Some of you who have talked to me or seen my posts have probably seen various little tech demos and tests from this game over the last months. I figured it's probably time to have a thread where I can post updates for stencylers who may be curious to see what I'm up to. I am trying to control the game assets and image a bit right now, so the old tech demos are no longer public as of this writing. There will be more, and sometime in coming months I'll want a few testers.
(Apologies, the screenshots are presented at 1:1 size, which is 800x480, so you may need to scroll right to see everything)
Ghost Song is a "Metroidvania" style game with an emphasis on atmosphere and exploration. The general tone of the game is lonely, and the themes addressed are tragedy, love, and closure. The player is tasked with exploring a strange and dangerous Planetoid that few people have ever left alive. Along the way the player will run afoul mutant abominations, bizarre indigenous creatures, feral droids, and ever emoting ghosts.
The game follows the metroid formula of progression, where the player must obtain new abilities to gain access to new areas. As such, some abilities and weapons are required to progress, but I've also made a point of including a number of abilities and weapons that are missable (though highly helpful), found in areas that the player is never required to visit. I want to engage the player's imagination and sense of exploration and wonder. My design philosophy is also that if nothing is ventured or risked, the player can't experience the same level of drama and intrigue, and, as such, the game is difficult and save rooms aren't necessarily around every corner.
A broken vault door.
There's a lot that can be done with Stencyl, as some users have demonstrated. I'm an artist by trade without any programming background, but over the last year have been able to get a lot of things working in very slick fashion just by learning simple stencyl coding concepts and expanding on them.
I've found that my visuals can be boosted greatly by experimenting with layering and blending modes. My game has 2 or more "overlays" (graphical patterns that cover the entire screen) running at any time that help tie the appearance of the game together and bring it movement and subtlety. I've also made numerous "particle" actors that serve as anything from sparks, to floating dust particles, to magical motes.
Lair of a mad droid
This is an animated beam of light coming from the surface above. I used blending modes to enrich the effect and some simple behavior to spawn dust particles floating around inside.
This this is the crash site where the adventure begins. I have separate layers for foreground fog and several background movements, all moving.The game also has a virtual pet mechanic. Early in the game, the player encounters a small droid that decides to follow along. It grants useful utilities, such as mapping, and damage analyses (floating damage numbers). Over the course of the game it may evolve a couple of times based upon conditions and grant new powers. More on that later.
It's hard to assess the "completion level" of the game right now. I can tell you that almost all of the power ups and abilities are already in, the stat system is already in, the pet system is mostly in, and over a dozen enemies are already finished (with more to come). I've also mapped out the entire game and implemented about 1/3 of it. There's also the difficult to quantify stuff, as I've been completely obsessed with and preoccupied with the game for over half a year now, and in that time, while I wasn't always working on it, I was always refining the concepts and figuring out exactly what I want to do.
Now comes the great push to finish this game. Barring unforeseen problems, my goal is to have it done by the time summer begins. A lot of that will simply be working on environment art and fleshing out the map, though I also need to do some more enemies and npcs and powers.
What's up there?
That poor soul looks familiar
Four way intersectioncenter]
Thorny proposition[/center]
Ghost song is my obsession, I believe in it strongly, and, in my opinion, it's much more ambitious than the majority of flash based games out there. It's a labor of love that can be traced back to the days of my childhood, when I, (like probably many other kids) simply knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if *I* could make a game, I could make a great one.
Oh, and one more thing. 3.0 rescued my game. This began as a 2.2 project, but I was running into more and more performance issues given the ambitious nature of the presentation and all the actors I wanted to use. I had sort of shelved it, until I decided to get 3.0 beta and move the game over. Now, this initially went very badly, as the game project wasn't surviving the transition without loads of bugs and gremlins and problems. Reluctantly, I decided to risk some of my time by reassembling my game from scratch in 3.0. This paid off, big time, because in doing so not only did I improved on the game's handling and mechanics, but I also found that I truly could use more actors in a scene with a more stable performance. Early in my time with 3.0 I conducted a number of stress tests and shared them with the 3.0 forums. I did such things as battle over 100 enemies at once (and these aren't simple enemies at all) or run a scene with over a thousand "dumb actors" (terrain actors with no code, visual only). 3.0 still has a few bugs, but it's hard to complain when it's making my project possible.
I'll be posting more in coming weeks and months.
