I am Overburdened, what takes so long?!

June 5, 2017 Spidi I'm overburdened Art, Design, Video log

Hello everyone!

I’ve been pretty silent for a while again…

I really dislike this, because I’m usually open and post a lot about my progress, but sometimes it just slows down and I end up in a spiral of “awkwardness”, when I’m not progressing too much and I really don’t want to talk about that 😐 .

Oh well, I’m preparing for the beta, some tiny fine-tuning left before I’m ready to upload a build, but before that, I share this update with a teaser.

Menus, menus everywhere!

I completed most of the menus. Some minor stuff (few more characters) are still missing but I will finish those during June. I included myself as the inn keeper 🙂 . Interacting with the guy brings up the help screen and he also tells the “story” of the game in the teaser.

Your journal

I went for a journal look for the classic focus driven menus and your inventory. I think it turned out good looking and it fits the game well.

For item pickup notifications I made a fancy scroll too.

Animated box-art

While preparing the trailer and other marketing materials, I had this urge to animate something related to the game 🙂 . The in-game sprites are all static and I wanted to keep it this way, so I made an animated box-art. Some say it’s a better attention grabber on storefront pages 😉 .

Dungeon templates

I made a bunch of new dungeon templates for the generator. Not enough for the final build, but there are already plenty and they provide good variety for a full beta play-through.

Progress, balance

First balancing pass over the item, monster and pickup power levels is also done. Nothing major, but you can complete the full 30 level deep dungeon now, encountering a new set of monsters and a new tile-set after every 3 or 4 levels and generally fighting stronger enemies as you progress. It is going to take days of tweaking to make it engaging though. I’m planning to devote a full entry to this topic soon.

Teaser trailer teaser

Yes, the following is just a teaser for the teaser trailer 😀 , a sneak-peek so to say. I’m working on a lengthier one which showcases gameplay features too with music, flashy texts and everything one would expect from a proper game trailer. So this is just the first 20 seconds of the real teaser, but I thought I should share it in this form and ask for some feedback/opinions about it…

Thanks for reading!
Take care.

I am overburdened, back among the living

May 10, 2017May 10, 2017 Spidi I'm overburdened, Magic Item Framework Art, Design, News, Video log

Hi there, long time no see!

Last month was rather chaotic for me. After a lengthy Easter vacation a nasty flu forced me to spend almost a week in bed, and overall the progress on “I am overburdened” was dreadfully slow up until last week. That is why I had no energy and not much drive to write new posts or to create video log entries, but it is time to break the silence.

Really, no progress?

There was a lot actually, but the development entered its last stage where there are a zillion small tasks left to be done but no modifications are substantial. The notorious last 10% which takes 90% of the development time 😀 . I go through all the changes made during last month in a few sentences, than I’ll adumbrate when and how am I planning to push this game through its finish line.

Monsters

I completed all the monsters from the easiest pawns up until the final boss. Their attributes are not balanced yet, but all their names, sprites and basic settings are done. Now each and every one has its own corpse graphic and unique sound effect too. This last bit was originally flagged as a nice-to-have addition, but after trying out the game with a few monsters having its own sound and carcass, there was no turning back 🙂 .

Attack and skill effects

The battles and item skills were lacking visually, so I decided to apply some cosmetics. I Implemented a simple system to flash in and out various sprites at given coordinates in the dungeon on top of the entities. I was pleasantly surprised with the effectiveness of the initial results. Since than, I added configurable opacity easing- in and out and timings. Now item usage and battles are really shiny 😮 .

Notifications

Another set of crucial visual queues missing from the game were notifications. Many pickups and events yield varying results in a roguelike and yes a player can figure out how much gold was picked up, but it is so much nicer if the game helps a little with these, especially when important changes occur. Clearly when it does not fit the style its not necessary, but I am overburdened is not a “super serious” game. Of course these can be overdone, but I tried making them not too obtrusive. Both the effect system and the notification system is accessible by the item skills, so various “spells” can trigger these too.

Items, items, items

103 unique items, each and every one having a unique sprite. All the graphics are done with around 50% of the item lore finalized and it was a hell of a lot of work. Sadly something I underestimated again. Making the graphics was not difficult but coming up with unique, interesting or funny concepts, skills and short descriptions after having around 75 piece already, was tough. The last mile became a grueling, laborious crawl! When a lot of great content is already in place and almost every single archetype is taken, it becomes ridiculously hard to come up with new ideas hitting the same quality bar 😦 .

After all I think I achieved my goal in creating intriguing hand crafted loot what may serve as a strong hook for the game, so I’m proud of the end result. I don’t want to spoil too much so I’ll only show a small selection of sprites. Sorry, you have to play the game for more 🙂 .

Localization

In Operation KREEP I hard-coded some strings, rendering the game impossible to be fully localized without code modification. Some buyers actually asked about how they could do translations. I felt really ashamed while answering those mails 😦 . For I am overburdened I’ve built a system which allows to bind assets for specific cultures and all the strings are read from asset files too. There are no major limiting factors now, so technically the game could be localized to any language without modifying the application. I know some languages are super hard to handle, e.g.: right-to-left ones or the ones with huge glyph sets, but the point is, that it is feasible now.

Since I don’t have the budget to pay for professional translations, only English and Hungarian will be done for release, but if the game does well, this is something, that is high on my list 😉 .

In-game UI

The user interface for the game is pretty much complete. Some finishing touches are missing here and there, but it is already pleasant looking and almost fully functional from the health-bar all the way to the item pickup pop-ups.

The main menu

I dislike making menus because they are usually boring to design and program. For Operation KREEP I came up with the idea of creating a “screen in the screen” look, to make it more interesting and alleviate this feeling while working on it. You navigated the menus of a retro-looking computer and the whole frame of the machine was drawn. It blitted the maps on the level selection screen in awful 4 colors and all the cozy stuff like that 🙂 . It worked for me and for the game too.

I tried a non-traditional approach again, but menus are still boring 😀 . Since it is a classic trope to have a city in action RPG-s and roguelikes where you return to from time-to-time, I thought about including one in I am overburdened. The idea did not align well with its mechanics, so I decided to make it the main menu! You move around in an inn, interacting with people and objects there to enter specific parts of the game. Talking with the inn-keeper lands you on a help screen, poking a bookshelf shows the settings, leaving the inn exits the game and the trap-door starts the actual dungeon crawling… If a player gets lost, escape will bring-up an ordinary focus driven menu. It is far from complete, but the skeleton is there and some parts already work.

Open beta, plans

I’ve been talking about this open version thingy for ages and I still haven’t released it. In my original plans I wanted to have the full game completed by now 😦 . For the most part it is, but some planned content and finalization (+polish) is missing. There comes a time when I have to say stop and I think it is here, so from now on I will only focus on wrapping the whole thing up and this starts with putting out a beta version. Will prepare some marketing materials beforehand, like store page graphics and texts, maybe even a teaser trailer, so it may take a few days, but will share a download link for it in the next post 🙂 😉 !

Stay tuned.

I am overburdened, check out the graphics!

April 3, 2017April 3, 2017 Spidi I'm overburdened Art, News, Video log

Hello everyone!

Tiny post with lot of pics this time. Last week I worked on the original sprites of the game and progressed steadily. Far from finished with every piece but a huge portion is done!

Missing pieces

In the last log I showcased the tile graphics, but one final adjustment was missing back then. All the tile-sets shared a single stair sprite which wasn’t fitting well, so I made a separate sprite for each one.

Entity sprites

The next stop was entities. I started out with defining clear goals for the looks and creating a palette serving these goals. The idea was to select contrasting, vivid colors to make entities pop from the environment and on contrary to the looks of the dungeons make them lively (browns and yellows are still pretty strong still 😀 )!

Not yet finalized!

Player

I really liked the design I came up with before for the player character so I reused my concept which was a failed attempt at the box art of the game. Two sprite states exists, since in the planned “story” scenes the player will have his sword in its scabbard.

Chests

The first apparent visual choice here are the light borders. I decided to add a colored one to every interactive entity type, so the player can not miss which tiles poses a threat and which ones provide bonuses. I made four chests with various costs/functions but I’m keeping the last one as a secret for the final version 😉 .

Pickups

Pickups come in many flavors. Permanent attribute bonuses (Meat = +Strength, Frying pan = +Armor, Carrot = +Vitality, Coffee = +Speed, Clover = +Luck), gold, potions, random items etc… Here are a few:

Monsters

I settled on a style after a few tries where the monsters are pictured from the same angle as the player. I plan to have around 15-20 unique monsters and a boss, which will provide a good variety for the 30 dungeon levels. They were divided into four groups based on the story when designing the looks: were/giant animals, goblinoids, undead and the allies of the boss. Almost all of them is ready (currently at 16).

Some screenshots from the current version of the game:

This week will be spent on completing the missing sprites (e.g.: items, some monsters) and overall visual improvements and polish, so I’m guessing the next entry will be similar. A kind-of “news” is my plans for an alpha demo. Before I complete and release the game I really want to do a open build (which will become the demo later) to gather feedback. I think wrapping this version up sometime next week is perfectly viable, so by the end of this week I’ll post a finished plan for this too.

Thanks for reading.
Take care.

I am overburdened, miles of tiles

March 26, 2017 Spidi I'm overburdened Art, Design, Tutorial, Video log

Hi there!

Short entry, a bit tutorial-ish, about the tile graphics of the game.

Art direction, ideas

I really liked the style of the open art assets I used for prototyping. Pixel art, huge value differences between the wall and the floor tiles and a little noise to make it a little grimy & wrecked.

Though I liked it’s looks and simplicity, I wanted to try some other ideas before settling on anything so I went ahead and made mockups.

False positive

The most interesting and furthest developed one was a tile-set and look with an oblique top-down view effect. I think this looks really good in many games, but sometimes it can get too exaggerated covering too much of the entity sprites.

I came up with this, but I decided to scrap the idea. I liked it sort-of, but making multiple varied sets for the 30 to 60 minute long campaign and fully fleshing them out in this style would require and immense amount of work. I choose the original simple style with a decent amount of variation instead.

Goals, final looks

So I returned to the looks of the prototype. Easily distinguishable wall and floor tiles, noisy and grimy places (it is an old dungeon after all) and good variations (many sets and small randomization within each set too) so it does not become boring during a full play-through. I needed a cool palette. Something murky. While picking colors I naturally deviated towards the looks of a game I always cherished for its atmosphere 🙂 .

Colors were picked carefully for supporting the look of the entity sprites, as they will use a marginally different palette full of contrasting colors instead of saturated ones to make them pop from the terrain (again just like in the prototype).

Here goes some shots about the results:

I have 10 different tile sets ready which I suspect will provide a good variety 🙂 . With 30-ish level deep dungeons a set change will happen after every 3 levels.

How-to?

For creating a lot of pixel art tiles, like the ones I made, you are going to need a frame so to say. Some rules and patterns how you start pixeling each tile and afterwards patience for experimentation. That is all to it actually. I walk through the creation of one.

I use GIMP, a free and cross-platform image editor, but pixel art can be done just as well in a lot of paint programs (even in paint, but I advise you to choose a better one which supports layers). A graphics tool which can work with tiles or a hot-reload engine feature (because GIMP as an example does not support tile graphics) also helps, since you can check while you are drawing, whether your graphics work well when tiled instantly.

First I usually start with selecting values for the whole set. This is a handy technique for defining an overall lightness/darkness balance for each tile.

Than I “sketch” a simple pattern for a tile using the values, usually with a light-source residing in a North-West direction.

I add a little variation, like cracks, missing bricks, mixing up the pattern etc… Detail like wines or stains can be added after coloring is done but this step alone makes enough differences between tiles.

I know simply selecting the same hue for the given values feels easy, but it makes the outcome look kind-of boring. Try to make colors interesting by selecting at least two different hues and by playing with saturation a little. It will make a huge difference!

Now you have a nice looking tile. The next step is optional. Adding noise was a deliberate style choice in my case. You simply add an extra set of values with only slight changes relative to the originally used ones. Select the noise colors the same way as the “normal” colors. Generate a noise pattern and overlay the noise colors on top of the tile using it as a mask.

A screenshot with the final tiles:

Thanks for reading.

Stay tuned!

KREEP, apples and penguins.

March 24, 2017March 24, 2017 Spidi Operation KREEP News, Release, Technical, Testing

Hi everyone!

Haven’t written for months now about Operation KREEP. It is time to revisit this old buddy bud bud of mine!

Yes, as the title suggest, it is cross-platform time 😉 …

Not official, but soon…

Nope, sadly no official release yet 😦 , but the Linux build is ready and tested (at least on my Nix machines) and the MAC build is ready for testing too. This means, that in a week or two an official release can happen, although a little piece of the puzzle is missing.

I require additional pylons!

I have two PCs, so I tested the Linux version of the game on two Ubuntu versions, but more would be nice (zillion distros 😦 ) + I HAVE NO MAC MACHINE 😦 …

This means, that the MAC build essentially never ever been started! I would really love to release the cross-platform builds, players already asked for them, but without sufficient testing it is not going to happen. Buying a MAC would be a somewhat logical investment at this point, but Operation KREEP (and my whole game development venture for that matter) is on an extremely tight budget as it is not profitable so far, so I will try to postpone that a little.

Feedback, results, “compensation”

Based on the differences between the builds (almost 0 code change, only packaging varies), I think a few simple checks would suffice. Whether installation works (files copied, icons set etc…), whether the game starts and basic configuration settings checks (settings work and are saved to correct application data folders) + a short test play round just for fun 😉 .

I know it is shady to ask for free QA for a product, but this is the reality of the situation I’m in 😐 . If you would like to help out I thought about sharing a limited amount of Steam/itch.io/IndieGameStand keys for the full game as a “payment”.

I put together a short form to ease reporting results: KREEP, apples and penguins

If you dislike sharing any personal information, but still would like to help out, please simply post results as comments here or contact me by e-mail: spidi@magicitemtech.com

I guess contact info of a cheap&used MAC reseller in Hungary could help too if you know any 🙂 .

Demo builds

Porting tech stuff

Just a little tech talk as closing words. The windows version of the game was made in C# using XNA. Two really cool projects were born to both preserve and enhance XNA in the last few years. MonoGame and FNA. Both are great and well established/tested at this point, but I choose FNA for porting Operation KREEP to Linux and MAC. My reasoning was the following:

Around a year or two ago when I was using MonoGame to work on my Linux machines I encountered some difficulties. MonoGame on Nix platform was using OpenTK for window, input and OpenGL context management and as I know, that library had it’s fair share of bugs and there was no real support/contribution/fixes for it for a long while.
Remark: as I know the MonoGame team changed to SDL2 lately, the same library FNA uses under the hood so it is probably not the case by now.
MonoGame favors a per-platform build approach, which looking at all the possible target platforms (desktop, mobile, consoles) is a logical choice, but requires managing and building multiple executables for each target. FNA from the get go approached this with a common desktop runtime, so one build works on all major desktop platforms (only packaging has to be taken care of per target).
Remark: if I’m not mistaken, last year a “common desktop” build was introduced for MonoGame too, so technically it could work the same way as FNA for desktop.
The FNA developer Ethan Lee had laser focus on cross-platform desktop XNA development and delivery, and the wiki for FNA had a really nice documentation about both working with FNA (differences and extras compared to XNA) and packaging + delivering games using it for Windows, MAC OS X and Linux. This documentation seemed really helpful and complete.

All in all I suspect both libraries could work perfectly for publishing your games to the three major desktop platforms, but I wanted to give FNA a try too. I was pleasantly surprised, most things worked like a snap without much fiddling.

That is it for today, in a few days I’ll post a new video & blog entry for I am overburdened. If you decide to help MUCH LOVE, SUCH WOW 🙂 and thanks awfully!

Take care!

I am overburdened, evolution of box-art

March 22, 2017 Spidi I'm overburdened, Magic Item Tech Art, Tutorial, Video log

Hello there!

Took most of last week off for vacation == no entries, sorry about that, but this week I’m going to make multiple videos and blog posts 🙂 ! This first one is about the box-art of the game.

Backstory, requirements

For previous projects I did not spend too much energy on the promotional art. That was obviously a mistake, because usually it is the first thing both the players and the press comes across when checking your game, so it needs to have a good teaser, but it is easy to forget the importance of it and miss allocating time for it…

I planned to make a difference this time, but I significantly underestimated the needed efforts 😦 . I wanted to capture the plot of the game in an image, suggesting the core mechanic, which is trying to collect a lot of loot and having a huge inventory, but still not being enough. All in all I think I succeeded but it took two tries 🙂 .

First try

My first idea was to focus on the protagonist of the game, who is a tomb raider kind-a guy (the not so morally OK one). Not being a typical hero or warrior, I wanted to present him as a bit of a simpleton and not someone who would kill a bunch of monsters with a single slash, since you won’t be able to do that in the game either.

Concepting and direction

I started out with some concept sketches in my notebook, portraying a bandit/pirate figure carrying huge bags…

I continued with flashing out this character with a composition I thought I like:

I wanted to create a pixel art end result, because I dislike box-arts with totally disconnected style from the game (except if it is top-notch quality + it adds to the lore of the game) but from my experiences with Operation KREEP, I knew I’m going to need a s#!tload of image sizes for promotional art (especially true if you plan to sell the game on multiple storefronts). Steam alone requests 5+ marginally different aspect ratios. So I decided to go with vector art as a base, and fix various sized renders instead of manually doing 3 to 4 different setups pixel by pixel.

Inking, results and confession

I use Inkscape for vector art. It is a free and cross-platform vector graphics editor, and has a convenient user interface . Perfect for line-art, icons etc…

First batch of line-art and shading work was pretty promising, I grown to quite like the character…

I tried out rendering the character in various sizes and fixing them up in GIMP using color reduction and manual pixel pushing. I still had “hope” at this point 😀 .

Then I throw together a “placeholder” pixel art title text.

The only thing left, was composition, fine-tuning and polish, so putting together an actual art piece which I could use as the promotional material for the game. Here are my attempts:

Of course I made close to a dozen of these, to try out various text sizes, backgrounds etc…

I don’t know if anyone likes them, but I sure felt like they simply aren’t working. I liked the character, I liked the colors, but the image was lacking detail, a good looking title-text, a correct composition and most importantly somehow it was lacking life 😐 . After days of fiddling on-and-off with it I decided, that no amount of polish is going the fix these problems, so I scraped it and started over!

Second try

I wanted to approach the next trial smarter. So instead of jumping in I looked at a lot of reference pictures and lay down much clearer goals and concepts before jumping into producing the picture.

Reference material

Looking at some images made for other games helped a lot! It made me realize, that I have to focus a lot more on the text first and foremost, and a more clever use of both color and space is required for the image as a whole.

I came up with the following concept afterwards which I really liked:

I followed a similar approach for scalability, using Inkscape to create the outline and work from the renders, manually pixeling the final image:

Final, final, final, final!

Funny thing about the final image is, that it took much less time and effort than my first attempt and I think it turned out to be a good deal better looking 🙂 .

The takeaway is if you feel even a tiny bit stuck, sit back to the drawing board and spend some more time on your concepts, it will probably yield better results !

The upcoming entries will be about the linux and mac ports of my previous game Operation KREEP and the tile graphics of I am overburdened. Here is a little sneak-peek of the last one:

Stay tuned!

I am overburdened, nobody make a sound!

March 3, 2017 Spidi I'm overburdened, Magic Item Tech Audio, Design, Technical, Tutorial, Video log

Hi everyone!

This post is going to be more like a tutorial, than a journal entry. I highly recommend checking out the video version, as it is heavily audio oriented + it contains some recent game-play footage 😉 .

I missed out creating an entry last week. I juggled between projects and tasks a lot, which led to me feeling a bit weary + no significant progress was visible on any front due to working just a tiny little on many aspects, so I decided to postpone it a little. Nevertheless, I’ve spent the last few days on finalizing the audio and sounding of I am overburdened.

Chip tune or not?!

My two completed games used pixel graphics and as a natural fit they were armed with 8-bit style sound effects. This is a really economical approach since making matching effects with a tool like sfxr takes only a few hours tops. From the get-go I wanted to try something different for I am overburdened, both for personal development and because some pixel games with realistic sounds (Canabalt) made me want to experiment with this style. I’m even less qualified as a sound engineer than as an artist 😀 so take my words with a grain of salt! All my mumblings here are based solely on tutorials scattered around the INTERNETZ + some fiddling with tools…

Recording

I decided to record and process as many effects of the game as I can. Last week almost a day was spent clowning with common household items to create noises 🙂 . If you are thinking about a similar approach, start by throwing together a DIY “recording studio” (sponge box). Even if you have a decent microphone it will help immensely with canceling noise and reverberation. Some sponge (check the boxes of your PC parts 😉 ) or a curtain can do the job. Otherwise you may end up with really echoing results (noise can be helped with software!).

Audacity to the rescue

First things first, download Audacity. It’s GIMP for sounds so to speak. Its interface is relatively straight forward (all what you would expect: select, copy, cut, paste, new track, the ‘z’ key ?! for clean cut selection etc…), but Youtube is filled with video tutorials (even with advanced tips and tricks) if you get stuck.

The following is a good repertoire to familiarize yourself with from the “Effect” menu:

“Noise Removal”: for sampling noise profiles (noisy but otherwise silent segments of a track) and noise canceling.
“Change Speed/Tempo/Pitch” and “Bass and Treble”: for mixing and changing effects (e.g.: making them play slower/faster or higher/lower etc…).
“Echo” and “Reverb”: for making sounds feel more spatial, and for creating some fancy voice effects (e.g.: making yourself sound like a ghost, demon or a robot etc…).
“Fade-In/Out” for correctly starting and cutting off sounds, especially alongside cuts.

My approach, which helped me out learning the ins and outs of effects, is to change back sliders to default positions (0Db, 0% +/-0) and experiment a lot, gradually trying out various modifiers, to see how something affects a sound.

Here is a short reel of what I was able to record and mix for the game:

Public domain

For I am overburdened approximately 50% of the final audio were recorded (some stuff is just hard to record in your room 😦 ), the other half came from OpenGameArt.org and Freesound.org. Both of them are wonderful sites full of really good content, many even final production quality. After listening to an hour worth of sound effects I selected the best matching ones based on my list of requirements and remixed many of them using Audacity for even better results.

One thing to be aware of before browsing around these sites is licensing. Keep in mind, just like code, various assets like pictures and sound effects can only be used under strict terms. Some only require author attribution, but some permit fully free modification or commercial use. If you don’t really want to dig into the topic, simply make sure you search for and use assets under CC0. This means the asset is essentially public domain, you can do what ever you want with it, even for commercial purposes!

Runtime tricks

You should be applying effects runtime too, to make the sounding of your game more dynamic. I constantly need to remind myself of this practice, I tend to forget about it. Few simple examples are: dynamic pitch, panning and volume control. If a sound effect is played a lot (e.g.: footstep, attack, shoot, hit) and your API of choice allows to set the pitch value (e.g.: XNA SoundEffectInstance) throw in some minor, but random changes! This will make it feel more varying. If your API does not allow this, have no fear! Pre-generate some good sounding variations for the often played effects and randomly select between them.

Example walking cycle in I am overburdened:

If you are not really into the video series but want to hear the difference between the placeholder sounds and the final sounds of the game, here is a timed link: Sound effects comparison

That is all for this post. I already cranked-out tiles and some sprites for the game, so I’m guessing the next entry will be kind of similar, but focusing on the art side.

Take care!

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