The Price of RPGs

Niemeier tells me what I already knew, that is, the price of video games has been going down, adjusted for inflation. And that’s just the Triple A stuff. Whedonesque dialogue slapped over a mud-genre game with microtransactions. If you are looking for games with soul in them, you’ll find lovely options at half or a third the price. I won’t buy a Sonic game from Sega, and pay $60 or more for a gameplay style I’ve never cared for, only twice as rushed as the games I did care for. But I’ll gladly hand $20 to Lake Fepard for Spark The Electric Jester 3. It’s Sonic Adventure 3. It’s got a poorly written Megaman X storyline that takes itself too seriously. But if you asked for Sonic Adventure 3, you signed up for that. And the gameplay, oh the gameplay! Refinement of many of the best ideas from the 3D Sonics.

Spark isn’t Sonic. It’s its own thing, taking its own direction with its own characters. But it built on the foundation Sega laid and promptly abandoned.

I have often advocated that people take the things they love that are now being defiled by corporate overlords, file the serial numbers off, and sell it. And well I should. I have 3, count ’em, 3 Jump the Shark children’s books for sale,

(you should definitely buy that latest one, it is some nice work if I say so myself. Look, it’s a ten minute bedtime story about a walking shark fighting a ghost kaiju ultimately with the help of a giant moth. If that doesn’t light a fire for you, buy it for someone who will love it, because you definitely know someone), and I have even put some work into making a Jump the Shark game. It’s half-baked. To become a true project worthy of sale, it will have to find an identity that is more than just a Sonic clone, and while Jump the Shark is a very different character from Sonic the Hedgehog, he does not yet lend himself to new gameplay. But as long as I live, the option lives too.

If your favorite game was Sonic, try out Spark. If you’re upset that Nintendo hasn’t made a sequel to the Paper Mario series, give Bug Fable a try. Hollow Knight would be a steal at twice the price. And I’m hearing very happy noises about the recently released Pizza Tower from fans of Wario, Sonic, and Metroid.

If none of these games ring your doorbell, consider perhaps God placed you on this earth to make the game that will. I mean, maybe not. Every gamer has a dream game that doesn’t exist, and very few of us were sent into this world to make it. But some of us were.

Maybe me. Maybe not me, but maybe me.

For me, my favorite games in no particular order are Link’s Awakening, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Super Metroid, and Megaman X.

So my dream game would be some sort of Open World, probably Metroidvania style, but maybe top-down, with a character that moves fluidly like Sonic, but has a ton of optional upgrades to find. Doesn’t fit Jump the Shark super well, though it could with enough creativity. Can be made to fit Merlin the Rabbit from my Hat Trick comics, which is one thing holding up the sequel book: it might be better to make it a game. Fits ~~Spaz~~ Sparky the Dragon to a T. I have this robot design that could do it. And Wren Valen could work.

And I’ve explored in that direction before as well, though I’m not satisfied with my explorations.

But a genre that keeps calling out to me from the borders of the world is the JRPG. And maybe it should call out to you.

The Dragon Quest-style JRPG is an excellent story-telling vehicle. I love making kids’ books, I do. But distribution of stories would be so much easier, and reach so many more people if I just did JRPGs. And there’s a hunger for them. Oh, not so much as you might believe. Sure, if Squaresoft releases a pixelart Final Fantasy, people will eat it up like they did Octopath Traveller, but for $80 or on sale sometimes $40 you can get RPGMaker, and RPGMaker games are a dime a dozen. They mostly don’t make money.

The primary rule for the ones that do is they ditch the RPGMaker assets for custom graphics and music. And, well, I’m an artist as well as a writer. Why not make my stories in that and add a new skin over the top?

This is something writers should consider. It’s something I am going to consider. I’ll get the demo version of RPGMaker some time in the next couple of months and play around with it. It’s 20 days, which is long enough for me to decide whether it’s worth the money. And one thing I’ve always wanted to do is team up with some of my friends and allies on the internet. I know a couple of musicians and countless writers. Imagine if I made an XSeed RPG with Niemeier. His fanbase appreciates old games. It’d be a win-win for both of us.

But I have not pitched this yet. Nor will I, ’til I’ve made a small game that proves I can make the big game. And while I am going to dabble in the latest version of RPGMaker to see if it’s suitable for this task, I suspect I won’t use it, and there is a decent chance game making will remain a hobby, or if I make games, they will be action adventure games. And these are the reasons why:

I don’t love JRPGs. I love some of the entries in the genre, but the ones I love are universally entries designed for casual players or players accustomed to other genres. Pokémon, Medabots, Mario & Luigi, Paper Mario and Chrono Trigger — some of these are classics for the ages, but all of them are meant for a broad audience. I don’t really like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Shin Megami Tensei, etcetera. That, in turn, makes me ill-suited as a designer or programmer for this genre. This can be overcome with professionalism and practice. Perhaps it is even a good thing that the games I love are more casual, the better to build experiences that are short and fluff-free. But it is sand in the gears.
I doubt RPGMaker will be easier for me to use than Godot. I can make a pixelart tilemap and a movement system in a day in Godot, and the one I make will be built with constraints I care about in mind, instead of RPGMaker’s constraints. The hurdle that RPGMaker clears for me is that it comes with a built-in combat system, inspired by Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. This is a dual-edged sword. One the one hand, a combat system is a sticking point for me, so just cribbing someone else’s would be nice. On the other hand, I would very much want my games to have a combat system that is distinct from the RPGMaker combat system. Moreover, with Godot, I already know I can build a web game. Play it in your browser! Ultimate convenience. The latest version of RPGMaker does not promise this. Moreover, every RPGMaker game I’ve played on mobile has used an onscreen DPad and… This is not acceptable. Mobile controls for a retro JRPG should be as simple as touch the place you want your guy to walk to. And again, I can get this running in Godot in minutes, while still allowing DPad/Arrow key controls for your PC and console users. I’ve already done it. The Last Legend Zero prototype uses such a system.

You can get around these issues in RPGMaker with the right plugins, or by writing your own. But I suspect the effort involved is equivalent to the effort of building it myself in Godot, and less than the effort of simply cribbing my already existing code.

So my recurring dream of making an RPG, and then branching out and telling stories in this way, instead of just with paper books is highly speculative at this point. Most of the pieces exist. It may happen. But as Mr. Niemeier points out, ideas are a dime a dozen. Perhaps you should try RPGMaker, and if you come up with a game you like, get a team to replace the stock art and music. Perhaps you should try building an RPG engine in Godot. Or Unity or Unreal, or raw C++ because unlike me, you’re a Real Programmer.

I don’t care if you steal my idea. If and when I make it, it will be totally different from what you made anyway.

Captain’s Log 3.1.1.2: The Revised Book Workflow

Jump the Shark & Paruvrew is the most polished book I’ve produced to date, and close to the quality level I’ve been hoping for from the first. However, it is the end of a long road. It would be good to summarize the lessons from each step down that road.

The Adventures of Jump the Shark and Sera Mermaid was my first foray into making kids’ books. I did not know whether I could, or whether I would be sufficiently pleased with the product. Therefore, I downloaded a book on how to make books on Amazon and followed its instructions, constructing the PDF on Canva. I worked hard to pander to my kid, so that if it all went sideways, at least I’d have one happy customer.

From it, I learned I needed to do heavy work on my color palette, I wanted to have more control over the creation process than Canva afforded me, I didn’t particularly like the 8.5″x11″ form factor.. and that I could do the work. I had that potential.

The Amazing Alphabeasts was my second foray. This time I tried constructing a palette in advance, using Amazon’s preferred 6″x9″ form factor, creating an educational book, and crowdfunding it via Kickstarter.

From it I learned the color palette needed further tweaking, that Kickstarter is a viable platform for me (I reached 50% funded halfway through the campaign, but abandoned it due to personal life events), and that I never again want to make an ‘edutainment’ book.

Hat Trick 1: the Death of Arthur utilized a template, and tested making a black and white book. I learned the relative costs of producing black and white verses color. I also learned that cutting off a story halfway and promising a sequel is foolish. To this day, I haven’t finished out the story promised in Hat Trick 1. I surely must, though, to reclaim my honor.

Jump the Shark & The Pirate Princess tested a new palette, and with only a tiny number of tweaks the one I use to this day. It tested a formula I mutated from several functional book-writing formulae, with an eye to making bedtime stories. The formula worked fine, but I realized I needed to storyboard my books as I write them from this point forth. It also started life as a digital popup book built in Unity,

Bunny Trail Junction is webcomic hub that to this day hosts John Michael Jones Gets a Life. For about 4 months, I kept it running daily comics, publishing black and white monthlies in paper on Amazon. I learned that I did not like the 3-panel format I’d come up with, that for all its advantages it was more trouble than its worth on most websites, I furthered my skills at inking with a brush, and I realized that small children looking for children’s books aren’t liable to be found on random webcomic sites.

Awesome Moments 1: The Kings of Earth was my first Bible Story book, and my first book produced on my display tablet. I learned that inking on a display tablet is tedious; I need to pencil and color on the tablet, then ink on paper with ink. I also learned that if I come to the end of my first month of working on a book, and feel burnt out, I should simply set it aside for a month and come back to it. I will get it done faster that way than if I try to push forward. I also devised a watercolor-based workflow for coloring in ClipStudio that I didn’t get to use for Awesome Moments but did get to use for…

Jump the Shark & Paruvrew, which tried out the new size format Bunny Trail Junction pushed me toward, the workflow I settled on after Pirate Princess and refined in Awesome Moments, and the watercolors. And it’s so far beyond the other books in terms of workmanship that I almost want to redo all the others. In fact, I do want to redo the others, I just don’t think I have the attention span to produce the same book twice.

The process is as follows:

Create a rough outline of the book. Clearly define the hero and villain and their goals. Figure out the climax. This step takes a day or two.
Storyboard the book. Create low resolution doodles and coloring, and a first draft of the text in Clip Studio. This step takes about a month, but may be faster, and doesn’t absorb all of my time that month, or even most of it. I can storyboard a book while working on another project. It is risky, however, to dial in and storyboard the book faster, so that it is done in a couple of days.
Produce the print test. Load the storyboard pictures into Scribus, and write the second draft into that Scribus file. Produce a cover, and send it off to Amazon for a printing proof. This process takes a day or two.
Wait a month or so. Do something else. Leave the book alone.
Read the print test out loud, and mark corrections in it for the final edit. This takes about ten minutes a reading, since they are kids’ books.
Produce the final illustrations. This takes a day per illustration or more, and ends up being about a month of work.
Done.

So, the process in total takes about 3 months. However, it is not three months of work. The storyboarding month can be spent producing storyboards for multiple books, or producing a storyboard in the morning, and then working on a game or a comic book. And the need for me to wait a month between spitballing the book and producing the final illustrations isn’t spent doing nothing. So realistically, if I made books full-time, never worked on comics or games, I could put out at least 4, and as many as 10 a year.

Now, I’ll probably aim for that 4. Aiming at the 10 is a bad idea because with my ADHD, not jumping from project to project is actually more inefficient. My mind rebels against focusing on one thing much longer than a month. It took me four months to do a month and a half of illustration for Awesome Moments. And that’s with industrial strength stimulants. If I had spent the intervening two months working on something else, Awesome Moments would have been done at the same time, better, more polished, and I would have the intervening two months’ work to show for it.

But aiming higher, maybe trying for six, might be a good thing. I have hundreds of stories from my childhood that should be dusted off, improved, and released (with, of course, the caveat of I don’t like to write the same story twice). And the jump in quality from book to book is quite high. With a little more practice, I might start turning out books that are more than just idle amusements.

My wife took me to the new Dreamworks flick for my birthday. And it reminded me of the importance even of my idle amusements.

I’ve discovered in my dotage that I’d rather like to be the abominable tribrid of Lewis, Seuss, and Eastman and Laird. This pleases me. It suits me. And there is a call for it.

Focusing on it, as much as I can focus on any thing, is no bad thing.

No bad thing at all. The Mouse is coming out with its latest desecration of its former desecration of Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid. I could furnish a less slick, but more wholesome and more true to the OG story. I did a poster of 3 ninja pigs versus a samurai wolf. That possibility deserves exploration. The Alphabeasts may be retired as an educational tool, but as a setting to improve upon Star Trek, they are quite well fit. And of course, I can always work on Hat Trick. Get some actual stories out there.

Captain’s Log N2•30: The Unbearable Weight of Moth

If you look at the project page, you will see that Jump the Shark and Paruvrew is finished. For funsies, I’d like to post a fun two-page-spread from storyboard to draft to final.

And to show how far my process has evolved, here’s the same image side-by-side with a comparable image from Pirate Princess:

The evolution to my process that has happened over the last two books is immense, and worth discussing in and of itself. That’s going to get a separate blog post of its own, which will be linked here. I’m very excited about it. I can’t wait to hold the finished book in my hands. And I’m subtly excited about making more books. Perhaps lots more. Perhaps a book every other month. But perhaps not. Even though every book I release is better than the last, and even the first was good enough that I thought, “man I should have started this years ago,” I don’t think I have the will to make book after book after book. Even though most of my work on video games is inconclusive, I think I have to do it, in between books, to keep my ADHD in check.

Which brings me to February. February is the month of my birth. So February is the month I sit back, look over what happened in the previous year, and try and figure out what I’m going to aim for. It is a month for reflection, and I log out of Twitter to repristinate my thought. And that deserves its own blog post, which I’ll link here after I write it.

But I get grumpy if I’m not progressing some project. So most months, my policy is to pick a project on the first of the month and ride it out to the end of the month. But in February, my policy is to switch whenever I feel like it. Give the ADHD full reign to remove all obstacles to musing. Embrace the chaos.

Towards the middle of last month, I was toying with my perennial RPG engine, and my current thoughts on that deserves a blog post of its own, which will be linked here. Towards the end, I was thinking of working on the Therian Virtual Pet, now renamed Warsprite. But as soon as I got into the month, I lost interest. Now, I’ve got 4, yes, 4, different platformer ideas vying for attention in my head.

And the work on Jump the Shark and Paruvrew and John Michael Jones Gets a Life has got me considering making more comics. Both reviving Re-Tail, reviving Hat Trick, and building out on my system of “game graphics” that can bring back regular Bunny Trail Junction comics. This topic deserves its own post as well, which will be linked here.

So this is a top-level hub for a series of in-depth brainstorms I intend to do over the next week or two. And all of them have the additional caveat of I’m trying to sort out a long term profitable career. In the arts. In the burgeoning age of AI democratization. My success is not urgent to me at the moment. I have a day job which feeds me and covers the bills, and permits me time and energy to put towards my projects. But the job will not last forever.

Anyways, Jump & Paruvrew is done. Get it while it’s hot.

Captain’s Log mc•61: Animation Programs

Awesome Moments 1 is done. You can see on the project status page.

I finished at the beginning of November. I started working on finishing Awesome Moments in, I think, August? Yeah, the announcement was log m811. August started briskly, with two illustrations, four pages a day. September slowed to about one illustration a day. Then October I was lucky to get two or three a week.

This tracks with my previous observations that I can hang onto a project for about a month before it becomes inefficient. And my resolution to basically keep three or four projects in the air at all times so I can switch each month to a different one. If I had simply not worked on Awesome Moments in September, I might have completed it halfway through October.

Instead I dragged it across the finish line in November and, holy shlamoley, I needed a break. I browsed itch.io for game jams, picked one at random, and joined the first team that asked as an artist. Spent a week using some poor group of programmers and a sound guy as a testbed for theories about animating.

The result is Toasty, and here are my notes on the process.

Basically, last year, I took a shot at making an HD game by hand inking character parts, turning them into vector art in Inkscape, and animating them. At first, it promised to be at least as efficient as pixel art, but as the project dragged on, it grew less and less so.

So I gave up and switched to pixel art for a while, even though the hand-drawn stuff has a distinctive look that is hard to duplicate. But for a game jam, I gave Clipstudio Paint’s animation tools a try:

This was a great success. So I tried it out in a Jump the Shark platformer:

But this introduced some problems. Tweaks were hard to make to already established animations. I missed the resolution independence that vector art offered me. I wondered if I penciled animations in CSP, but “inked and colored” them in Inkscape, making them vector art, the lower quality in line variation would be worth the increased customizability of vector graphics. And also I made the Jump Sprite way bigger than it needed to be.

So I tried this new system for “Toasty”

..and I didn’t hate it. It was deeply hampered by the fact that Inkscape is not an animation tool, and so I had no way of knowing until I had rendered an animation out whether I had gotten it right. But I was able to do things like re-palettize the cutlery, and swap their heads for different animations. And I didn’t hate how the art looked, even though the lack of variable line-width flattened my style a little.

It also did well in the jam, gaining 5th place overall among the 52 entries, and 1st for the art.

So I tried reanimating Jump the Shark using the style from the existing game, but according to the new rules. And the whole while, I kept thinking, “man, I wish this was Anime Studio.”

Anime Studio is an animation tool I used years and years and years ago. More than ten, I think. I made some Sonics with it.

This animation is not great. I’m certainly more skilled now. But the problems with the animation are the fault of my inexperience, not the fault of the tool. The tool is fine. It’s a vector art tool that has four huge advantages over Inkscape:

Line width variation is built in and not a pain. (You can do line variation in Inkscape, but it’s weird, unintuitive, glitchy, and laggy).
You can just hide a line segment on a shape. In Inkscape, either the entire shape is outlined, or none of it is, forcing me to make multiple copies of a shape if I want gaps in a line. (There is one minor exception to this rule, but it isn’t very useful.)
It’s actually an animation tool, meaning you can see if what you’re doing works before rendering it out.
And also meaning there are things like bone-based movement and automatic tweening when you want them.

So I said “heck with it,” googled what had become of Anime Studio (it’s now called Moho), and eventually buying a license.

Here’s the idle for Jump the Shark in each of the 3 programs: Clip Studio hand drawn, Inkscape traced over a CSP pencil, and Moho:

Ignore the more pixelated look of the second two animations; that’s an artifact of rendering them at a size more appropriate for the game. As you can see, there’s less line variation in the Inkscape version, but the drawing still has a decent amount of personality, and I was able to redo the feet to make them more consistent with the character design. Moho brings back line width variation, though I keep it light to avoid making more work for myself. The tweens are smoother because I didn’t have to eyeball them. And I was able to tame the bouncing fins a little. I like them, but I went too far in the original animations.

But the biggest deal by far was the time it took me to make these animations. The original was about 2 days of constant work. The Inkscape was 1 day of work. It was actually more laborious than the CSP version, but benefited from that version already existing, and so most of the animation puzzles that come up in making a piece had already been identified and solved.

The Moho version took me a couple hours, maybe. And in half an hour I made a “tired” variant:

So, it looks like I’m going to be employing Moho moving forward.

Now, to use these characters in comics as well as games, I need to export them much bigger than Moho is equipped to handle. But Moho has SVG export. It has kinks, I’m sure — it has to! But we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Anyway, I’m making a book with my kid now!

Once the print proof is prepared and ordered, I will probably try working on another game to nail down my Moho workflow; either rejiggering my Jump the Shark platformer, or else another jam where potentially I work solely as the animator. We’ll also burn that bridge when we get to it.

Captain’s Log m8•11: Clip Studio Kaplooey

Like in October of 2021, I have heaped projects on my plate. And like October of 2021, it is not working well. I don’t really know how I’m going to handle it just yet, however.

I am making John Michael Jones Gets a Life at a rate of one comic a week, which is a nice, slow, easy pace. Nevertheless, I have been a scant 2 weeks ahead this whole time, and this week, I’ve slipped to 1 week ahead. They are color comics, so they take a little more producing, and eventually, our heroes will be in a digital world, which will allow some shortcuts, but there it is.

Concerning to me, I’ve launched this before I’ve finished the draft. Which means I don’t know if I can land this ship. But I felt if I sat on it any longer, it would never get done, so…

Awesome Moments is my Bible Story book series. Awesome Moments 1 goes from Eden to Christ to the Parousia as briskly as possible to serve as the anchor for the rest of the series. I’ve ranged from doing two illustrations (each of these being two pages) per day, to one, to none.. I want to have it all done by the middle of the month so it can be thoroughly exorcised from my system, because I feel kids’ books are my best medium, but I haven’t been able to finish a draft. I think my gears are clogged, and won’t start turning again until I finish this book.

Also, while the publisher intends to Kickstart it in December, they’d like it a good deal sooner.

Jump the Shark is a platformer that’s a big dose of Sonic, a moderate dose of Megaman X, and whatever else I feel like mixing in to taste.

Strangely enough, the adoption of all these projects can be traced to one program: Clip Studio Paint.

Continue reading →

I’m making a Sanic

So, this is what I made this weekend:

To be 100% clear, this is my plan moving forward:

In July, my priority is Awesome Moments 1, the Bible Story book that rushes from Genesis to Revelation, makes the angels awesome, and draws on typology (e.g. Adam looks like Jesus).

At my present rate of two illustrations a day, if I get an additional illustration in every other weekend, I should be finished by August. However, I’m not sweating it. If it takes a little longer, it takes a little longer.

This means any development on a Jump the Shark game will happen on weekends and weekends only, at least until the book is done or I drop it. I’m going to hang onto it with all I have for the duration of July, but if it’s not done in August, I may well stop, leave it for a month or two, then pick it up again and finish it.

Basically, I have ADHD, and it is more productive for me to work with it than fight it. Even on a project I love, my endurance maxes out at about a month and a half before I have to switch to something else.

So… I’m probably going to tinker with this game on weekends in July. Supposing in August I either finish Awesome Moments or drop it, and decide to mainline this project. What happens then?

Here’s my plan for this project for the foreseeable future:

Keep adding controls until I have a fun little character that can freerun around in ways I enjoy.
Once I feel the character control is more or less complete, along with level gimmicks to play off of (springs, enemies that provide specific challenges, etc), graybox some levels until I have a set that I think are pretty good.
Build a game and bring it to market.

That is to say, I don’t have a specific game design I am working towards. I’m feeling my way forward, and I intend to continue doing so for the forseeable future.

My preference in game genre is Action Adventure, so this is likely to turn into a Metroidvania, because that’s what they call Action Adventure Platformers in these benighted days (no shade meant for Metroid or Castlevania, though). But I’m also toying with the idea of just straight up implementing Alexander Hellene’s platformer design because then at least he’ll buy the game.

A Sonic Metroidvania is not very much in the spirit of Sonic, but this isn’t Sonic. This is Jump the Shark.

Anyway, at this point, this project is still in the tinkering stage. I’m 100% playing by ear. If and when a design is finalized and put into production, of course I’ll let you know.

Grumbles of a Sonic Aficionado

I don’t describe myself as a fan of anything these days. “Fan” is short for fanatic, and nothing but God Himself is worthy of fanaticism.

But the fact that I once would have described myself as a Sonic Fan is not a secret.

The obvious clue is my first children’s book:

What happened here is I sat down to read my kid a kids’ book, and I didn’t like the book. It occurred to me then and there that I certainly possessed all the component skills to make my own kids’ books, and so I set out to see how that would turn out.

I decided I had better pander to my kid, so that if the book was bad, at least the intended audience would like it. My kid loves sea animals, so I set it underwater.

I decided I had better pander to myself, so that if the kid loved the book and requested it every single night, I wouldn’t get sick of it. Also so I would feel motivated to finish the book. So I plucked Jump the Shark, a character created to parody Sonic the Hedgehog, out of my box of characters. That way the book could be 30ish pages of thinly disguised Sonic fanart.

Now, Jump the Shark isn’t the first bit of evidence I enjoy the occasional Sonic game, nor the best. He’s just a side-effect of my enthusiasm that happened to spin off (all puns always intended) and become my best property.

But we’re not here to talk about Jump the Shark. We’re here to talk about Sonic Games.

Continue reading →

Captain’s Log m7•30

I’ve officially begun work on the final illustrations for Awesome Moments 1. If I can maintain a pace of about two illustrations a day, and one on Saturday, I should be done with them by August. Gonna get this book off my chest and move on with my life.

In this scheme, I spend Sunday-Monday resting, and Monday-Tuesday keeping up on the John Michael Jones comic, adding both a draft and a finished page to my set, so that they keep coming out for Mad Mondays.

As things stand, I’m a couple weeks ahead. I’d rather be a month or two ahead, but I’m not going to accomplish that while working on Awesome Moments.

Maybe I’ll build up some additional breathing space in August. Or maybe I’ll use August to create the next chapter of Hat Trick and finally tie up my loose ends.

I say one image on Saturday and not two. That’s because I’ve had some trouble figuring out (since I work the night shift, and each of my shifts covers two days) how to take my day of rest. Should I start it at midnight Sunday?

Well, right now, my plan is midnight Sunday, do a little tinkering with something else. And that something else deserves its own blog post. So I shall go ahead and post.

Captain’s Log LB•M1: Piqhing a Fight

This week’s goal, aside from hugging my kin, and thanking God for what I have, is to finish my business plan.

At this point, I am about 80% sure the plan goes like this:

Reconstruct my JRPG/Adventure engine in Godot.
Build a 1-month adventure game therein, probably using Piqha. Probably an Easter Egg hunt, to publish in time for Easter 2022. Put it up for sale for $2. Let’s call it Last Legend Zero. Say the story is set before the crash of the ship, one Piqha suspects that something is wrong, and is exploring the conduits of his ship to figure it out. I want, somehow, the Word of God to be available to post-crash colony, so perhaps this easter egg hunt is the story of how it gets there.
- Develop within/alongside the game the sets and characters for the Last Legend comic.
- Last Legend as a story about Piqha rebuilding their lives is designed to be a 4x8x9 comic, as laid out in Formats for Print and Screen.
  - On the completion of the adventure game, I should be set for Last Legend comics for 1 or 2 months.
- And/or 8×9 storybooks.
- Bunny Trail Junction will reboot as a comic in like format, or storybook pages in the 8×9 storybook format, in due course.
- I may spend a portion of November or December assembling a post-hoc December wrapup of the current format, and perhaps the 2021 Annual. Just tie up the first year in a bow.
Work on other projects with the Illusive Man as they come up.
Pour 2 months building a JRPG, Last Legend I. This is our business launch. Our “two-month, $5 game that makes 4K per month of work.” Our 1K wishlists on Steam.
By this time, presuming all goes well, we should be far enough along on the Illusive Man’s manga project, that taking a month or two off to produce something here is a good idea.
Pour 2-4 months into producing Last Legend II.

This should
- Get us our party mechanics.
- Finish the challenge I undertook on behalf of my swordsmanship master.
- Be a solid game that secures the Last Legend/Piqha brand, universe, and assets for use in the comics.
- Be a solid showcase of what my micro JRPGs look like. Which leads us to:
Licensed JRPG. Say to the Illusive One, to Brometheus, to Niemeier, to my other homies, “Behold: here is a small game I have made that is designed to present a story. You have stories and an audience. Let us therefore run a Kickstarter together and produce a grand thing.” And do so. Choose the best fit. Run a crowdfund. Make a game. Lather, rinse, repeat, to raise everyone’s boats, while taking appropriate breaks to produce my own stories.

The only thing I would add is I want to produce a kid’s book every now and again. Keep my library of kids’ books growing. I feel the itch even now; it has been too long. So, keeping my format notes in mind, I think I may aim to produce a 8×9 Last Legend Kids’ Pulp Formula book next, and try and put one in every other month. Maybe break Awesome Moments into that format length as well.

Maybe do a Jump the Shark story before years’ end so I keep my pattern of one per year rolling.

Captain’s Log LB•33: Moving on to the next game

As of Captain’s Log LB•11: The Primacy of Vidya, I have decided that henceforth instead of making comics, games, videos, or books as the fit takes me, I will be making games and then deriving comics, books, and videos from the games as much as possible.

It’s no good for some things, like Awesome Moments, obviously. In that specific case, I am content. Awesome Moments is a record for my own children, and I feel a little odd about making it a product. But I do need to make a product.

I’m working using a concept/business model I am calling the Game Tower.

Game Towers

A Game Tower is a game development technique wherein you make a miniature game that is a Complete Game that implements a core mechanic of some larger game you would like to make. Then you release and sell that game. Then, on top of that miniature game, you build a larger miniature game that has an additional component. In this way, you build a tower that grows towards the dream game you wish to make, while also increasingly funding that game and expanding your track record.
Note LA•S9

I have discussed before how I find dismal projections of how little money indie game developers make to be encouraging. Partly because I’m old poor, so a coder’s “I could never live on this” is easily 50% more than I can hope for as a Lowes Greeter. But partly because of the way Game Towers work. The projections in question assume you are marketing from square one each time, but every brick in a Game Tower helps sell the brick below and the brick above.

I have two Game Towers in the running. A JRPG Tower, which we’ve spoken of and…

The one I’ve chosen, Game Tower Awakening, is building a foundation with my favorite games in mind, especially The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the Gameboy, with later influences from Megaman and Megaman X.

The first brick in that tower is familiarize myself with the Godot engine, try out some graphical and gameplay ideas, and see how that goes. And so I have done. Hat Trick: Prelude to Nightmare was made in Godot, tested the ideas, and is technically a Complete Game, even though it is not a good game.

Today’s Choice

Now, this is not the first game in the tower to be ‘financially viable’. Nor can I follow the proper methodology with this game, as making it has taught me several things I want to change on the ground floor. So after concluding I should focus on vidya, I debated two options:

Release the Proof of Concept with no real gameplay to the world and immediately begin working on the second brick.
Spend up to a week polishing the Proof of Concept so that it can be reasonably considered a real minigame.

The advantage of 1 is that it does a better job as a marketing tool. Hat Trick: Prelude to Nightmare was not meant to be a mere proof of concept. It was meant to market the Hat Trick comics on Bunny Trail Junction And it was meant to market the second brick. Right now, it’s not a good game. All it can really do is prove I can make certain things.

To make it a good minigame, I have a week or more of work ahead of me. Animating goblins, developing rudimentary AI, filling out the levels, changing the music at dramatically relevant times, and adding a bunch of satisfying beeps and swooshes to the menuing. This puts me a week or more further away from making the second brick. No big deal?

It would be good to do. I have learned a lot of stuff about Godot making this first game in the engine. There’s a bunch of things I want to do completely different now. And I know from experience that game dev will always be like this. If I start over, build a new foundation, by the time I get a game out of that, I will have a ton of stuff I’ll wish I’d done differently. Pushing forward to make the minigame a proper minigame would mean I begin work on it with even more notions of how I can do better.

But some of the changes I intend to make are fairly drastic.

Some Changes

For instance, I want to build my animation system differently so I can compartmentalize animations and reuse them between multiple characters. Oh, and here’s a big one.

I’m going to ditch 2D for 3D.

Not entirely. I still intend to use the same sprites and tiles. But I will do so in a manner reminiscent of Paper Mario or Octopath Traveler, albeit with an overhead perspective instead of a side-on perspective. So more of a Pokémon Black & White kind of look.

See, one of the things I love about Link’s Awakening is all the jumping. To add top-down platforming in 2D would be complex. I’d have to carefully consider how to emulate the third dimension. How to alter and sort the graphics as they get higher or lower. How to track which parts of the map are at which height.

If I just shift that gameplay into Godot’s 3D engine, I get all that stuff automatically.

And I can take a Link’s Awakening style adventure and make Megaman or Sonic levels by tipping the camera on its side a little.

And I suspect (I do not know, but I suspect) that Godot may succeed for me where Unity failed, allowing me to prototype gaming in pixel art, and then slip HD art with the same proportions in if I decide to make the game more ambitious.

The Choice Revisited

Now, let’s take a quick look at Option 2: cut off my proof of concept where it is and begin building the second brick now.

If I am correct, I should hit a stage in developing the second game where I can take a couple of days, build out the first brick’s world and situation in the game in progress, and simply publish it in place of the proof of concept. That is, a month (hopefully less) into making the second brick, I can paint the second brick to look like the first brick, and get all the advantages of finishing the first brick first, as well as the advantages of cutting directly to the second brick.

So that’s my choice. Today or tomorrow, the Proof of Concept will be available for download on bunnytrail.itch.io/hattrick0 and then, later, when I can recreate it and more in the second brick engine, it will be swapped out.

The Second Brick

The Second Brick is a ninja stealth combat game where you play a snow leopard ninja my wife uses as her online avatar, sneaking around and killing therians. Tenchu Z in the Link’s Awakening engine. Aside from the meager marketing I manage on Twitter by my lonesome, this has the advantage that I can have her run betas on her Twitch streams, and enlist her fanbase in spreading the word.

The Third Brick…

I have many, many friends online who are writing excellent books and comics and drawing attention. Releasing the second brick is all the proof I need that I can turn one of these into a still bigger game. I have lots of ideas for several properties, but we will see who is amenable. With our audiences combined, the Third Brick will have an even greater reach.

And Beyond?

That JRPG Tower I was working on? The one that’s more marketable, has better storytelling potential and so forth than the Tower I’ve chosen to build just because I happen to like it more?

It may have very different gameplay than this Tower. But I might be able to take the work I do on graphics and dialogue and world representation, and use the same foundation for a second Game Tower.