Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of February 23, 2015

This week I can mostly let the artwork speak for itself… but only mostly!

Portrait Collection 4

Shown here are Ardis, Astrid, Besarre, and Leaf and there’s all sorts of stuff to mention related to this collage:

* These lovely face portraits were drawn by Flora at 512×512 as I asked, but I’m showing them as 256×256 here so that big enough monitors can see an entire row on screen at once. =) 256×256 is what I’m most likely to use in the actual game as well. (I haven’t had menu skins drawn yet, but since I’m not going above a 1920×1080 resolution, full 512x512s would be huge relative to the screen no matter how the menu borders turn out.)

* As seen in games like Fire Emblem 9 and 10, Bravely Default, and Tales of Graces, having the faces at an angle means that I can flip them horizontally to have characters talking back and forth on different sides of the screen. Of course, doing that would result in some clothes being on the wrong sides and such, but those games didn’t worry about it and they’re made by companies with much bigger budgets than me, so I’m cool with it. =P

* Starting tomorrow, I’ll tweet at least one face each week plus a line of dialogue that goes with it. And I’ll call it Talky Time Tuesday! :D Since this site is a more comprehensive collection of Dreamblazers-related material than Twitter, I’ll also add a new Dialogue page here that will embed all those tweets.

* A small Easter egg here is Leaf’s nail polish. Leaf’s a pretty mysterious girl; her magical-musical skirt plays tunes according to her will, but her nail polish made from a liquid rainbow changed colors randomly until she experimented with chemical catalysts to control it. Blue and green are her usual colors!

* While this is the full collection of expressions made so far, the number of expressions per character is subject to go up; for example, I might see a face for a later character and then realize that Leaf should have the same kind of face and doesn’t. Right now Besarre is the most likely to get one or two extra expressions.

* Random trivia time about Ardis! When I was my younger 2000-2001 self who first dreamed of creating my own game, Ardis was a name that I picked out and thought I was making up—just like I’d made up Celty as my even younger 1997 self who was toying around with Blades of Exile. As it turns out, Ardis is an Irish name for girls, which completely changed her character. Her description from my early files says that she was a half-elf with tanned skin who wore a halter, miniskirt, and sandals, so I’m guessing that I conceived her as more of a harem dancer type of character. Although it is just a guess, I did love Dragon Quest IV (localized back then as Dragon Warrior IV), so maybe I thought of Ardis as a girl more clothed than fellow dancer Mara but less clothed than her sister Nara:

Dragon Quest IV - Mara and Nara

Possibly my inspiration for the original Ardis?

We did try darker skin for her during the design process, but my knowing that her name was Irish led me to stick with lighter skin. And while Ardis is technically still a half-elf, she’s now also a half-sylph, fitting in with Irish lore. She was one of my least developed characters back then, basically a glorified set of stats who filled a party slot and faded out of existence at the end of the game (because for some reason all the great RPGs on the SNES had people fading out of existence at the end of the game), but the modern personality I’ve come up with for her has made her one of my top five favorites to write for now.

* Random trivia time about Besarre! Like Ardis, I thought I was making up a name in 2000-2001, but it wasn’t Besarre at the time; he was named Bestiary and wouldn’t you know that’s a real word. He was also underdeveloped just like Ardis and even more than her, but his importance jumped massively in 2012 when I was penciling out the rough progression of the plot and figuring out how to tie different story elements together.

* Random trivia time about Leaf! Yet another tale of 2000-2001: Leaf was the name of a talking orange cat who was one of the 17 main characters instead of a girl who happens to carry a kittyara with her. But fear not! The talking cat is still in the story with a different name, color, and gender—and she’s coming soon!

More faces will be posted here as progress continues. =) And the trivia will roll in with them!

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of February 16, 2015

Sometimes things come full circle. Sometimes they even do it three times in one week!

The gameplay front:

ORK 2.3.0 released with a boatload of new things. For my purposes, the most important two are:

Status effect types – This finally brings organization to the chaotic mess of 400+ effects that I created for my fashion system and lets me do things like “Neutralize” magic that removes all “Stat Boost” type effects. That second part was an important component that I had wanted from the beginning, but I’ve been living without it for so long that I actually forgot it wasn’t possible yet. It’s a key part of Celty’s abilities and her character: because she reads people well and sees the truth about them, so to speak, she can easily undo any enchantments.

Shortcut slot menus – This will take much more effort on my part, but basically players will be able to create a selection of 8-12 moves per battle per character. This was another thing that I wanted from the beginning as yet another Pokémon inspiration: rather than having to search through every move every time, they’ll decide outside of battle which moves they care about and which they don’t. (And unlike Pokémon, characters don’t forget the moves just by taking them out of the menu, so they can be reassigned at any time.) Reducing the number of button presses this way should help out the flow of battles, which has still felt a little bit off to me until now. It also fits perfectly with my “Adventure your way!” slogan, where everything from exploration to outfits (equipment) to battle is customized by the player; you make your own dream because you’re a dreamblazer too. =)

The art front:

Another thing I’ve wanted to do since last June is have characters’ faces drawn for use in dialogue. That got put on the shelf in favor of finishing a big flurry of character designs since Flora was leaving freelance art behind, but it came back up since dialogue is right in the middle of what I’m doing now. And you know what else came back up? Flora herself. :D

So faces are soon to get underway as I’ve been gathering references, thinking out which characters will react in which ways, and so on. Since I have so many characters I’m trying to be careful about not going for 23935 faces to cover every possible scenario, but only the ones that I truly need: some characters never get Angry faces, others never get Scared faces, and so on. It’s trickier than it might sound; having over 30 characters and about 30 expressions that I can think of is a lot of combinations to sift through and this also needs to be balanced against the two main currencies of life: money and time.

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of February 9, 2015

True story: when I took the SAT—the big important high school test here in the US that determines one’s college-worthiness—I didn’t read the instructions, so I didn’t know that answering wrongly deducted points while leaving a question blank didn’t. I still scored 760/800 on the writing section, but I took what I’m assuming was a substantial hit in the math section, where I distinctly remember filling in random numbers to a few questions that were beyond my level. I got 620/800, so according to the scoring system used in my time my overall score still landed upwards of the 93 percentile.

Here in the indie game development world, however, reading the instructions is apparently compulsory! Now that I’ve finally listened to what some might consider common sense and looked more deeply into ORK tutorials, I’ve gotten my scene transitions going (i.e. stepping onto an overworld cave to leave the overworld and appear in the cave) and I’m decently underway with dialogue. The ORK directions are aimed at 3D games, so I do have to adjust as I go, but the sense of progress is palpable. =) After these things comes the undertaking of translating the battle system into 2D—much more interesting to me than dialogue and slightly more interesting to me than exploration, to be sure, but everything has a proper order to it.

Equally as good (or maybe even better yet), pixel artistry is moving along and I just received some wonderfully exciting early stuff this morning! :D The fundamentals like floors and walls are now in play for two of the earliest areas (they share most of the same tile set) and the fine details are up next, like stuff that breaks up the repeatable tiles and gives visual variety to the ground. I do love seeing other people’s pretty pixel art during #screenshotsaturday on Twitter, but I’m looking really forward to being able to participate myself. =)

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of February 2, 2015 (Existential Crisis Edition)

I could talk about many different things this week, but one stands above the rest. During the pixel art reference gathering process, I was comparing Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and a bit of Lufia II and somehow reached an existential crisis.

I had always envisioned that Dreamblazers would resemble FFVI but with a Pokémon-esque color palette to kick up the appeal. For me there’s always been a certain charm to obviously grid-based pixel art like in FFVI and Lufia II. I also believe that it serves the gameplay; I remember when Pokémon Black and White finally created the illusion of a “broken” grid and I suddenly had occasional trouble judging whether a strip of water-to-ground edge tiles could be walked across or were merely there for visual credibility.

Grid-based pixel art, though arguably worse in terms of visual appeal (but only arguably), does come with precision for an intuitive feel.

Up until now, every decision I’ve made has been firmly in the interest of gameplay with no regard to anything else. That would make it obvious that I should stick with the grid.

Only one problem: one thing is even more crucial than gameplay and that’s financial viability. With all my tax stuff coming in week by week recently, I took stock of my spending and found that I’d put nearly $5,000 into Dreamblazers in 2014. And this isn’t even counting the hidden opportunity costs of having no part-time job, no contract work, and absolutely nothing else except a tenant in a rental house.

This isn’t worrying in and of itself—and by that I mean I freaked out for a couple of days and wondered if I was the craziest idiot on the planet. How could a game that I intend to sell for $15 or less (probably less) recoup all the money I’ve sunk in, never mind the pixel art costs that I’m about to run into?

…but then I consulted my spreadsheets. Years ago I crunched the numbers of Kickstarter projects that I’ve backed and I’m still crunching them today. After taking away outliers that skewed the numbers upward like insane media hype, known franchises, famous developers, re-releases, and multiple games in one project, taking away outliers that skewed the numbers downward like very small-scale projects that raised $2000 or less, and taking away successful things that were game-related but weren’t games, the average Kickstarter project I back raises $64,317.78. That might seem a bit high, so if I factor out all six-figure success stories and all four-figure success stories, that still yields an average of $32,985.99—more than enough to justify everything I’m doing.

Ah. Relief!

That figure is only the average, though. In my ideal world I’m better than average, but the worst-case scenario is missing even the average mark. So what would make me more likely to be considered above average? What make me less likely to be considered below average? These were the questions that faced me while I had a picture of the FFVI overworld and the CT overworld open next to each other.

Philosophically speaking, it’s not true that perception is reality. In fact, one way of defining reality is that which is true regardless of whether anyone perceives it—but that’s philosophy. In the world of economics, perception is consumer behavior and consumer behavior is reality.

I’ve watched more than enough indie RPG projects to know that obvious-grid pixel art tends to draw criticism about an RPG Maker look—and that’s the “reality” even if the game is made with Unity, Cocos2D, Moai, anything else out there, or just created from scratch in C++. There’s also a pretty big glut of C-level 16-bit-style RPGs flooding mobile devices, which is another type of “guilt by association” that I don’t want to deal with.

So there I sat, pondering whether I should trust my gameplay preference as I always have or whether this was the one situation where I had to draw a line and make a call about what tiles should and shouldn’t look like for financial reasons.

And you know what the answer is?

I’m now leaning toward the Chrono Trigger style, but ultimately I’ll wait for one tile set (or at least some sample tiles) and go from there. I need to judge as I go—because the target audience is me. The target audience is people with tastes similar to mine, AKA the people who back the same Kickstarter projects that I back and provide all the numbers that I’ve been using for my assumptions in the first place.

Shockingly enough, I might just for this once be a great judge of how to progress with my own life.

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of January 26, 2015

Dreamblazers Title Image

We have ourselves a title screen! Finished mid-week, this was Flora’s final image for me and is about the grandest sendoff I could ask for. =) It’s even thematically appropriate! …but this artwork was always destined to use this concept. Besides the obvious adventure theme, Leaf, Celty, Cotelle, and Minori are who I call the “Big Four” of Dreamblazers, the mainest of main characters—I wanted to emphasize from the very title screen that there’s no “Goku” who dominates the spotlight.

There’s another subtle bit here with the character groupings. In a game about people’s hopes and dreams for the future (and I’m not talking about the story only or even the story primarily; the most important thing to me is that the gameplay is about the player‘s style), characters are bound to have different dreams. Leaf and Celty are united here, as are Cotelle and Minori, but the two pairs don’t share the same vision for what they want to bring to their world, so there’s a slight physical gap between them.

The completion of this picture also means that I’m getting my stuff together and ready for posting in the ORK Showcase section like I mentioned last month, including more fleshed-out character profiles than the previous time, so I’ll finally be fielding a little bit of feedback. =) Flora gave me a positive reception for the colorful and eccentric characters when we first started together and the same is true for Becca, but I did after all hand-pick people whose artwork I liked, so we’ll see if the next rounds of unfiltered feedback are any different. =P

Speaking of Becca, let’s get to the other big front! Here’s a quotation from Flannery O’Connor:

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

I actually do know what a story is—but I found that I knew what pixel art was until I sat down to explain in detail what I wanted. It ate a good lot of time to hunt down references and think through how much is too much or how little is too little. Do I want three frames of animation for water or do I want five? How many types of edges do I need for sand? What small details would give the ground visual variety? Should I go for complete-looking tile sets now so that I can make a more earnest attempt at raising money from other people? On the flip side, given that I don’t know if I’ll be able to raise money or how much, should I do more minimal tile sets now?

In the end, the answer is often “I don’t know, so I’ll just play it by ear.” I refuse to say “this is more art than science,” partially because I don’t care whether video games are art and mostly because I don’t believe there’s any legitimate divide between art and science in the first place, but the idea does stand that there might be no right answer in terms of how to handle pixel art.

Either way, the point is that pixel art is just about underway and I couldn’t be happier with that. ♥ The long run of character design art has concluded, but we’re making like Pokémon: hitting Baton Pass and pursuing another horizon.