really good atmosphere, love the fog rolling in the distance at the start.
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Just over a week left and I am feeling pretty good about my progress.
The game is playable from start to finish, I still have a handful of high priority assets to make, set up and create the ending cutscene and just an overall polish pass across the board.
All the music and audio effects have been set up, Chibenobi was able to deliver all the tracks very quickly and I used chiptone.io to create most of the audio effects I needed with a bit of tinkering in audacity as well, given the sci-fi nature of the game, more synthetic sounds worked out well.
I also have all the dialogue set up, though I think I'll probably refine the script a bit as I play through the game over and over during testing, I usually handle my scripts this way, with the first draft being a very rough take and then I get a feel for whether it feels good in game.
Originally I had dialogue triggers all over the map that opened up the dialogues as you explored but it felt a bit disruptive and annoying to not really have an indicator that dialogue was going to play, there were also too many dialogue triggers, so sometimes you would fly for a few seconds before a new scene started.
to fix this I added comm beacons to the game, and you have to actually find them and get close to them to trigger dialogue instead.
This means that you can miss some scenes but it feels a lot better to interact with something in the world.
there are still some invisible triggers since it didn't make sense that those scenes played from these beacons but now it feels more balanced between the two.
I also added an on screen UI element to help spot them form a distance.
I also decided to add a bit of texture to the world, I originally wanted to keep everything flat shaded to save time on texturing but I felt like the sense of scale I was going for wasn't coming across well enough, I ended up finding a good compromise with a detail texture that tiles across all the assets.
Overall I am pretty happy with the state of the project, I went into the jam not sure I'd even have something to submit, given how far along I am I'll have almost a whole week to just polish and bugtest.
Gameplay wise the game is fairly simple, you mostly just have to explore and figure out where to go next, I think in hindsight I'd have liked to have a more interesting core mechanic to engage with through the game but I hope people enjoy it for the ambience and vibe I've been building instead.
The last week has been pretty productive, I finished blocking out the level design and plotted out how everything plays out in the story, started to work on assets and found someone to help out with music.
I started working on assets and have been trying to find a balance between asset detail and the feeling of scale needed with this type of environment.
- Intro area, later parts will have a bit more color to them.
Feel like I am getting there, I wanted to try going for something a bit cleaner than my usual jam games and instead of using pixelated textures and wobbly geometry I just stick with some color gradients, the film grain and other post process effects help give it a bit of texture.
The UI has also seen some polish, mostly just in terms of presentation, how it pops up and switches to different HUD elements.
Yazmody and Marygold are 2 of the characters you meet in the game, I've found a style I am happy with where I can get something serviceable out in a decent amount of time and have it somewhat resemble the style I am trying to go for.
I know they are both pretty far from the original art but don't worry, things will make sense by the end of the game.
I am also very Excited to say that Chibenobi offered to make some music for the game and we have a solid plan for how much music we need and the general vibe.
With about 2 weeks left my plan for the upcoming week will be to finish up the asset work required, that means the player model, more env assets for the later half of the game and finishing up the portraits.
aside from that I also need to set up audio in general, some VFX systems, script all the story event triggers...
I am at the point now where I'm sure I will have something playable from start to finish before the deadline, but there is still a lot of work left.
Hey all, Leo here.
in the last few jams I've been leading Team Hi-lite, usually a fairly large group of community members and some friends making pretty ambitious games that end up consuming all my free time during the jam month.
This year I knew I couldn't participate due to work getting pretty busy and had already decided to not make a game.
...however during the jam stream I got the itch again and started to think about other ways to join without leading a whole team this time around, I was open to helping out other teams that might need some unreal or asset help and started just playing around on a little project idea I had by myself.
I've decided to at least continue on that idea and instead see what I can put together solo with less time as well, I'm not sure I'll finish the game yet but I think I have something scoped out that I believe I can put together.
KÖNIGSHAUS is a kind of Descent and Everspace 2 inspired space sim exploration game.
My plan is to keep the mechanics simple and just focus on exploration and light puzzle solving, no combat either.
Space sim means I don't need any skeletal meshes as well, which are usually the most time consuming elements of asset creation, instead all dialogue will be delivered with 2D portraits.
I don't consider myself good at it but I love drawing and its something I haven't gotten to focus on in the last few years when we had incredible 2D artists on the team.
I've usually gone for very PSX inspired visuals but this time I'm trying something different, it will still be lowpoly and lowres but I have ideas that might save me a lot of time on texturing.
The only aspect I know I cant really handle on my own is music so I might see if someone can help me out there, it will mostly be some ambient creepy sci-fi stuff, while I wouldn't call it a horror game it will probably be the closest to horror I've done so far.
So far I have most of the required mechanics working in a rough version and a pretty good idea of what the story will be, my next task will be some level and puzzle design, hoping to have it all blocked out in the next week.
I might also share some story ideas next time, I haven't really figured out the specifics but that's also helping me not stress over the project too much, mostly working through vibes atm.
So its the last week of the jam, I always try to get everything done at least a few days before the deadline to give us some time to polish and test the game.
We managed to get the game feature complete in the last few days, the only thing left is a few assets need to be replaced and some audio is still missing.
There is also some polish and nice to have stuff we are still working on that we are hoping to get in but overall the game is "done"
It took me a bit of time to figure out what to do with the jam theme, I didn't have any specific idea that stuck out, I just knew I wanted to make something that focused on what I enjoy about making games, creating environments.
Nightmare Valley is the name we went with, its also something I struggled to decide on but ended up going for something simple.
The game starts with all the Skremplets seemingly frozen, Pastoriche is the only one to wake up and needs to help his friends and figure out what happened.
Overall I feel pretty good about the state of the game, we did cut out one of the bossfights we had planned but the game is already cutting it close on playtime, its a bit open ended so some people might take more time than others but overall during testing we have hit between 20 to 25 minutes.
I would have liked to go into more details on development in the devlog this year but generally I didn't feel like there was much to say, overall things went pretty smoothly and according to plan.
I hope people have fun with the game.
Until next time.
- Leo
The last week has been pretty productive, We've been able to set up most of the mechanics needed and a lot of the assets, the main thing missing at the moment are a few characters which generally take a bit more time as they need to go through rigging and animation after modeling and texturing.
Level work is pretty much done aside from a handful of placeholder assets still in there that need to be replaced, there are a few things left like setting up the secret area where you pick up the DSD sweater but overall the game is playable from start to end, aside from cutscenes and a final bossfight encounter.
Here's a small preview of the level, its a small open map split into a few different areas, players can tackle the areas in different order but will need to clear the 1st 2 before they can access the rest of the map and then need to clear all areas before finishing the game.
This year Vacation T. Hessler has been making the music for our game, he's done a great job so far and I'm excited for everyone to hear it in-game.
The plan is to finish the main loop with everything except the final boss playable in some state with placeholder cutscenes by the end of the weekend and then spend next week replacing placeholders and setting up the bossfight encounter.
Leo here from Team Hi-lite, its that time of the year and we're back with another entry.
I don't think I'll be as active making devlogs as the last few years, part of it down to not having as much free time and some of it not wanting to spoil too much.
that being said I wanted to show just a little bit of what we are working on and talk about what our plan is for the jam.
This year I wanted to make a game that had a strong exploration element, I was feeling a bit nostalgic about the Steel Love game we made a few years ago, it was an open world game which had its charm but it wasn't utilized very well.
This time we are making a platformer with a smaller more tight map but still have a bit of open ended design.
Pastoriche will be the main character and the idea is that you explore a shared dream between the Skremplets who have all been mysteriously frozen.
We are still blocking out the level with placeholder assets and a lot of art assets are still missing
We have about ~75% of the mechanics for the game ready as well, as you free Skremplets more mechanics unlock, making the world feel more alive as you progress.
So far we seem to be on track but there are a handful of things that I'm ready to drop if needed either for getting the game to the 25min time limit or if we run out of time.
I probably wont show off too much due as it would be too spoilery but I'll try to provide weekly updates.