...And being replaced. I am a little sad to announce that after a couple years, our company website needs an aggressive makeover. Since designing this site, I have learned a lot about marketing and much has changed about us. When the new site is up, this site will link to that one, and soon after be deleted. We recommend following us on Twitter or Facebook until the website swap is complete, and you'll know when that is.
On New Years, my resolution was to at least release a public demo of Paper-Soul Theater before the first official day of Autumn this year, which is the 22nd. At the time, I made a promise that, if we could not make that goal, I would reassess whether the project should be cancelled. If you're reading this, then we've decided to keep working on Paper-Soul Theater, but I wouldn't celebrate just yet...
Q: Where did the most recent blog post go?
A: It is located under the January 2017 section despite being published in May. This is simply because weebly, as a website host, is a hunk of garbage. The more you know. It's midday, I'm riding my bike beneath the springtime sun, when suddenly white flowers catch my fancy. I stop and admire them quietly for a moment and feel the warmth of the air like ocean currents passing by calmly. "How nice would it be if those were in Paper Soul Theater?" I wonder aloud. I snap a photo and keep on my way. In a sense, that scene sums up my life. I may be busy often, but Paper Soul Theater always remains in the slower moments. Even on days when no actual development gets done, I'll wistfully think about it. This may seem insignificant until you learn the bad news. Unfortunately, two very important members of the team recently quit, leaving what's left of the development team in shambles! Without a programmer, or composer, I recently considered terminating the project. Sometimes there's no shame in quitting, and maybe I don't know when to do so, because I'm just so damn excited about Paper Soul Theater these days. It's time for a rebound. Spring is all surrounding as winter comes to a close. This is what's new: ~ ~ ~ I'm lucky to say that my designer and writer are sticking with me. Our designer has before struggled with participation, and still does, but I can feel that's getting better. Though at a slow pace, I can depend on him to sketch something or give his thoughts on a design, now. These days, our writer is slowly becoming like an adviser to me, being there to listen whenever needed. I've been having him create interactive fiction to simulate story-heavy moments and dialogue. Each time, we go over what I like and wish for him to change, and it has shown me how blessed I am to have him specifically on the team. We have great chemistry as partners in crime, and I trust him when he disagrees with me or when he has an entirely different idea. The oldest two members still with us, are only honorary members. I talk with both of them on occasion, and even though they've moved on, they each still care. Our other writer, who was the first person to join the team with me, had a brilliant idea towards our cause of downsizing the game, the other day, and suddenly I felt nostalgia for 12 months back when it was the two of us against the world. Our soon-leaving programmer is doing so with a going-away present: a promise to help the next programmer learn the code he's leaving behind, and I consider that very kind. More still is another ex-writer, who is a friend. Just the other day, he pointed me in the direction of a programmer, and I'm excited to contact him later today. I myself have been working on and off with the surface short-grass hexagon textures. This is how they are going to look: It's nothing special, but since it looks okay in game, I think the wise thing to do is move on, rather than slow progress by being a perfectionist. As mentioned before, I've also been finding people to interview, and easier than I expected! Assuming that goes well, we'll be back to our prior size and with more progress made to boot! I've lowered my standard for who we try to hire, in hopes that rapid-fire interviewing will help get the right type of person aboard.
While manning our social media, I've come across the upcoming Steven Universe game, and honestly panicked as a response. Here again was another game to compete against (Paper Mario gameplay) but this time, it's well known by the public, getting journalistic attention. I looked into Save the Light, and I found it will be "available on consoles" with nothing hinting at a computer or handheld release, and given that Paper Soul Theater might release on computers at the same time, that deflated my worries a little. I told my close friend about it, and he convinced me nothing is ever going to be "too similar" to Paper Soul Theater, so for now on, I vow to simply trust in the unique ideas and quality of our upcoming game to prevail. I have a good feeling about the future. We're not throwing in the towel ...not when there is a big milestone event coming soon... The image above was taken from the BBC's website. Videogame development is a volatile process. Games don't evolve over time, they perpetually mutate like the climax of a chemical reaction. Some games gets rebranded, some games absorb parts of other past games, and sometimes they look nothing like the original plan. Ever game I ever worked on was like this.
Starting today, Snakepit is among the two latest victims of this process. Very recently, it went from being one game to two planned, and starting now the second game is cancelled, and the first is going to revert to being just a game inside Meat Quest. As part of the original plan, Snakepit was going to have no story and the player would only get to play tiny segments of the game at any one time, as part of a side quest to obtain bug spray. When thinking about Snakepit Zero today, I realized that the game has literally nothing new to add to the platformer table, which means I see no reason in selling a full version. The colors came from Meat Quest, the RPG elements (and sorta also setting) came from Gargoyles Quest, the jump mechanics came from Yoshi's Island, the collect-to-win level design came from Yoshi's Story, the planned immortality was going to be from Wario Land 3, the planned dive attack was to be from Ristar, and the planned hydration bar would have come from Demon Returns. You would think that with such a wide palette of games to draw from, I'd result in a platformer game that would be unique enough, yet it all adds up to just a humble platformer/ rpg that is 7 years too late. If given the choice, I would probably just recommend one or two of those inspirations for someone to play over my own future videogame, which is really telling. The degree to which I struggled to assign Snakepit a story should have been a red flag weeks ago, but I'm at least glad to have figured this out so soon. I was wrong about Meat Quest. I was worried that people would be turned off by my intensely-surreal, meta humor poking fun at videogames, developing them, and their relationship with the player, combined with the intentionally obtuse/ antagonistic design. Even if I can only bet on a cult appeal from Meat Quest, I think Meat Quest has a hell of lot more going for it. First person adventure games are getting rare these days, and even rarer are ones that ask the player to explode the generic NPC they hate the most in a psychedelic landscape. While most of the mechanics are nothing new, this is such a story-lead game that having such an outlandish experience (paired with good graphics) is all I really need, and there is still a lot of wiggle room to come up with new ideas. The other game to mutate isn't Paper Soul Theater, but a new game called Inkko (which in hindsight should have been named "Inko" since that is how I pronounce it). Inkko was going to be a 72 hour competition game, but I then realized I was really on to something with the concept and don't have time to finish it by Monday 7 am. Though conceptualizing Inkko, I was able to combine two of my past games that were never finished. Both of them had some of my most clever ideas so I felt like I was knocking out two birds with one stone in making this. Here's the kicker: Inkko is being absorbed into Peanut Caravan, making Peanut Caravan now an amalgamation of Hippie Business Balloon, Acid Dough, a once-planned game named Sneaking Around the Outer Reaches, and another once-planned game called Pikmin: the Survival (a fan game). This means the games later to be in production by us has been reduced to just Friends of the Void, The Road Goes 601, and Peanut Caravan, as well as the interactive fiction. All side games will continue to take a back seat to Paper Soul Theater, and Meat Quest will now be worked on in place of Snakepit zero. Thank you for taking time to read up on what is currently in production. (Image credit: Anne Burgess, Geograph.org.uk (This picture was taken on an Ireland shore)
In a recent concept art showing a battle (which can be found in the recent interview), one of the things illustrated is the way Paper Soul Theater (in battle and out) is made of hexagonal prisms fit together like honeycombs. Each hexagonal prism stands upward and their height is usually about that of the prisms surrounding. Together, they form an island, and their ends are cliffs surrounded by open air. You might be reminded of a diorama upon seeing a location in our game for the first time, and that's a reasonable connect to make. Each place Aponi and her friends venture through vaguely resemble dioramas connected by bridges. You might wonder how serious we plan to take this idea. After seeing how hell-bent Intellectual Systems and Nintendo were on making Color Splash a world of paper, in the same vein as Yoshi's Woolly World, I discovered that other people and I feel a videogame world is fake if it realistically looks constructed by arts and crafts, and that can be enough to ruin an experience. It would be a mistake to really ham-up that the entire world is a series of dioramas brought to life by your imagination. In my mind's eye, I don't see Aponi's world that way. Games like Yoshi's Island and Paper Mario (N64) have a style that hints at being colored by crayon, and existent inside a story book respectively, but this isn't meant to be much more than a stylistic choice. Yoshi's Island gets across the very imaginative world in a time when Mario was young, and Paper Mario made it clear that it was a game with a concrete story, starring Mario. The style acted as a foundation to lift up their games, but these also remained very subtle. I dig that. The diorama look in our game is borrowed from Paper Mario keep the game scope small, but the hexagon level design serves the same purpose while also evoking an atmosphere of strategy. Games like Thea the Awakening and Civ 5 share the hexagons, while games like Legend of Grimrock share the free grid-movement, and games like Final Fantasy Tactics share the elevation and battle 3rd-person view. Each "diorama" will be a fairly small size. From the perspective of the player, they will be shallow in spatial depth yet wide. This has some very clear drawbacks: the world won't feel big, no matter how much content is actually in the game because it is viewed in tiny chunks; there will be a lot of moving between "dioramas" by walking off screen; and there are heavy restrictions from the size limit of each little area. As you expect, it also comes with benefits. Each "diorama" you enter feels like a distinct place with clear boundaries in your mind. You will be able to mentally identify a place like "this is the place with the bridge over the lazy river" as opposed to "I think there is a bridge and a river somewhere near here." A person's yard and home exterior could evoke a unique sensation, like "this is a place that feels distinct; friendly; and soft," yet your feelings for the house would be lost in a sea of feelings for surrounded things in a connected world. If you don't believe me, experience sequential art (like comics, graphic novels, or manga) for a while and pay attention to how each panel's shown location feels distinct and evocative; better yet, stare at a photograph. Maybe most of all, severely-chopped-up areas are easy to design and complete. The combat arenas are also constructed by hexagonal prisms, but remain in a straight line, with a few rare exceptions. The main reason for this is so that background tiles can be used to represent the status of the tiles you can stand on which happen to be next to those tiles. The quasi-random nature of these tile set-ups are only possible through this method and will lead to many interesting twists and additions to TTYD's stage arenas, such as the height factor, locational influence, and the distance factor. These are all things that a direct sequel to TTYD might have had, with a continuation of general themes and ideas that TTYD constructed. Somehow, this also keeps the game separated too; hexagonal tiles in a Paper Mario game is not-at-all something anyone would remotely expect, and I find that exhilarating. There isn't going to be a picture this time around because I want to make this quick.
2016 was the year Paper Soul Theater became more than an idea, the year that I created Phantomatics (voted first place in a competition of 60 games by one of the voters), and the year I began making SnakePit. It was the year that Otyugra Games grew from two people to ten then back down to eight. 2016 was when I got my NES to finally work for the first time, and when I had to replace my Xbox 360 with a new one. It was the year I started a club for reviewers to share their thoughts on the indie games that appear on the main GameMaker forum. It was the year I turned 20-years-old. A lot happened for gaming this year. Probably more games were released this year than the last two years combined due to consoles and Steam continuing to make it easy for indie developers. Game creations tools advanced. GameMaker, after two years of waiting, leaped from Studio 1.4 to Studio 2.0 and gained export support for the new console generation and more smart phones. Other software, such as Unity continued to advance, though I don't keep up with them. Indie games, through the intense competition, have really made a name for themself this year; if you compare the indie games that came out on Xbox One with the indie games for the Xbox 360 in past years, the difference is astounding! This was the year that many Kickstarters failed and succeeded, as well as many developers gained Patreon and IndieGoGo as a life line. Mighty No. 9 casted a somber cloud over the future of Kickstarter projects, but then slowly many indie game creators won back the trust of backers everywhere. An acquantance of mine made a Kickstarter for a game that wouldn't have been made if the funding didn't reach its goal, and to my surprised, his game was funded! Hell, even some gaming magazines got their start in Kickstarter this year, like Mega Visions for example. Toejam and Earl (1991) made by a total of only four people, had a massive sequel funded with the help of Kickstarter this year through half a million dollars! Likewise, the sequel to Shantae, a game made by three people back in 2002, finally got released. I can't tell you how many great games were made by friends of mine in only 72 hours this year. Beyond that, many indie games inspired by Paper Mario got started in 2016 besides our own:
Meanwhile the Gargoyle's Quest series got put onto the 3DS eShop finally, and I'm hoping more spiritual successors for that series will give SnakePit company in 2017. For the AAA side, things continued to be bleak in some ways, but for the most part it seemed things went very well. EA got their act together and released some really great games, with few of them running on bad business practices. Speaking of which, Unravel redeemed E3 and reminded the world that platformers aren't just meant for Nintendo and indie games with a heartfelt presentation that actually felt real. The Assassin's Creed series was put on hold at long last, DOOM made a glorious comeback to redefine the shooter genre, and Overwatch brought the spirit of Team Fortress 2 back. Of course mobile games and horrible indie games continue to overflow markets, but at least we got Pokemon Go. Maybe No Man's Sky was a huge disappointment, but at least now the Playstation 4 has a significantly larger library than it did a year ago. A lot can happen in a year, just ask Donald Trump or the ghosts of all who died. Let's pray that 2017 is an interesting year, if it can't be a good one. |
Otyugra Talk
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