#devblogging

[yekokataa]

robert kurvitz doing an animation reference for harry

[heartmachinez]

Hyper Light Breaker: Meet Dro

Who was Dro?

Whoever she was, she is now transformed. What does she want?

And what is the pain behind her howl?

A glimpse into our wordless storytelling.

Hyper Light Drifter was a game well-known for its wordless storytelling. A quick Google search will yield dozens of videos and articles discussing the art of worldbuilding without words.

As Jake Theriault artfully describes in his analysis of the opening sequence of Drifter:

“We discover all we need to know about the world in one wordless sequence. And from there on out, all the discovery made by the player is done visually.”

While Hyper Light Breaker will not be entirely devoid of text (there will be UI and some loadout descriptions), we have made the decision to lean back into our strengths and reveal our world and mysteries therein through illustrated vignettes.

There is so much about the Hyper Light universe to discover. With Breaker, we’re excited to share more about the history of the world that led to the events of Drifter.

Our Character Artist, Isaak Ramos, has established a house style for our studio, inspired by the works of Katsuhiro Otomo.

Some key aspects include:

Clearly defined straights and minimal curves

Shading using a halftone pattern (and/or halftone+flat value)

And reasoning includes:

Effectively receives color blend modes

Meaningfully calls back to our influences and to our past without resorting to pixels

Adds gravity/seriousness

Quickly creates a more finished aesthetic that will support looser lines and different drawing styles

Let us hear from you!

What do you think about this return to wordless storytelling? And our panel art style?

And what’s going on with Dro?

[inlandempir]

post on one of the dev forums for disco elysium, titled "THE BENEFITS OF A MODERN FANTASY WORLD". text version beneath the cut

There's been a lot of art and tech talk so far, it's all kinda dry or saccharine. I think it's time to juice it up by throwing in a proper essay.

THE BENEFITS OF A MODERN FANTASY WORLD

The world of No Truce! (we do have a proper name for it, but we’re shy) is not what you’d call “a generic genre world”. It is not pseudo-medieval stasis, as Forgotten Realms was, nor is it Fallout’s campy barbarism with guns. It is also not a Harry Potter/Batman/vampire fantasy world, which is basically “our world with a secret/special world within it”. Neither is it the tech-obsessed ‘punks’ of steam and cyber. It’s a modern fantasy world, a fantasy world in its modernity, which roughly corresponds to the middle part of our XXth century. Now that kind of thing opens up an array of new possibilities. It is a world with a promise of non-staticness, meaning, things appear undecided — they could go one way or the other. It is close enough to our own world for things to have meaning in it, it is a proper frame in which to explore themes relevant to our own society such as bigotry, power relations, politics, bureaucratic apparati, geopolitical relations, philosophy, ideology, religion et cetera. A pseudo-medieval world is not a proper frame for truly exploring themes of, for example, sexuality, for it lacks 1) a proper concept of sexuality, 2) an actual idea of societal progress and 3) a clear ideological dominant, which would be the place where values come from. All you can do in a static, societally unstructured world is give out-of-place shoutouts to present day communities for cheap popularity (“this is exactly my sexual orientation, how did they know?!”).

We find the ideological dominant missing because the western world is traditionally culturally critical of ideological dominants – critical of both state and religion. Anyhow, a classic fantasy world would feature two main ideologies – the “good” and the “evil”, of which the former is selfless and compassionate, but the other one is selfish and cruel. The attempts to overcome that have given us the Grittywelt – a world in which everyone is an asshole and pessimism rules the day. Unsurprisingly, Grittywelt is also static as hell and meaningful change is foreclosed from it. It is a “protection from false hopes”. As such, it is heavily unrealistic. Much more realistic would be people living in super gritty conditions, but not looking the part, that is, not really noticing the abnormal harshness of their conditions, because they don’t have much to compare them to, and being hopeful towards the next day, because surprise! This is how you do it. Survive, I mean. Being depressed is a luxury. In a way, I’d say we’re trying to create the obverse of the Grittywelt – a world in which everyone is empathizable, sort of a hero of their own story.

The modern era is also a fitting vessel for anachronisms – do we not have actual cyborg limbs and donkey-pulled carts operating in the same world at the modern era? Capitalism can also contain little feudalisms in a way, in which a single man or single family controls the entire economy of a town or a village and profits from it. And at the same time, it can also contain little socialist utopias, scientist villages, in which everything is provided by the State. Aside from being a basic feature of reality (anachronism is nothing more than time failing to fit the stereotype about it), it is also a lovable creative tool, allowing for a plethora of what-if-scenarios. Imagine a modern world, only without television; imagine a modern world in which there never was a global war, imagine a world in which fossil fuels are less available. Now, if you will, imagine one which has forgotten its antiquity, and one, in which there is not just water between the continents, but something worse as well — an anti-reality mass we call “pale” (also more on that later). Now imagine one, which has a legitimate and operative “religion of history” in place, which seeks for people it deems special enough to be the “vessel of progress”. (This is not an alternate history thing, by the way. An alternate history takes place in our world quite recognizably and has no more than one divergence point from history as it happened.)

One might ask, why would we not create an even more modern world, if we wanted to maximise our possibilities? Well one of the answers is that it would have destroyed the necessary element of escapism, another is that we cannot create a good alternate Information Era because we ourselves fail to understand the Information Era (More precicely, we have the information era in its infancy and it works via radio relays). We are too close to it and it is too new to understand it, it is “in progress”. The third reason would be that technology is not a fascinating subject for modern science fiction. It’s become a natural part of our reality. We don’t believe it’s going to save us anymore – it has failed to deliver for too long. I am of the belief that the themes of science fiction today are societal, political and psychological (one could maybe add aesthetical to it, for we also love the world for its beauty). All fantastic or sci-fi elements are means for best exploring those themes.

I have filled my page. That’s all for the time being. Thank you for reading.

Martin Luiga Writer

[henmesh]

Working on a crossbow

[thewakingcloak]

the shadow is back!!! (you probably didn't even know it was gone)

it's a small detail but should help pretty significantly with figuring out where you are when you're jumping or falling off a cliff!

[nextinline-if]

Bug Fix Update - July 9, 2024

Hi, everyone.

I hope you're all doing well and staying safe in this crazy world. There were a couple bugs in the last update of Ch 2, Part 1 from August that I never got fixed. Well, I just fixed them. Sorry about the delay.

I'm getting better mentally. Still have a lot of work to do but after many months of therapy and medications, I am feeling more myself than I have in a long, long time.

Anyway, thank you for sticking around. I appreciate each and every one of you who has taken the time to play NIL.

In this bug fix update, the following changes were made:

High Priority Fixes:

Chapter 1: (preface: I think this is fixed. Please please someone let me know if you find that it is not. I've been trying to fix this for more than a year lol). Some people could not move forward when F and Felix argue if they choose that F is an ex-lover.

Chapter 1: Coding typo in balcony scene with F at the ball.

Chapter 1: When finding out your pet is coming, it now clearly communicates that the pet is male. (someone asked me to add this on Itchio.)

Chapter 2: fixed a scene where Constantine's horse is mentioned incorrectly.

Chapter 2: Carriage Scene - fixed two coding errors.

I know this was only a bug fix, but I hope it helps improve the experience. I'll let you all know when I have something more for you.

Best,

Vi

[entropy-game-dev]

One of the new additions to the build is flagging especially hard enemies. Currently, enemies 1 tier above the current dungeon tier have a 2% chance to spawn. This can mix up the battles to keep players on their toes, and give especially strategic players the chance to earn equipment, and a possible ally, one tier higher than what they'd usually have access to!

However, during playtesting, I got absoutely wrecked by a single monster and I had no idea it was a strong one because I didn't have the chance to scan it. On the suggestion of a friend, if I had big flashing warning symbols on it, I would have been more careful and run away or played more defensively. And so now I do!

It was easy enough to make it yellow, since all sprites are drawn as white to begin with and then a colour blend is added to it in game. The warning symbol is new, but uses the same code as the HP and recruitment UI text, but with an image instead!

[candleholder-dev]

some recent screenshots, featuring neo darkner designs by @spamtons + @shazos​ and tilesets by @creepa-b0t-inc :)

[guiltycorp]

SO happy about apathy/psychosis states for the Bachelor in Pathologic 3 as described in the recent devblog by the audio team Т_Т give me give me give me

[jjeinn-tae]

Welcome to the journey!

Hello everyone, and welcome! I'm Jjeinn, and I'm working on a series where I'm building a retro game inspired by games of the N64 and Play Station! It is under a working title of "Journey Through LoGuo" in the vein of Zelda and the like. Our protagonist, default name Locca, is going to make her way through the Empire of LoGuo, ruled by the sun emperor who as of yet does not have a name.

In her adventures through the lands, Locca will win the support of various scholars dedicated to the 6 elements, learning various spells to supplement her ever-increasing array of... gadgets? I feel that implies a higher tech than we're talking here. In the very-shoehorned reference to Journey to the Wes I have in my working title, there is a rather Chinese-inspired theme to LoGuo, which being my attempt at a N64-era "Zelda" esque game, directly created the name of the empire.

Contrary to most games I've seen of this genre, Locca is not your typical sword and shield fighter. Locca's weapon of choice is the guandao, a Chinese polarm sword, leading to a combat system that will be very active!

To me, this is basically a modern port of a hypothetical game made in a world where the video game crash didn't happen, and thus there was a US competitor to Nintendo that was attempting to match pace. So... "out of universe" but still in-universe somewhat, this is just what was the latest of a series in the 90's. To that end, there are certain things that would be known to players in this non-existent world that the game was made for, but we obviously don't have that context in real life. So, I have been going back and forth on whether to talk directly on that or not. If I do, I will mark such posts as #loguo spoilers

Other tags to follow the project are mainly going to be #loguo but I might add more.

This post will also eventually have the elemental symbols surrounding the crest of Loguo (basically mirroring the medallions around the triforce in OoT) but my pen tablet is angry currently. So hopefully soon.

And a link to my previous master post, about J'ard here:

J'ard is not dead, I've been working on the world for 8 years now, but it isn't the correct start. Thank you everyone who's followed along with my dev logs, and here we start some more!

[paleopinesofficial]

Can't get enough of our chonky boy? 😍

Animator Rachel Dixon shares her secrets of bringing the Sarcosuchus to life in Paleo Pines in our latest dev blog! 🦖🎞️

Read all about it here 👈 and you might even find a secret code…

[rosiemoo]

Out of Touch Gameboy Code

This is my programming equivalent to sheet music which plays Hall and Oate's Out of Touch. A little devblog of how this chunk of code came to be for this year's final Thursday ❤️

For @b0tster's birthday Gameboy cart, I wanted to get the Gameboy to play Out of Touch. My hands were also in rough shape with an RSI so I was programming using a combination of voice dictation and the onscreen keyboard. Because of this, rather than figure out something better, I had to rework my old music code which was an already reworked version of the sound.c example code that comes with GBDK.

A list of notes and their frequencies, graciously provided by the sound.c example.

This code takes one of the notes, and uses the frequency to set the registers correctly for playing that note on the first sound channel. The frequency is a bit more than 8 bits of info so it gets split between the bits in register 13 and 14. The other registers affect the kind of note played in ways I couldn't hope to fathom. Those were figured out with trial and error.

To get the timing better, I also had to add FF and SD which raised and lowered the tempo (by doing the opposite to the tempo variable). I also added HOLD which if put before a note, doubled the length of the note. This was just enough to get the tune working and not sounding terribly off.

The code for playing the song isn't terribly interesting, this function is called once every frame with a delay of "tempo" ticks between them. FF, SD, and HOLD all call the function again to avoid this delay while still playing the actual next note. Also the note value is subtracted by 12 because I wanted to lower the tune by an octave but didn't want to use the hand energy change all the numbers.

And the rest of the playing code is terribly simple! Play a note, wait a bit, repeat. Which brings us back to this:

This is an array of the note enumerators from before The song goes through this and plays each note in sequence. I wrote this by looking at some sheet music for the melody of the chorus and just feeling it out from there. I eventually added little comments above the notes to help me keep track of it!

No human writes music like this

but, it worked, which means it was good enough which means it was perfect!

The resulting video:

[spritework by the lovely @abbytorade]

This was a weekend project that ended up taking me a bit under a month due to life but it was a very fun little coding puzzle to work on when my hands would allow me. Lilith is a great friend and I am so glad to have been able to make this made for her!

[fangirlsovertoomanythings]

alright derivating is not so bad after all

[lavapulsemods]

cmd: homophobia -> delete

ANB Mod Update

Been a minute since I posted about mod progress. I did end up having to use the gender swap method for the main character, and all is going well. Currently in the playtesting/dialogue hunt phase. As before, I've been fixing any preexisting typos that I come across along the way.

Gaia always knows the right thing to say.

Breaking News: ANB Secretly Run by Squirrels

It turns out that A New Beginning is written in a language called Squirrel. This game is the first I've heard of it, but it reads like a hybrid of Java and Lua with minor squirrel-themed syntax sprinkled in, such as how script files use the ".nut" extension. I love knowing that the game devs chose a somewhat obscure language themed after little forest critters.

[henmesh]

I've had a few questions asking if the game's graphics were made with actual clay or just digital models with a clay filter/texture.

All graphics in the game come from photos of actual clay models! Then I process them in Aseprite to make the in-game sprites:

All animations for a standard enemy like this guy usually need around 70 photos total

A more thorough explanation of the full process will come in a later post.

[thewakingcloak]

Testing a new method for tall grass :)

(don't worry, there won't be a random square patch of grass on the beach, this is just The Test Grass)

Before, I was using the Game Boy Zelda game trick: grass is a tile, and then I just throw a grass sprite on top of the player to make it look like they're inside it. Clever, and it's surprisingly convincing!

But now, this uses the sprite tilting method, which I've been using heavily throughout, to create "3D" grass, and it works so much better than I expected. Also more consistent with the perspective I'm going with!

Wheeeeeeeee