Soundtrack is up at Death Whisper Diaries in Death Whisper Diaries (soundcloud.com)
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Hey all, We're at the end of the jam, or at least the submission period.
It's been an intense month for us, the project took a few pivots during development but I am happy to say that we managed to get it out the door with a couple of days to spare.
The final game is mostly a narrative game with a few puzzles and some areas to explore, playtime should fall somewhere between 15 to 20 min which is well under the 30 min limit, overall we wanted to have a bit more gameplay but we kinda struggled with getting our gameplay systems set up in the first half and therefor we didn't have enough time in the second half to make all the levels we originally intended.
We still have the entire story we set out to make but the later half of the game is mostly cutscenes instead of levels to explore.
Ultimately I am very happy with the end result and feel like we managed to put together a very solid and complete feeling game from a visual and narrative point of view.
The original idea we had for gameplay was similar to the one we ended up using but focused more on having objects attract to each other with magnetism instead of just lifting them up and manipulating them like it is in the final game, We had some prototypes set up early but it wasn't until around the end of week 2 that we started to think about when kind of gameplay scenarios we could build around that mechanic, which is where we started to run into issues, eventually we settled on making it work like it does today but it left us little time to wrap up puzzle and level design.
The mechanics we ended up using are good though and in a more fleshed out game they would have a lot of gameplay potential.
Visually I wanted to iterate on the lowpoly retro mixed with modern rendering techniques we had last year, We added extra shader features such as vertex wobble and improved the texture style a lot with dithering and other filtering and made them feel more like they came from a game from the PSX era.
The last week was a mix of setting up the cutscenes and replacing all placeholder assets and level blockout with custom geometry along with some polish in areas we finished earlier, we wrapped up work during the weekend and spent a couple of days dealing with any issues that popped up.
I hope you enjoy the game and good luck to all the other submissions, I've played through a few so far and the level of quality across the board is just insane, every year the bar is raised and it continues to inspire me to improve our games.
Until next time,
- Leo (Leotime0)
Hey all, It's been a while since the last devlog, plan was every Thursday/Friday but the last few days were just a little too busy for us, I just wanted to give a little update on our progress.
The project is going well overall, We have most assets ready and are working on putting together the last few areas and cinematics.
all dialogue has been implemented and Esskaden's 2D art assigned to each corresponding line.
We still have the later half of cutscenes left to make but as all assets are ready we'll hopefully get them up in the next couple of days.
The game is set in a small rural town and the surrounding areas:
We are still missing the last area and a detail pass on all the entire game but overall most level work has been finished.
Gameplay wise all the mechanics are in but we still need to do some testing, the gameplay is mostly exploration plus some light physics puzzles.
Aside from that there are things like UIs, Menus, Options and progression triggers that need to be implemented.
This year it's been a bit harder to keep up on the devlogs because the project required way more planning and iteration on the gameplay mechanics, it took us a while to settle on the final story and our original plans for the gameplay ended up being not as fun as we expected, in the end we managed to figure things out but it has meant that the workload has been a bit heavier in the later half.
That being said, I feel pretty good about our progress and am expecting everything to be finished before the deadline.
Hey all! We're wrapping up week 2 of the jam now and ready to show off a bit more content.
The first week was mostly figuring stuff out, writing a story summary, deciding on artstyle and general vibes, figuring some gameplay elements out etc.
The story summary went through about 3 revisions, we started with an idea that ended up being a little too ambitious so the later revisions took that core idea and scoped it into something more realistic while keeping the same themes and general ideas.
It didn't take us long to decide on the artstyle with Esskaden at the helm, he gave us a couple of potential directions and we all agreed that the more stylized cartoony look in the left was the right one.
I took some time to figure out how to best translate that look into a lowpoly retro 3D look and did some art tests:
There are a few other characters we are using for the jam and have concepts of but I'll show more of that later.
We also started to create some env. assets in that style, most of these are still blockouts but this is the general idea:
We have a bunch of extra assets ready but they're all super spoilery so we're gonna hold off on showing them for now.
We're also gonna have a CRT filter similar to last year so these images are not completely representative of the final look.
Music is also going well, Shabello is working hard on getting a couple of core themes ready this week before tackling level specific ones.
We're not quite ready to show off gameplay systems, we had to rework a few things as our original idea ended up being a little too hard to implement properly in the game jam timeframe while leaving time to iterate and design puzzles so we went with something a little simpler that is getting finished up this weekend hopefully, after that Alli will be focusing on blocking out the levels and puzzles.
The plan is to finish up character assets this weekend and start dialogue and cutscene implementation next week while getting some extra env. asset work done in between.
Overall I'm very happy with the progress so far, we have a lot of assets but are a little behind on content, hopefully we'll have some of the cutscenes in a first iteration by next devlog.
Until next time...
Hey all, this year me and the team behind World in Ruin teamed up again to make a game about Mary Margaret.
The game is Death Whisper Diaries and it's an adventure/puzzle game where Margaret explores a little town solving a mystery.
We've also decided to go by Team Hi-lite this year, as these games have become more than just something that I made with help from others.
Shabello is taking care of music and some additional sfx work, Index is back as programmer and I am writing the story, some game design and 3D assets.
We've also added a few extra team members, Esskaden is working on some concepts for the characters and general artstyle, Alli is helping out with programming and game design and Marinofannar is working on 3D assets.
This means we've doubled the team size but it doesn't mean we're gonna make something 2x bigger, our plan is to have a more visually refined game that is more compact and focused than last year.
We're off to a good start with a lot of great ideas for the story, gameplay and art, things are moving a little slower than last year as a larger team means more planning and coordination is involved.
There's some great concepts, music and 3D assets already made but I'll save it for next time where I hope we can give everyone a better idea how the game plays and how it will look overall.
Hey, not sure if a lot of ppl are still checking out the community pages but I said I'd do some sort of post mortem after submitting so here I go.
First of all, the positive reception both on the stream and from everyone leaving comments has been incredibly heartwarming to see, there's always some part of you that is afraid whatever you're making isn't going to "click" with ppl or you overlook some major issue that renders the game unplayable.
Also big thanks to Shabello for all her hard work on the soundtrack, it really is the heart and soul of the game.
When the jam officially started I set out to make a simple kart racer where you could play as a few different characters and go though a grand prix type competition with very little story, after a couple of days of tinkering I had a vehicle prototype and was ready to start properly plan it out.
Later I was playing Genshin Impact, just wandering around doing some side content when I thought, "man I wish I was making an open world game like this"
So that's when I started wondering if I could maybe do something a little more ambitious than the kart racer, and a flood of ideas starting coming to me, I actually stopped playing and just started writing down what I thought of.
The original idea for the game
As I started working on the project I started to pull influence from games like Arceus, BotW, Nier and Xenoblade more.
In general, I wanted a game with a sense of scale.
I saw some in the stream chat wondering how we managed to deliver the amount of content we had and it mostly came down to a few different aspects:
- Good planning and willingness to adjust scope based on progress, don't be afraid to scale back and cut stuff early, cutting a troublesome aspect gives you time to make everything else better and/or expand the scope on other tasks.
- Modular assets and good asset pipeline
I generally make most of my environmental assets modular, then once I have a good library of generic assets I start thinking about more unique stuff, this means if I end up not being able to make the more unique assets in time I have something to fall back on instead.
- Experience, I've been working with Unreal for about 4 years now so there's a lot of stuff I've figured out how to handle before.
Focusing on story and visuals does mean that the game is generally not that interesting gameplay wise, it's serviceable and works for what we wanted to do but some of the jam games had some really creative and fun mechanics, which is what I feel like our game might be missing a bit.
I also probably shouldn't have had the game be a big open world, I could have achieved a lot of the same wow factor with a more Zelda OOT style map layout instead while making the side content feel less out of the way.
When I started the jam I specifically had 2 goals in mind:
- Deliver on a complete narrative
- Not to crunch and get burned out after the jam
-Story-
I was really committed to not just having my game be some "first chapter" like I did last year, I wanted to tell a story and have a satisfying ending.
Sure, I did end on a cliffhanger but this time it was on purpose, not just a cover up for not having been able to end the story properly, I had a few different ideas on how and where to cut to credits and the whole Dark Schippie Damian thing came pretty late into development.
Originally the game was supposed to end after defeating Gigantimus, with Dark Schippie being an optional fight that you would unlock by finding a few different Sumiv Warring Logs scattered around the map.
I generally shared a lot of stuff on the discord but kept the Gigantimus model a secret.
Sumiv's Logs would have been about them searching for giant robots but instead uncovering DSD and his plot, ultimately leading Charlene to the location of DSDs lair.
when I actually started writing the first pass of all the dialogue I shifted away from that idea and decided to have more information inside DSDs lair instead in order to give players some additional backstory that would explain a lot of the missing pieces of the story, such as why Gigantimus is evil and how everyone came back.
It also worked out well for the general flow of the game because finding all the logs would have taken a lot more time than Kyle could have streamed, and DSD wouldn't have been included on stream.
Damian was not part of the plan originally, after you defeated DSD he would have just dumped all the info I put in his logs and then flown away, as I started to actually write it all down I came up with the idea of DSD never talking to Charlene and instead having a conversation with a mysterious group of villains after escaping the battle.
The silhouette of the villains would then resemble a few different characters I didn't already include like Frieda, Jebb and Damian, this was then condensed into just being Damian and I changed the logs a bit to have him be the only apprentice.
This worked out pretty well because I already included BT (his robot buddy) early on so this felt really natural to the existing story.
Damian's mesh is actually a modified DSD model, you can kinda tell by the lower half.
I was constantly rewriting the script as I started implementing it into cutscenes, sometimes I found a better flow for the dialogue or added/removed context or details to set up stuff later in the game, writing isn't really my strongest skill but I think the end result worked well enough and ppl seemed to enjoy it.
Also a fun fact about the music in the DSD dungeon, when brainstorming for ideas I sent Shabello "Hatari" as a reference, I think she did a pretty good job capturing that vibe!
-Crunch and planning-
Last jam I really burned out afterwards and didn't really want to work on games for a while, in order to avoid that I put some ground rules for myself when I started:
First was not starting work on the jam game the second I get home, instead I would just go play some games or watch a show, cook and then once I had destressed a bit from my dayjob I would go work on the jam game, I also stopped working at a reasonable time instead of staying up and depriving myself of sleep.
Second was to lean on my own strengths as a dev more and not try to do something I probably won't be able to deliver on, I make environments for a living, So that's what I focused on for the jam, instead of trying to create advanced combat systems like last time I'd keep the game mechanically simple and create more assets instead.
In general this was probably the saving grace of the game, I was able to convince a friend of mine (Index) to help me out with some of the heavier programming stuff so I could focus on assets and content.
Third was just constant planning and scoping, we kept a Trello board and put everything we had to to there, it really helped us gain perspective on how far we had come at any specific point and how much was left.
There's a lot of stuff I would have like to do differently in hindsight but overall I'm really happy with the final result, and I've learned a lot valuable lessons for future projects.
If you read through all that then thank you for taking the time, this project means a lot to me as I finally created something I feel really proud of without compromise.
This is it, the final week is here and so is the final in-dev devlog.
The last few days have been going pretty well and the project is finally turning into a proper game, with a story and gameplay progression. Most UI aspects are ingame and getting worked on, most of the levels are ready, all of them are at least playable, all the dialogue has been written and most of it implemented into cutscenes, although the cutscenes themselves still need a lot of work.
At this point I think I have a pretty safe estimate on what will and wont be included in the final release, and thankfully I haven't had to make any major cuts to my overall plan. one thing I decided to cut was idea to have the player find a bunch of collectibles in order to face DSD, now you are just told where to go after the main story is complete.
The last major thing left are the bossfights, most assets such as models and animations for the fights are ready but the logic hasn't been implemented. Aside from that I also need to implement the last few cutscenes and then refine them and make them pretty, with character animations and camera cuts. Most of the music is in progress and a few tracks are done, but all of it needs in game implementation, alongside other audio. If everything goes according to plan then I'll also have a couple of days left to add some fancy new FX and overhaul the lighting in the dungeons.
I'll also post a post mortem after uploading the game to itch.
Time for anther Update:
This week I wanted to focus on combat mechanics, finishing some environmental art and in general I've managed to get some good progress on both of those tasks.
I finally started laying out the ingame map instead of just working within a test level, The map is quite big with 3 visually distinct regions, the first one is the forest and is where you start the game.
The second area is the city ruins, a bit more WIP as I still have some asset work left.
The Archives is the 2nd dungeon and is found inside the city ruins.
The last area isn't quite ready yet but will be where the player goes at the end of the game.
The game is split up into a large open map and smaller dungeons found in the open world, the open world map is pretty big right now and I'll need to flesh out and add a few side activities and collectibles to make it feel less barren later on, I also haven't quite decided on how I want to handle guiding the players around the map just yet, I have a few ideas and generally want to avoid having a minimap and objective markers like in typical open worlds.
I mostly wanted to give the game a sense of scale and it's a little fitting for the game to feel little barren given the story but it's gonna have to strike a balance between the mood and what's fun gameplay wise.
I also have to consider the gameplay length limitation, the game has to be playable within 40 minutes, So right now my idea is to have the main story fit within that frame but also have a few side areas that all give you some sort of upgrades along the way, so if players want to explore a bit they get more powerful.
The Dark Schippie fight also doesn't really have to fit within that time limitation because he's optional right? my current plan is to have the players find secret collectibles scattered around the open world map in order to unlock the fight, and that might take a bit longer than just 40 min to complete, I am also considering then just having a cheatcode that unlocks it instantly if Kyle wants to play it on stream as well.
Regarding combat, The general combat mechanics are playable and have received a lot of the visual assets as well, I originally intended the game to have a mix of melee and ranged attacks but decided to streamline things a bit and am just focusing on ranged combat for now, making a good melee system is a lot harder because there are so many more complex factors to consider and given the scope I felt it would be best to rather focus on making the shooting feel good than to divide my attention even more.
Next up is finally doing some sequence scripting and cutscene work done, I still need to finish up some of the dialogue and cutscene systems and thought it would be a good idea to just get started on them instead of saving them for last and having to rush it, I still don't have all the assets needed to script the entire story but I should be able to get started on the first half of the game.
Another week, another devlog:
I feel like in general I didn't quite put in the amount of hours I wanted to, life got a bit in the way but despite that I still managed to get some stuff done.
Last week I set out to have some combat mechanics and get started on environmental assets.
on the exterior side, thigs are shaping up decently and most of the fundamental exterior assets are complete and in-game, this includes landscape materials, nature assets like trees and grass and then buildings and ruins.
I still need to add a variety of props to the exterior areas, but I'll save that for when I actually have a map layout and a more concrete idea of how everything is laid out.
As for Combat, things didn't quite stay on schedule as much, combat has a few different aspects to it and context switching from modeling, texturing to making enemies, animating them and working on their AI went a bit slower that I had hoped, thankfully I have been getting some help on the enemy behavior and gameplay mechanics from a friend, there's a lot of stuff missing or just very WIP right now.
Currently we have a couple of enemy types with simple behaviors and the ability to attack them with ranged attacks.
Robot animations
Hovering Drone
Aside from that I also started work on one of the more complex characters I'll have to work on...
Shabello has been doing a great job creating the soundtrack and made some super fitting music for the outdoor areas.
Next week is going to be more combat stuff, I want to have all the aspects of the general game loop ready because it's about time I actually lay out all the levels in the game, there's a few dungeons and a large open area, it's just gonna be blocked out with boxes at first as most of the assets for the dungeons haven't been made yet but doing the blockouts is probably gonna help me fill in the gaps on what I need to create for them, I'll also probably get started on the missing characters as well.
Hey, I'm the guy that made Final Blade last year and this time, I'll be working on an action adventure game where you play as Charlene in a world set several hundred years after the book series, where some sort of calamity has completely destroyed the high tech cities, Charlene is a few years older, mysteriously appearing a few years ago with no memory of her past.
Last year I was very focused on mechanics and gameplay systems and ultimately I didn't have enough time to fill out the world with content, I relied on asset packs for all the environmental assets, kept my story super short and that aspect ended up being a little underwhelming. this time I wanted to keep the game mechanically simple, try to create all my assets myself instead and deliver on a complete narrative.
My game idea didn't quite come together as fast as last time, Originally I was going to make a kart game where you just played a few races with all the characters but I eventually started to formulate a fun story idea that felt a lot more interesting and ambitious.
I've also been talking to Shabello about making some music for the game, We still haven't quite found the right sound but things are progressing smoothly, once we also have some environments we should get a better idea with what works.
For the first week I've mostly been focusing on some basic systems such as movement and fleshing out the story idea a bit better, I feel a little scatterbrained and pulled in every direction because there's just so much work to do at this point, and I've had to go back to some gamedev stuff I haven't touched in a long time, such as character rigging and animations.
KartProject Unreal Editor 2022 05 06 21 12 23 - YouTube Everything is very WIP at this point but a lot of basic systems are getting implemented.
Next week will be focused on implementing combat mechanics and starting on some environments.