#morlequariat

[morlequariat]

Morlequariat playtest stream with Kaia Soule

The vtuber Kaia Soule is streaming a playthrough of the latest Morlequariat demo right now! She's a variety streamer who personifies the idea of "contagious laughter" and she's been a big part of what inspired me to start streaming my development process, so stop by!

[epiglottalaxolotl]

Reblogging this, half to keep it as a reference and half to talk about a 90s-style website I'm working on myself.

I've been working on a website for a month or two now; it's partially a nostalgic love letter to the early days of the internet and partially a very disorganized gallery for pixel art I've drawn. Right now it's at morlequariat.com (a domain I originally registered for a game I'm working on, which is titled Morlequariat; I may or may not move it over to its own domain at some point.)

Unfortunately, I'm running out of (easy) ideas for things to put there. Currently there's some downloadable cursor themes, a (work-in-progress) random quotes page, and one page that's a parody user manual. If anyone has thoughts for what direction to take the site, I'd love to hear them!

I spent last night looking at Neocities sites and here are my takeaways:

There's a real push to keeping the internet weird, open and less corporate-driven -- info on bypassing paywalls, protecting your data, archiving web media and basic coding/tech literacy.

(I found one tutorial on how to make a pop up that detects whether someone has an ad blocker and suggests they install one if they don't! Love that.)

There's also resources on finding the kind of internet that isn't the default experience anymore - alternate search engines I hadn't even heard of, human-made link lists and webrings. (Webrings! Turns out they never went away!)

If any of that sounds interesting to you, by the way - sadgrl.online has a lot of it and is possibly the best thing on the internet????

The "90's web" aesthetic is really fun and nostalgic, but I particularly loved seeing some people bring the better parts of the "modern internet" into it. What if we had weird, eye-searing personal sites BUT with plaintext alternatives for accessibility purposes? CW for flashing lights and unreality triggers?

(Again sadgrl comes in with a lot of resources for making your website accessible.)

Most of all, I'm honestly emotional about all the sites I found that were like, "hi! I'm 14 and this is my website where I talk about stuff I like haha."

It's so good that so many kids and teens who never experienced the "old internet" are still finding stuff like this and making their own weird stuff! Not just because weird websites are more fun, but because these skills are being passed down.

Anyway it's great and who knows maybe I'll make my own site sometime to keep horror media recommendations or something.

[epiglottalaxolotl]

Streaming a demo of my game over at https://www.twitch.tv/epiglottalaxolotl if anyone is interested!

[morlequariat]

Sporadic devlog, 2023-02-13

Can't very well call these weekly any more, given how often I forget to write them. But I should still post updates about the game when I have them!

I've been working lately on improving the game's opening cutscene, adding more variety in character animations and putting more personality in the wording. It's a lot closer to my original vision now, although there's always more improvements that can be made. This is now the first thing you see upon starting up a new save file:

I've also been making even more improvements to the tilesets, changing the old wall tiles to be more versatile and adding more decorative tiles for detailing and adding more texture to things.

Not entirely sure what the next release is going to be. Depending on what gets done and when, I might put out a new version just with these improvements this month, or I might wait until the Chapter 1 Mid-Boss fight is finished.

Also, this past saturday was the third anniversary of the game's first demo release! Which was at the time an incredibly bare-bones tech demo. It's hard to believe just how far everything has come, even if what's left to do does seem insurmountable sometimes.

[morlequariat]

Looking for people to play a puzzle RPG I programmed

For the past couple years I've been working on a game that plays sort of like an old-school Zelda title, except turn-based and with multiple playable characters (sort of like an open-world version of Into the Breach). Since I have no sense of restraint or scale, this is all in a custom engine that I wrote.

Anyway, the game is far enough along now that I'm looking for more people to play it! Primarily because I want to hear people's thoughts on the narrative and lore, but also just the simple question of whether the game is fun to play.

The demo can be downloaded for free on itch.io here and if you want to talk to me about the game you can do so on the game’s discord server here.

[morlequariat]

Candelstabra

"Two blades are better than one. Not sure about three, though."

Hidden deep within the haunted inn that was once known as the Dusty Pancake, a curious weapon that can hit three enemies at once can be found.

[morlequariat]

Sturdy Leek

This is the cleric's counterpart to the Sharpened Carrot. Both of these "weapons" are sold by a gardener once you complete a sidequest to defeat the plant monsters that have taken over her vegetable patch. (I would make its effect have something to do with the "leekspin" meme, but having direct meme references in the game strikes me as just a little bit immersion-breaking. I'll probably have a subtle reference to Ievan Polkka in the music, though, since it's a legitimately good song. Plus, I've done that sort of thing before—there's even a track in the game right now that references Megalovania.)

[morlequariat]

Alpha 4.2.2 is out!

Well, I said it would release at the end of august, and I was wrong. But! It's out now!

This is primarily a content update, adding new areas all around the lake, up until (but not including) the first major plot-relevant boss fight.

(The structure of the game is that there will be four chapters, each with a major boss fight at the end and a major boss fight in the middle. So tonight's update ends with the pre-fight cutscene for the chapter 1 mid-boss.)

Go check it out! I'd love to hear people's thoughts, especially on the game's narrative.

[morlequariat]

Any long-form narrative, actually; I feel this constantly about my game.

Making long-form webcomics is like

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2022-06-20

Took a week or two off, but now I'm back! Still not being the most productive, mostly due to uncertainty over what to prioritize next. But over this past weekend I managed to finish most of a system that I had been wanting to add for a while: swappable UI themes!

This is entirely just something I'm doing because I feel like it, and because sometimes I get indecisive about what buttons should look like. But the plan is that in-game achievements can unlock new UI styles to change the look and feel of the game. At the start, there would be three or four available; another handful would be unlocked during the course of the main story; and then even more would be gated behind hidden sidequests. Most themes only change the appearance of buttons, although some also affect the cursor and fonts.

Maybe someday I'll get back to adding actual content to the game. But that's hard.

[morlequariat]

Weekly(?) devlog, 2022-10-27

Been very busy lately, with my job and other real-life stuff but also with trying to rush out this update before the end of the month. Still not sure what day it will be, but any day now.

So if you really want to see how the development is going, you should go watch my twitch channel right now, where I'm putting the finishing touches on the update!

[morlequariat]

Alpha v4.2.1 (the Lore Update) is out!

An unexpected surge of productivity has led me to finish the next minor update exactly on schedule, meaning that 4.2.1 is now available on itch.io! I'm very proud of how much better the overall visual presentation of the game comes across in this update.

(The UI is still not perfect, but that's going to be my next big priority. Either that or enemy AI.)

Check it out:

[morlequariat]

I'd like to hope that the Programmer Music in Morlequariat lives up to the precedent.

I'd like to hope that the Programmer Art in Morlequariat is at least a little ahead of the curve, although I know I still have a ways to improve.

The Programmer UI Design in Morlequariat may, however, be a lost cause.

The central paradox of independent game development is that Programmer Art sucks, and Programmer User Interface Design is incomprehensible, but Programmer Music will consistently blow your tits clean off.

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2022-08-01

Made a bit of a breakthrough with regards to level design a few days ago! Specifically, the addition of flowing water tiles (or, equivalently, conveyor belts). Many of my favorite games are puzzle-platformers of some kind, and one of the primary challenges in any puzzle-platformer is how to circumvent involuntary movement (usually gravity). Adding that to Morlequariat will open up an immense design space for challenging levels, both combat-oriented and otherwise.

Besides that, not a whole lot going on; due to some changes in my day job there's a chance that development will slow down a little, but hopefully that won't be a problem. My plan is to keep working on the game and keep streaming the development when I can.

[morlequariat]

Let me just preface this by saying: I really like making fonts. There’s something fascinating about taking a symbol that has a universally-agreed-upon meaning and figuring out how to transform it in a way that keeps its basic structure recognizably intact while still giving it a unique personal touch and ensuring that it aesthetically fits into the greater context of whatever it’s being used for.

So, to that end: This is the default font used in Morlequariat. It’s used for most in-game UI elements, all narration, and almost all dialogue. All of the text in the game is stored on disk as ASCII, and so this font page corresponds to the printable range of ASCII (codepoints 0x20 to 0x7F). However, many of the punctuation symbols included in ASCII were not useful to me, so I replaced them with things that—at least to me—made some sense. The substitutions I made are as follows:

The hash sign (#) is replaced with the Sign of the Light. Any good Gothic fantasy setting needs to have one of two things: either superfluous crosses everywhere, or superfluous instances of whatever the equivalent holy symbol in the setting’s fictional religion is. I chose the latter.

The dollar sign ($) is still a currency symbol, but in this case the currency is gold coins and, in lieu of coming up with a symbol for them, I just drew a gold coin. I’m not entirely satisfied with how it looks (and especially with it being the only colored symbol on this font page), and once I have a better sense of how currency systems are going to be handled in the finished game I will probably replace this with something more appropriate.

The equal sign (=) is replaced with an ellipsis, mostly because a game that has more dialogue than it does mathematical equations is going to have a lot of ellipses and not many equal signs.

Similarly, the greater than (<) and less than (>) signs are replaced with arrows, mostly for use on road signs. Once I had these replaced, it was obvious to replace the caret (^) with an upwards arrow, and the underscore (_) being replaced with a downwards arrow was chosen because of its proximity on the codepage to the upwards arrow and because it’s the only symbol that has any connection to the idea of “below”.

The at sign (@) is replaced with a smiley face. Since I’ve never seen that symbol used for anything but email addresses, and email has not been invented yet in the setting of Morlequariat, it was effectively a blank space that I could put anything in; and this is a symbol I’ve seen frequently enough in the fonts of the old games for Nintendo handhelds that were such a major influence on the game’s aesthetic. I think the main reason I chose the replacement I did is because of the tendency of old-fashioned ASCII-graphics roguelikes to represent the player character with an at sign, and the tendency of upgraded versions of those same roguelikes that used the IBM 437 font to use the smiley face character instead.

The curly braces ( { } ) and the vertical pipe ( | ) are replaced with glyphs that can be combined to make variable-width dashes. This is because I have a tendency to use perhaps more em dashes (—) in casual writing than is strictly warranted, and the hyphen (-) is too short for that.

There are at least two other fonts of the same style that are going to be in the game. One is a Gothic Blackletter font, which is going to be used for inscriptions on ancient statues, dialogue spoken by historical figures, and the like. (This fontpage currently also contains a number of color-coded symbols for game concepts such as damage types and health meters, although these may end up getting moved to their own page at some point in the future.) The other is based on my own handwriting and will probably be used primarily for handwritten texts. As an unrelated personal side project (read: “way to procrastinate working on Morlequariat”), I have also expanded the primary font to cover the entire Greek alphabet and have gotten much further than necessary on replicating the entirety of the IBM 437 and Windows 1252 codepages.

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2023-01-16

Alpha 4.2.3 is out today! That's it. That's the devlog.

Well, okay, I can say a few more things. Since the last update was a content-focused one, today's is more about polishing. So now there's things like attack animations and the ability to access the settings menu from the title screen.

I've been intentionally taking a step back from Morlequariat lately for a variety of reasons; there's other stuff going on in my life right now and I don't want to stretch myself too thin. Like I've mentioned before, I'm hoping to focus a little more on my other game, but I am hoping that the first chapter of the game (including the fights against the mid-boss and the final boss of the first chapter) will be done by the end of the year.