<<<<< DAY 4 >>>>>

So what got done today?

• Got some of the story going.
• Made first concept drafts of possible maps.
• Tweaked base program.

Being a survival horror, the story calls for some kind of grotesque monster. Maybe something like this:

I want to have something really scary as maybe the boss monster of the game. Besides the run of the mill normal monsters that the hero should be able to handle, there should be some powerful monster that hunts the protagonist. This monster may even be invincible, and all you can do is run from it. It could be the beasty kind above, or it could be humanoid like a Jason Voorhees say. 

Know any monsters that you find really scary? Suggestions welcome.

I love seeing your process and survival horror games are my JAM! I'm really looking forward to your project and will be following this thread for sure :)

<<<<< DAY 5 >>>>>

Today was a real busy RL work day so didn't get that much done, but.......

LINHTENDO JOINED!!!!!

Woohoo!!! She made it!

Alright guys, our team is finally complete. Sorry we gotta lock it at 4 people (else the prize money will stretch too thin. Ha!) . No more new members. We got CuckooOrange on code, Miss Nile on maps, Linhtendo on graphics, Me on making unreasonable demands of everyone. So by our powers combined....

Ok, maybe not that. XD

But this team will rock!

Now, for those of you who don't know Linhtendo, she's a fantastic artist. A whiiiillllle back, like back in the stone age, for a game I planned, she drew the protagonist valkyrie Brynhild for me:

Isn't that beautiful? (This is for a valkyrie game, which incidentally hiddenone also drew a bunch of amazing sprites for but it never got made yet cause of various reasons such as me being lazy okay that game WILL get made at some point! Just not for this contest.)

GO TEAM!

If you have time check out Cardiophobia https://rpgmaker.net/games/6357/ or a lets play of it. Its a great horror puzzle game made in rpg maker some time ago and one of my favorites.

<<<<< DAY 8 >>>>>

Settled on our protagonist for this game, who we will call Gabriel:

Those of you familiar with the Pop set will know him as Male6. I picked him because he seems like the average office worker guy, not too athletic but not too weak either. As this game won't be a gun blazing power fantasy, our hero needs to be an average joe who's vulnerable. 

The question now is, whether we give him a strong back story so he's more interesting, or keep him blank on purpose so he serves better as the player's surrogate in the game. I think there's trade-offs both ways.

Due to RL work and traveling arrangements, I probably won't be updating in the next few days. But progress shall still be made!

Heyho, man! Love the progress you guys make, your game looks awesome! 
Keep up the great work and good luck for the contest! 

<<<<< DAY 12 >>>>>

Well, we finally settled on a title. The game will be called...drumroll please............

CHOSEN

Yup. It will be called Chosen. Now why this is so is because well I can't tell you because it will spoil the game for you. :p

Just know that it is definitely linked to the premise of the game.

On another note, we began work on the GUI for the game. CuckooOrange wanted me to draw it on a napkin, so napkin he will get:

As is evident from my fabulous art skills, that is why I am not handling the art. The final GUI might be different depending on coding difficulty and eventual practicality of the setup. We'll see.

<<<<< DAY 13 >>>>>

All advice says Sound will make or break a horror game. I guess it's time to go digging for some sound and music in my big dump of DLCs gotten during Steam sale binges. Well, here's something that is definitely going in:

And I think this might be fitting too:

Lastly, I think a sprinkle of this might be useful, even though it's not strictly horror:

I will put these on my phone and listen to them relatively frequently. It's been my experience that it takes a while to find the right music. Of course, the best way would be to hire someone to compose custom music, but the budget for this game is already reaching dangerous levels. We'll have to make do with public material.

<<<<< DAY 14 >>>>>

Today let's showcase some of Miss Nile's maps! Below is the first iteration of the Bloody Basement!

Miss Nile is doing a great job with the Pop horror set! The area will be even scarier once we turn off all the lights and force our hero to trudge through it in the darkness.

So recently I looked at some videos of the top down horror game Darkwood.

I really like how you can swivel your light around in this game and only see what your "line of sight" can see. This way enemies can sneak up behind you. Probably too difficult to implement this in MV though. >_< Oh well. It's something to think about.

Who is that woman? How did she end up here?
Guess I'll have to play the game to find out! ;)

<<<<< DAY 16 >>>>>

One dilemma going into this game is what rating to shoot for. On the one hand, the more general the rating, the wider the audience. On the other hand, the nature of horror games makes it almost impossible to attain anything less than a Teen rating. So here's the general direction the game's gonna take:

1. It will have at least a Teen,  maybe even close to Mature (Rated R), rating. I believe this is still within the contest rules.
2. The game will have some gore, but not "piles of bloody mashed body parts everywhere" overkill. Mainly because I'm not a big gore fan. XD
3. Strong language such as F*** and S*** will be used at times in the game. We won't sprinkle every sentence with them, but it really would break immersion if our characters go "Oopsie daisy!" during intense moments.

Of course, we're aiming to make this as good as a pixel horror game can be. Which means it has to be somewhat scary at the very least. Still, there's only so much you can do with pixel graphics, but just to be on the safe side, I'm still including a fair warning before the game begins:

Players should know before they start that this is designed to be a horror game and may not be suitable for everyone.

However, if uh, we should like...win, and it becomes necessary to make the game suitable for a wider audience, we are definitely open to toning down the game to PG-13 levels (cough...talking to you judges...cough....XD).

<<<<< DAY 17 >>>>>

I remember the first year I did IGMC I actually spent money on buying advertising. At the time I thought paying for banner space would help us attract more players. It did I suppose, but the effect wasn't as spectacular as I thought it would be. I think marketing and advertising isn't that effective unless one goes past a certain spending tipping point, which is probably beyond the means of most indie developers.

Since our budget is limited, instead of spending it on advertising, this year we're gonna put it into content instead. One of those things is cover art. I've always loved those games with great cover art, so I wanted one for our entry this year too. Since I can't draw worth a damn, and Linhtendo already has much on her plate, we hired the very talented Michael Galefire to draw us this wonderful cover art for Chosen:

Isn't that absolutely stunning? He painted it based on some basic concepts we provided. You can see our hero Gabriel in that cube. Our team really likes it, and I think it's fits the mood of our game very well. Thanks Michael! Phenomenal artist! I highly recommend him.

<<<<< DAY 18 >>>>>

I've always made RPG Maker games controlled by the keyboard. However, Chosen has a more adventure game mechanic that seems to work better with a mouse driven interface.

So while you can still play the game with a keyboard, we're going to design the game as if the player has no keyboard.

Not much more to report today. Everyone hard at work. ^^

<<<<< DAY 20 >>>>>

So we've been hard at work on the game over the weekend. Putting everything together. Here's a quick progress update:

• Miss Nile is done all the maps! Yay! Now I got to event all of them. Nooooooooooooo!!!
• CuckooOrange ran into a problem with the transparency. Now things don't disappear. Oh no! We gotta solve this soon!
• Linhtendo finished more sketches, will begin coloring. Can't wait to see 'em!

The game's about 50% done, but still lots of work to do. Anyways, here's a screenshot of the game:

Ok. I'm just kidding. :p Well, it IS an actual screenshot of the game, but probably not the most glamorous one. Being a horror game, there will be times when our protagonist has to traverse through dark places. Darkness is an enemy. Still, just looking at darkness probably isn't very interesting, so here's one with lights on:

The Pop Horror set works quite well. And the lighting script we're using is Terrax Lighting, which is pretty awesome!