways, writing this little article felt good, shoot me up if it was useful to you to be motivated to write more :P

Thanks for reading yo

[kingsnightwatch]

Weekly Dump

Still checking what I would like to do, this version looks more like Dead of Winter, but it’s basically a mix between it and Elder Sign: Omens. Is it a stretch? Of course, 100%, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[kingsnightwatch]

April Weekly Dump #2

Recreating the slashing and fighting mechanics and effects. Its like if they were playing a fast paced rock paper scissors: yellow > green > blue > yellow. I have more feedback animations that hadn’t been implemented again. Still, any thoughts on this please let me know \o\ I would love you immensely 

(Marbles were drawn just to notice horizontal movement)

[kingsnightwatch]

Weekly update

Game Maker Studio 2 still going, reconstructing the battle in a cleaner way feels great. This post is just to fill my personal quota, here’s a gif /o/

[kingsnightwatch]

Yet another dump

Now that GDC is out of the way, it’s time to do what a mediocre gamedev is best at:

Restarting everything! **fanfare.wav**

Fig 1 - The ‘camp’ side, remember the cards? well forget bout em. I’ll talk about that next week!

Well now with the announcement that Game Maker Studio 2 (GMS2) will be able to export to the Switch it gave me extra motivations to:

- Drop all the bad code from the SpriteKit project (iOS native engine) - Buy a switch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another inspiration sources made me take everything to GMS2 right away:

- GDC talks that persuaded me for ui / concepts redesign - People interested in the game and feeling guilty about it being trapped - Potentially collaborating with new friends <3, but for that I would need to have true proficiency with the tools

So what you see in the gif is game maker, oh did I miss having easy ways to connect animations. And I was able to do the outline shaders easily enough!, I might be stumbling with the tool a lot, but it gives me space and time to think throughly on how to simply the design enough for programming it and for, as a player, using it.

While a lot of stuff is being scrapped out, it’s going to be rebuilt on top of that learning. I’ve been playing a lot of Pokken Tournament lately and with feedback of the few people who played it I will have to redo some stuff but I’m sure on key aspects and have new tools for problems that I couldn’t solve, it’s exciting!

It will be bigger and better! (actually it will be smaller, but that’s still better) 

Thanks for reading!

[kingsnightwatch]

Chill post-GDC post

Hello again, I was trying to avoid making a post GDC in favor of embracing the unspoken objective of ‘no seriousness trip’, but I’ve been submerged in a big enough pond of emotions and the tradition of uploading something each week led me up to open this… and now I can’t restart the ritual without acknowledging what happened on the trip.

Last night it was a no sleep with thoughts of missing people I met and fear of the future, pretty normal I know but this time it was magnified as f***. And I keep rewinding through photos and videos enjoying the memories of the trip, I really enjoyed every moment of it and now I feel trapped back in my cage. Just look at this gigantic mess of good but chill vibes:

And I miss every single person in the pictures, and it sucks!

Because I want to have them around all the time, well maybe not all the time pretty sure lots of us got super tired of being social but you know what I mean. Thanks to this trip I got to meet very inspiring people, but not as game developers, as human beings!

I don’t care if it sounds cheesy fock off

Most of my school friends are spread around the world, they are family now but only get to see them twice a year, wish it would be more often. Now I have a new batch of people that I got used to be around very quickly and it hurts that they aren’t around either, and it sucks!

People who are great role models of human beings, who share same interests and got interested in my work, smart and sensible like minded people, it’s rare to find people like that. 

And it sucks!

I guess if we could hang around everyday, and this will sound like bittersweet cheese, it wouldn’t be as special. Yet I would love to hang around my friends everyday. It was a cold water reminder that distance is not an illusion, one can’t fake through the internet thinking that the other person is one click away. Although it can connect people that otherwise would be impossible.

I loved my time at SF, my new friends, my old friends, and the experiences that I got during GDC. And I will gladly attempt to repeat the same thing the next year.

But not the hobos nor the expensiveness.

That definitively sucks!

[kingsnightwatch]

Timelapse x3 speed of how the flow of my game is supposed to be, there are numerous bugs that just make everything confusing but I start to have a nice feel about this. Also dread because there’s a lot of other stuff needed to be made, for example even porting all this stuff to Game Maker Studio 2 isn’t something in the chart, not like it is impossible... its just that it is a looooot of stuff: writing, testing, ui, navigation, juice, oil, units, cards, other features, campaigns, balance, ahhhhHHHHHHH

thanks for reading, sorry that the vid just cuts off in the middle of the fight but the game actually crashed and I’m so tired right now n_n; 

[kingsnightwatch]

Recent juicy updates.

- Transition into battles - Background ideas for the camping/planning part - Some ui explorations on the battle scene - And some ui explorations for menus and stuff

My plan is to have a decentish thing for the upcoming GDC! 🤞

Thanks for reading :D

[kingsnightwatch]

This week I just wanna show off a little, made some sort of selector and art to get a better idea on my head and to hopefully get to a point in which you can play one round while making sense, but I was getting tiiiiiired. So it was perfect time for just drawings. I’ll probably commission one or two because it gives me inspiration on the stories that I want to tell. 

Thanks for reading!, if you like it, are going to gdc, or just wanna talk leave a comment :D

[kingsnightwatch]

Quick update! 

Some more ui iterations, the camp board (presented figures) is half solved but close enough to start stitching everything together. The current battle scene is a complete mess, but once I can finalize a complete loop I’m hoping everything eases out.

[kingsnightwatch]

Fig 1 - Example of an activity. It is a guardian dog doing a guard task, it can’t do the third task because he doesn’t need to.

Fig 2 - Example of states for your units: lost (not shown), fate and mist.

Intro

I added some new states to the player units and the cards perform simple but diverse effects. The logic of the cards is getting interesting like a little calculator, and the range of effects isn’t that narrow which helps me with options for the cards and the lore. More on that down below: 

Insight

The effects of the cards were hard to read, my poor grammar makes it worse but it helped me to identify ways to improve both the UI and my englisherino. It started as a simple parser for the rules description but hopefully it will be able to perform basic logic for the rules implementation.

The first option on Fig 1 looks like this:

Text: "Ashamed of yourself hardwork and training time for the watch shows your new strength." Rules: "Spend [2 will|lightblue] to gain a [LEVEL|white]" Code: "-2wp, +level"

I implemented some simple regex to identify what happens on the Code, every comma separated is an instruction and it changes directly to the activated card or unit and hopefully it will be able be recursive for some basic logic. 

While working in all this it was evident the lack of options for the cards effects, so the tentative MIST or mystery, LOST or delayed and FATE or destiny became needed and implemented. Level ups are still on the board but the next weird item in the effects is FIGHT

That is ‘You were ambushed!’ and you fight some minions to avoid being LOST for example. There are other simple effects that might be adding noise to the screen but some changes on the ui and making less mixed effects can minimize it.

I struggled so much to overcome the paralysis, to help me with that I watched some GDC talks from TCG and digital boardgames. In Achieving two Worlds by Magic the gathering developers, the speaker talk about how they have a grid of color vs type that they need to fill and while my cards are shallow right now they serve to test.

Giveaway

A parser for text isn’t that hard if you know regex, and if the IDE let you. I’m glad XCode and swift, or my experience with apps, let me do it.

On analysis paralysis having a frame (in my case a grid) of reference, stolen or borrowed, works wonders to fight it. It will be far from perfect but it surely helps to narrow next steps.

[kingsnightwatch]

Fig 1-5: Mockups for the Camp board and its flow. Each unit is selected for an activity to later execute each of story effects. 

Intro

This is an update on the whole Camp side, the in between fights that is, and a little about how I’ve been iterating it.

Insight

I’ve fiddled around with the design for this mini board game and it is very apparent my knowledge on the subject is limited. A lot of numbers are involved and even is hard to find references on the subject. Right now it is unsure that it is going in the right direction since it barely represents anything, better redaction could help of course and it is a problem for the future me but I think it might be very difficult to imagine that the characters are doing about anything.

On the other side it is way better for imagining stuff for me, have been able to test some stuff, designing the cards while on my head it was great to have different attributes for the activities like time limit or other effects I’ve simplified to be easier to understand because it was super bloated with icons everywhere

Fig 6: Previous mockup, cards have icons to indicate additional effects. 

For example the hourglass meant that it would have an effect when it reaches its time limit, on inspecting the card you could read their choices and effects. However giving the wide range of options while it added interesting strategy choices it removed some of the character growth potential, that is: sending units to tasks the don’t want to. 

So I removed the options made all available just that turn but you will not be able to know their effects if non performed. Is that a good choice?, I don’t know ™️, but for now it feels way simpler and hopefully while it isn’t inherently good it is (might be) easier to follow on my mind.

Prototypes are great, this might not look like it but I’ve iterated some stuff while making it and probably couldn’t find good insights otherwise. I totally forgot that the editor works perfect for quick concepts, most of the presented pictures are actually scenes with no code and it works for me to check for unnecessary stuff however more and more it seems I can’t get away from the idea of making it more mobile friendly than other since I’ve been simplified maybe too much.

Takeaway

Tools for easy prototyping is very handy, can’t say it saves a bunch of time since I don’t have a good reference for it in game dev but I do know that for apps making a paper prototype is a time saver and with this project the most important thing for me was that it made me regain momentum. 

Also I should stick to the vision of simplicity a little bit more rigorously, the background on the cards took a good chunk of time and it is barely visible and as you can see in the gif it might look better without it.

[kingsnightwatch]

Fig 1: top left - willpower and rival strength pools, top right - random tasks, bottom left - characters, bottom right - doom and investigation tracker. 

The Introduction

I swear this is the same game. 

Hello and welcome to Madness, population: me.

Also this is a way longer post so I potato in advance, thanks for reading <3

This is an intent of a paper prototype and an excuse to play with the meeples (the carcassone figurines) and wooden cubes I bought because low willpower. This has to do with the other image I posted that looked kinda like this: 

Fig 2: center - double outlined mess.

Anyways, been watching and reading some stuff and hopefully my paper prototype resolved a lot of issues, lots of learning in the process. I’m giving some formatting with the titles to give more formality and hopefully somebody can learn from this.

The Insights 

Something that I’ve learned from watching Pocketwatch Games development and by working on this game is that pushing for extra simplicity isn’t that bad. Here is more like a sanity check. For me it’s obvious that it isn’t getting simpler the more hours I pour in… but if I don’t stop once in a while and that gets unchecked then there’s a high risk of making an ugly collage of mechanics. I’ve started noticing that some stuff became overcomplicated because it was hard to track and some of my experience making apps kicked in.

Still, I didn’t knew what I was doing so my plan was to borrow (yeah) mechanics from another games. So I watched or played other games trying to find something to steal study, something that could represent what I want my characters to play.

I decided to go trough the manual of Mouseguard again (it is a tabletop RPG about knight mice) because there are similitudes in the structure. It has The Guard while I have The Watch, both have a team going for a common defined-ish goal and each character has it’s clear chance to shine.

In it they have a stat named Nature that is in play when the character acts accordingly with the associated skills to its race. The mice race comes associated with foraging, scouting and others while beavers come with building and swimming. 

Also I played Fallen London, a narrative game with tons of decisions but everything is text and stats. Every single thing you want to test is a stat, they have 4 basic types of checks: Watchful (deduction),  Shadowy (stealth), Dangerous (fights), Persuasive (charisma). This 4 characteristics highlight what Fallen London is about.

In both games the player has activities that is associated to what people in those positions should do: be mysterious and sly in Fallen London, and be heroic while a mice in Mouseguard. I tried to use the same stats as Fallen London however I don’t want them to focus that much on stealthy or deciphering, and while I didn’t came with similar 4 basic stats (which was my intention) it ended up a little bit simpler than that which is great because otherwise Fig 1 would be way more cluttered.

The Takeaways

Searching for inspiration by playing is great, I thought it wasn’t necessarily needed because I’ve already played them but entering with a different focus in mind sharpens your observation skills. In the book of ‘The Anatomy of Story’ by Jhon Truby he mentions a technique for finding your story (something about writing a hell lot of terms and then trying to find patterns), and while I didn’t use that, in retrospect I’m understanding some of its value. 

But in this case I stole those boards filled with ideas from other games. 

Thats all for this week, thanks for reading and leave a comment if you like or reach me at @calixjumio on twitter.

Mouseguard RPG - http://www.mouseguard.net/book/role-playing-game/

Fallen London - http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/signup

[kingsnightwatch]

Update! finally working on the portion between battles, they hardly convey right now what they are supposed to do. Each card represents a task that one or more members can participate, it represents the action that happens in between battles. Each one opens its complete description and options which I still haven’t thought on how to present, Ideally I would love to have custom art per card but that might become a problem hah.

Also I discovered that nothing is wrong with doubling the amount of outlines :D, units now have that and they feel more papery than ever. I think they could need some shadow but im not confident enough to pull it out right now haha.

Something that can’t be noticed because it didn’t even made sense to begin with is the purple attack, it was supposed to be a concealed but stronger move but it was hard to follow because its rules were weird. This following attempt is to make it easier to follow to the eye, if that even makes sense. Purple attacks are empowered, they never lose and if against another purple they cancel each other. Those special purple moves happen after a series of sword skills ie 3 blue attacks activate its special skill that deals 3 damage, this is also to signal better when to use a dash because it would waste an incoming purple attack.

It also works to have a cushion ie when being overwhelmed: x3 blue attack, x3 green defense and x3 yellow feint are special skills so at some times it is good to just spam the same skill over and over.

[kingsnightwatch]

A little bit of UI might help me right now. 

After making some of the icons I added the ‘pressure’ action which I was thinking about but in the end it was added because there was an empty space in the wheel n_n. Its function should be something around defending or controlling a certain zone.

Some of the actions are implicit (or bonus for DnD peoples) and the background color will say if it is and if it consumes energy. For exampling ‘attacking’ far away of your units means they have to (implicitly) move, but you can move your units there without attacking too. 

[kingsnightwatch]

Testing an extra way to show damage. Got the idea from an scene in anime (Katanagatari??). A guy splits in two another guy with a kick from above but instead of blood theres a flow of this red leaves and I thought it could be a nice touch... because I had a hard time trying to draw nice blood. While its still a little test I like the idea of each unit having its own leaf shape.

...

not that I need more assets on my backlog -w-