July 22th - 13 Days Remain
It begins.
I have decided to embrace my flash game-ness.
The music's edgy. The concept's edgy. The characters' edgy. My drawings are edgy (puns!). It's a perfect fit. I go over-the-top until it's laughable, lure the player into thinking "hey, this is a parody", then remind them that edgy band just raised a couple hundred for charity, while your not-edgy self hasn't.
I'd need to separate good edgy from bad edgy. In a post-GamerGate culture, edginess is associated with douchebaggery, and not without reason. Edgyness has this "screw you all, I'm doing what I want" aspect to it, which can be good, but it often devolves into "I'm not listening to your criticism because you're all haters". You see, at some point in my life, I realized "hater" actually means "people that disagree with me but whom I'm not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to because I'm an asshole". If anyone looks at my game and thinks it's celebrating that mindset, I have failed.
Hmm...I have an idea.
And there's my loading screen.
It's time for music.
Normally, I'd think it's best to leave music for last. There's always the risk a song will find itself without an appropriate scene, resulting in lost production time. But I'm in a unique position. 100% of the game's music will be metal, so cut songs can find somewhere else to go. And the music's part of the gameplay, so cutting anything would be more trouble than it's worth.
Today, I'm focusing on the intro song. This will play during the title cards and menu screen as a way of establishing tone. It doesn't need to be particularly long, as you'll probably leave the menu before it finishes. However, since you could stay on the menu for potentially forever, it will need to loop. Let's begin!
I start by selecting instruments. To streamline the process, I'm going to be using the same few instruments for all of the game's songs. After some experimentation, I decide upon a drum set, a guitar, and a bass guitar. Suit Jeff is on drums, Sketchy Jeff can be moved to bass, and the player can take the most visible role as guitarist. The small selection also speeds up the composition process.
After an hour of tinkering, I'm not happy with the result. I try adjusting tempo, rewriting the riffs, changing out the bass guitar to a slappy-ier sound; nothing works. Then I realized my mistake.
Four measures, four beats per measure? That isn't metal enough.
I rewrite the entire composition into a 4/7 time signature. And sure enough, I have a working product in 15 minutes. I uploaded it to Bandcamp here, if you wanna listen. Also: Soundcloud sux, Bandcamp also sux but it sux less.
July 23rd - 12 Days Remain
Here's a sprite sheet.
I think it speaks for itself.
The main menu's my first major challenge. And it's quite the challenge.
Here's what I got so far:
The peep, title bar, and button prompt are all separate images, and the windows are a partially transparent foreground object. I'm hoping to give the screen some more energy in the game itself; peeps bouncing up and down, button prompt flashing, etc. It would match the high-tempo music that's playing over it.
Unfortunately, that all involves programming. So far, I've gotten the title cards before the menu programmed with a fade effect, but I'm still working on the menu itself. Since the text is white, I'm using a screen flash effect to "reveal" the text to give some liveliness to the scene. Menu loads in, screen flashes, text appears. I still have to work on animating peeps walking about. At least it's progress.
In the next update: Sexual harassment! And that's terrible.