#game beta

[colarabbit]

EAT YOUR HEART OUT (CHARACTER CONCEPTS 4 MURDER DATING SIM)

Hello!! I haven't been posting cause I've been depressed sorry bout that. But I have a game I'm creating called "Eat Your Heart Out" which will be set in a zootopia like world of half human half animals. You will be playing their respective prey animal in this world. Do you love Boyfriend to Death, The Price of Flesh, Broken Colors, Sunny Day Jack, and other similar murder dating sims? Well look no further! THIS IS AN 18+ GAME FOR 18+ PEOPLE WITH GORE, MURDER AND MORE IN IT'S WALLS TO COME SOON There's three routes being made so far with small descriptions. What will you be doing on your last day of summer before you move out of the city to go start a new life in a quiet, Prey heavy county?

>Go To The Beach It was 102 degrees outside today wow! Maybe having some fun in the sun wouldn't be so bad. A day at the beach would be a great way to relax before moving. On your hot day you happen to meet the sociable lifeguard, Hopsin! He's got a firey personality and a passion for keeping people safe. I'd be careful getting in that water!

>Go to the Mall The mall is a great place to stop by and get some last minute clothes and some accessories for your new home! Here you'll meet the fashionista, Ivory. Ivory is a pink loving, and energetic cat with a lot of excitement for clothes. She can be a bit of a ditz but don't let that deter you! She's a fun loving cat who loves to play.

>Go to a concert in town You totally forgot you had those tickets! There is a concert for your favorite rock band in town tonight. You figured you could catch up on sleep when you got to your new home the next day. You go to the concert for the all wolf band The Howlers. Here you meet Vance! The stoic bassist who you caught the eye of.

no TWS yet BUT I'll need your help! I work a 9-5 and I don't have hardly any time to make the game itself unless we get some patrons! Patrons will get all access on Sunday's to the newest content before it's released AND some fun Discord streams (that will be recorded as well for people who couldn't make it for concept testing and such) Would this be a game that interests you? Follow the tags #Eatyourheartoutbeta #eatyourheartout #colarabbit For more!

[saturnw0lf]

Yesterday a prototype of Persona 5 was dumped online, and it features, among other things mentioned in the tweet:

Early versions of songs

Early versions of the models

The MIDI-esque version of Last Surprise featured in the trailer

Differences in textures

The vocal songs (with exception to Wake Up, Get up, Get Out There) use a synth lead, this is before they hired Lyn most likely

Differences in animations

It's genuinely fucking wild to see. Do you ever feel like life is beautiful and has hope and meaning?

[zebracorn-chan]

Coda was able to play the demo of Secret of the Mimic at PAX West, which contains the first 5 minutes of the first two levels of the game, here is what he described:

[vapor-trails]

Happy Halloween! This update to the demo brings you all of Deep Town and the initial story before reaching the Lady of the Lake, as well as several new achievements and the entire ending sequence.

Play in your browser (or on desktop for better performance) on keyboard or with a controller. Completely free.

[dreamlostdogs]

I could finally be assed to take a proper picture of what the game is intended to look like, haha. These pieces were made for game testing purposes, so a few components are still missing and the art is not final.

[alpha-beta-gamer]

Titanic: Project 401 allows you explore a jaw-droppingly authentic recreation of the RMS Titanic, from first class all the way down to the engine rooms.

Read More & Play The Alpha, Free (Windows)

[xeniums]

very very wise words from zagreus there

[chloesimaginationthings]

Vanessa TOTALLY got those Tapes for the FNAF lore..

[skuntank]

Kalos league concept art

[pupperish]

I'm probably missing some good ones but I ran out of space. Play Aconite.

Edit: added funger and that is the only change I'll make. I do not care about what your personal definition of an indie/horror game. This post includes psychological horror cause it's horror.

[freegameplanet]

Nightmare Kart is a "legally distinct" Bloodborne inspired kart racing game with 21 racers, 13 karts, 15 tracks, boss battles and a full narrative-driven single-player campaign!

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Windows)

[justanandkensakufanblog]

Kensaku Card Battle possible beta screencap

Kensaku Card Battle is another minigame in And Kensaku that has a possible beta shot of it available. First the final game for reference (sourced from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KceSV1GmbQ )

and now the beta 

Not too many differences with this one but the words at the top being combined to calculate the attack power have stars next to them, these stars can appear in the final but there the stars are all of an even size. In this beta shot though the stars progressively get larger as they are being viewed from left to right. Stars are sometimes put next to words that are ‘more compatible’ with other words in search, in this case they all have three stars suggesting that they are very compatible (the stars system is a bit confusing and I don’t know how to explain it properly).

The final shot is of a different level of the game being played. There are five levels of this minigame that can be played and in one of the later levels a paper-rock-scissors mechanic is added with the fire, water, and grass elements. It functions the same way as Pokémon.

The only other difference I can see for now is that the clouds in the background were brightened for the final release. More details on this story as it develops!

[vincenzonova]

Canon Mudkip is still my favorite starter, but Beta Mudkip is still so cute, and I needed to attempt making its evolutionary line

[repliiku]

using the fact i never posted my 4/13 piece from last year on here to have conveniently wonderful post.

[toastyghostey]

I forgot to post this here -- beta designs Chell sketch i did a while ago

[just-ornstein]

[JK]  My first job was as an Assistant Producer for a video game company called Interplay in Irvine, CA. I had recently graduated from Boston University's School of Fine Arts with an MFA in Directing (I started out as a theatre nerd), but also had some limited coding experience and a passion for computers. It didn't look like I'd be able to make a living directing plays, so I decided to combine entertainment and technology (before it was cool!) and pitched myself to Brian Fargo, Interplay's CEO. He gave me my first break. I packed up and moved out west, and I've been producing games ever since.

[JK] I loved my time at EA. I was there for almost a full decade, and learned a tremendous amount about game-making, and met the most talented and driven people, who I remain in touch with today. EA gave me many opportunities, and never stopped betting on me. I worked on The Sims for nearly 5 years, and then afterwards, I worked on console action games as part of the Visceral studio. I was the Creative Director for the 2007 game "The Simpsons", and was the Executive Producer and Creative Director for the 2009 game "Dante's Inferno".

[JK] I haven't played in a long while, but I do recall that after the game shipped, my wife and I played the retail version for some time -- we created ourselves, and experimented with having a baby ahead of the actual birth of our son (in 2007). Even though I'd been part of the development team, and understood deeply how the simulation worked, I was still continually surprised at how "real" our Sims felt, and how accurate their responses were to having a baby in the house. It really felt like "us"!

Now for some of the development and lore related questions:

[JK] So I ended up in the incredibly fortunate position of creating the shipping neighborhoods for The Sims 2, and recruiting a few teammates to help me as we went along. 

Around the same time, we started using the Buy/Build tools to make houses we could save, and also bring them into each new build of the game (correcting for any bugs and incompatibilities). With the import tool, we could load Sims into these houses. In time, this "vanguard QA" process turned into a creative endeavor to define the "saved state" of the neighborhoods we would actually end up shipping with the game.

On playtesting & the leftover sims data on various lots:

Basically, we were in the late stages of development, and the Save Game functionality wasn't quite working. In order to test the game properly, you really needed to have a lot of assets, and a lot of Sims with histories (as if you'd been playing them for weeks) to test out everything the game had to offer. So I started defining a set of characters in a spreadsheet, with all their tuning variables, and worked with engineering to create an importer, so that with each new build, I could essentially "load" a kind of massive saved game, and quickly start playing and testing. 

It was fairly organic, and as the game's functionality improved, so did our starter houses and families. 

The thought process behind the creation of the iconic three neighborhoods:

I would not say it was particularly planned out ahead of time. We knew we needed a few saved houses to ship with the game; Sims 1, after all, had the Goth house, and Bob Newbie's house. But there wasn't necessarily a clear direction for what the neighborhood would be for Sims 2. We needed the game to be far enough along, so that the neighborhood could be a proper showcase for all the features in the game. With each new feature that turned alpha, I had a new tool in my toolbox, and I could expand the houses and families I was working on. Once we had the multi-neighborhood functionality, I decided we would not just have 1 starter neighborhood, but 3. With the Aging feature, Memories, a few wacky objects, plus a huge catalog of architectural and decorative content, I felt we had enough material for 3 truly distinct neighborhoods. And we added a couple of people to what became the "Neighborhood Team" around that time.

Later, when we created Strangetown, and eventually Veronaville, I believe we went back and changed Pleasantville to Pleasantview... because I liked the alliteration of "Verona-Ville", and there was no sense in having two "villes". (To this day, by the way, I still don't know whether to capitalize the "V" -- this was hotly debated at the time!)

Pleasantview:

Anyway, to answer your question, we of course started with Pleasantview. As I recall, we were not quite committed to multiple neighborhoods at first, and I think it was called Pleasantville initially, which was kind of a nod to Simsville... but without calling it Simsville, which was a little too on the nose. (There had also been an ill-fated game in development at Maxis at the time, called SimsVille, which was cancelled.) It's been suggested that Pleasantville referred to the movie, but I don't think I ever saw that movie, and we just felt that Pleasantville kind of captured the feeling of the game, and the relaxing, simple, idyllic world of the Sims.

Pleasantview started as a place to capture the aging feature, which was all new to The Sims 2. We knew we had toddlers, teens, and elders to play with, so we started making families that reflected the various stages of family life: the single mom with 3 young kids, the parents with two teens, the old rich guy with two young gold-diggers, etc. We also had a much greater variety of ethnicity to play with than Sims 1, and we had all new variables like sexual orientation and memories. All these things made for rich fodder for a great diversity of families. Then, once we had family trees, and tombstones that carried the actual data for the dead Sims, the doors really blew open. We started asking ourselves, "What if Bella and Mortimer Goth could be characters in Sims 2, but aged 25 years? And what if Cassandra is grown up? And what if Bella is actually missing, and that could be a fun mystery hanging over the whole game?" And then finally the "Big Life Moments" went into the game -- like weddings and birthdays -- and we could sort of tee these up in the Save Game, so that they would happen within the first few minutes of playing the families. This served both as a tutorial for the features, but also a great story-telling device.

Anyway, it all just flowed from there, as we started creating connections between families, relationships, histories, family trees, and stories that we could weave into the game, using only the simulation features that were available to us. It was a really fun and creative time, and we wrote all of the lore of Sims 2 within a couple of months, and then just brought it to life in the game.

Strangetown:

Strangetown was kind of a no-brainer. We needed an alternate neighborhood for all the paranormal stuff the Sims was known for: alien abduction, male pregnancy, science experiments, ghosts, etc. We had the desert terrain, which created a nice contrast to the lush Pleasantville, and gave it an obvious Area 51 vibe.

The fact that Veronaville is the oldest file probably reflects the fact that it was finished first, not that it was started first. That's my guess anyway. It was the simplest neighborhood, in many ways, and didn't have as much complexity in terms of features like staged big life moments, getting the abduction timing right, the alien DNA thing (which I think was somewhat buggy up until the end), etc.  So it's possible that we simply had Veronaville "in the can", while we put the last polish on Pleasantville (which was the first and most important neighborhood, in terms of making a good impression) and Strangeville (which was tricky technically).

Veronaville:

But my personal favorite was Veronaville. We had this cool Tudor style collection in the Build mode catalog, and I wanted to ship some houses that showed off those assets. We also had the teen thing going on in the aging game, plus a lot of romance features, as well as enemies. I have always been a Shakespeare buff since graduate school, so putting all that together, I got the idea that our third neighborhood should be a modern-day telling of the Romeo and Juliet story. It was Montys and Capps (instead of Montagues and Capulets), and it just kind of wrote itself. We had fun creating the past family trees, where everyone had died young because they kept killing each other off in the ongoing vendetta.

[JK] You know, I have never seen The Lone Gunmen, and I don't remember making any kind of direct references with the Strangetown Sims, other than the general Area 51 theme, as you point out. Charles London helped out a lot with naming Sims, and I'm pretty sure we owe "Vidcund" and "Lazlo" to him ... though many team members pitched in creatively. He may have had something in mind, but for me, I largely went off of very generic and stereotypical ideas when crafting these neighborhoods. I kind of wanted them to be almost "groaners" ... they were meant to be tropes in every sense of the word. And then we snuck in some easter eggs. But largely, we were trying to create a completely original lore.

[JK] Well, I think we kind of pushed it with The Sims 2, to be honest, and I remember getting a little blow-back about Bunny Broke, for example. Bunny Broke was the original name for Brandi Broke. Not everyone found that funny, as I recall, and I can understand that. It must have been changed before we shipped.

We also almost shipped the first outwardly gay Sims in those neighborhoods, which was bold for EA back in 2004. My recollection was that we had set up the Dreamers to be gay (Dirk and Darren), but I'm looking back now and see that's not the case. So I'm either remembering incorrectly (probably) or something changed during development.

In general we just did things that we found funny and clever, and we just pulled from all the tropes of American life.

[JK] The alien abduction started in Sims 1, with a telescope object that was introduced in the "Livin' Large" expansion pack. That's when some of the wackier ideas got introduced into the Sims lore. That pack shipped just before I joined Maxis in 2001; when I got there, the team had shipped "House Party" and was underway on "Hot Date". So I couldn't tell you how the original idea came about, but The Sims had this 50's Americana vibe from the beginning, and UFOs kind of played right into that. So the alien abduction telescope was a no-brainer to bring back in Sims 2. The male pregnancy was a new twist on the Sims 1 telescope thing. It must have been that the new version (Sims 2) gave us the tech and flexibility to have male Sims become pregnant, so while this was turned "off" for the core game, we decided to take advantage of this and make a storyline out of it. I think this really grew out of the fact that we had aliens, and alien DNA, and so it was not complicated to pre-bake a baby that would come out as an alien when born. The idea of a bunch of guys living together, and then one gets abducted, impregnated, and then gives birth to an alien baby ... I mean, I think we just all thought that was hilarious, in a sit-com kind of way. Not sure there was much more to it than that. Everything usually came from the designers discovering ways to tweak and play with the tech, to get to funny outcomes.

[JK] Possibly we were just testing the functionality of the Wants/Fears and Memories systems throughout development, and some stuff got left over.

[JK] I can't remember, but that sounds like something we would have done! I'm pretty sure we laid the groundwork for more stories that we ended up delivering :) But The Sims 2 was a great foundation for a lot of continued lore that followed.

--

I once again want to thank Jonathan Knight for granting me this opportunity and taking the time from his busy schedule to answer my questions.