Kept you waiting huh?

But seriously, I’ve been pretty busy and secretive as of late. But I’m not here to regale you with my plights; you’re here to read about game design are you not? 

While fooling around with the game, I was thinking about the way combat looks. And it turns out that I haven’t actually put too much thought as to how the battle screen looked. The previous idea was to just keep the earthbound aesthetic from One Night at the Steeze, essentially an animated background with an enemy sprite. While I don’t think of it as the inferior look, the reason for assuming that battle screen was because how simple it was to set up. The only asset to make there is the custom, enemy sprite as there’s more room for detail in that. And that would be it if I didn’t have the realization that a different battle screen would be better.

The side battlers setup! This lets me to add more visual flair to who does what in battle. The only caveat with this is the addition of another sheet of animation for each sprite pose, which I am willing to bear the burden on.

There’ll be more from me soon, and October’s gonna be a busy month.

Y'know, I didn’t really relate my thoughts in the previous journal to the Derpy game…

So Imma do that right now. The Marriage of Mechanics to Narrative is exemplified most in games that provide a more of an experience than a straight on game. Mostly because leading a player through an experience leaves a different, substantial impact in the long run. The main concept of the game I want to convey is “Struggles of Everday Life”, as seen through the eyes of a mother, in this case Derpy.

I wanted to take advantage of the myriads of fanon theories out there and create a happy medium between show accuracy and the events and humor that could be expanded on. The daily lives of the ponies of Ponyville or in the world of Equestria, is an interesting topic because there are many scenes in the show that showcase these everyday ponies, each going about their business with a variety of jobs; this begs the question, “How does Equestria work?” Are there contruction ponies? Are they all educated, or do some not goes through the complete annals of education? If that’s the case, are there teacher ponies, and Department of Education ponies, and civil services ponies, etc., etc. And yes, some of this curiosity stems from the fascination of these adorablely designed ponies (looking at you Bulk Biceps) wearing different sets of worker apparel, but the show conveys this facet of the world in such an interesting light that it kinda succeeds in making the mundane look fantastical.

Let’s go back to Derpy for a moment. In fact, let’s go back to game design for a sec too, because the way games explore concepts like this is interestingly done in Life Sims to varying degrees of success. Harvest Moon, being a nearly pure life sim, lets the player make their own story as they spend time maintaining their farm and interacting with the town’s NPCs, while many of the combative JRPG elements are stripped away, it allows the player to color their experience with the town and world of Harvest Moon as they pleased. The exploration in that game is then placed within these 2 avenues of play- self improvement via farming, and interaction with the locals. These mesh together well, because, while they are separate parts of the game, each contributes to a small sense of progress in terms of the depth of the systems that allow players to set their own goals, whether its clearing your field, or getting jiggy with some of those local honeys (still lookin at you Bulk Biceps). This makes you naturally feel like a part of the world, as you are, essentially, trying to get by in. Work to make ends meet so to say.

Here, we’re gonna explore the relationship between Derpy and her daughter, Dinky and their unique dynamic in their lives in Ponyville. We have ponies all around going about their business, working in the ways they want to work; so what if we add a JRPG + Life Sim elements and mix it according to the “Marriage of Mechanics and Narrative” philosophy? How will it affect their everyday lives and the ponies around them?

That’s the kind of game I’m making.
<strike>Single Mom Simulator 2016</strike>
But really, I need to come up with a better title. @~@

Let’s talk about game design. Rather, let’s talk about a certain game design “philosophy”- The Marriage of Game Mechanics and Narrative.

Instead of referring to a ceremony with puffy dresses and stuff, this use of the word marriage here basically means “tying” these 2 concepts in game design together to facilitate an experience that both contributes to the player’s immersion with the game world and have the player think and interact in depth with the mechanics without the player even realizing it.

Fancy language aside, by designing your game’s mechanics around this philosophy, you would probably lessen the disconnect the player would feel during play when they start to see the rules and limitations of the game AS they are. A perfect example of this disconnect would be in Pokemon, in any of the games, HMs are a necessary part of navigating the world, but in terms of battle (the primary method of encounters) HMs are mostly not very viable.
So what do some trainers do?
Assign a HM slave of course!
Just pop in to the nearest patch of grass and catch yourself a Bidoof and BOOM. You got a wild animal to delegate all your navigational needs to. But is this what Pokemon as a game, wants you to do? Pokemon really sells the experience of being a pokemon trainer, someone who works in tandem with pokemon to be the very best, yada yada, but the way this human-pokemon relationship is portrayed in game is massively different from how we mechanically treat the encounter design.
“My Charizard has been my longtime companion and friend! And I’ve met so many other pokemon too!”
…
“Oh here’s Bidoof. He gets us around.”
“Scares away the Zubats too.”
From this, the player’s traversal on the map is trivialized in favor of freeing up your move slots for combat. That’s probably why there’s always some cognitive dissonance that comes whenever someone picks up a new pokemon game, the mechanics allow for endless grinding to strengthen your pokemon while the narrative usually puts you in contrast to the enemy Team that presumably uses pokemon forcefully or against their pokemon’s will; cuz really, what you’re doing is kinda similar when you break it down in reality. But to us, the player, we aren’t doing this out of malevolent intent (hopefully), we’re doing this because these mechanics are the tools the game gives us to experience the world and its narrative.

Now this isn’t to bash the Pokemon games for some flaws in design, in fact they sorta singlehandedly managed to carry the JRPG genre through the past 2 decades even when video games were going through different trends and dimensions. So to even it out, here’s an example of when Pokemon did live up to the Marriage of Mechanics to Narrative Philosophy.

Gary. Blue. Or Buttface, whatever you called your rival in the OG games, was a recurring combat encounter that would often show up as your were visiting different cities. What made his encounters so different from every other encounter was that he was basically setting up a benchmark for you to shape up your team to as it’s a requirement to fight him multiple times throughout the game, each time progressively getting harder and harder, and his team was probably as varied as yours was (minus the HM slave) so you had to meet that challenge on your own terms. Narrative-wise, he was your rival, always one step ahead and ready to but heads with you whenever you meet. While the game was training you to step up your level of play, you were wrapped in the narrative of 2 rival trainers keeping each other on their toes. To beat the game, you have to level up your pokemon and make a good team and a good test of that is to beat someone else with your team, thus unlocking the next area to explore. This is difficulty ramping taken to a more subtle level, and one of the best things about it is that it drew players into interacting with the game on that level because it was tied to a narrative approach to guiding someone through the game. Then your immersion with the game and its world creates a more enjoyable experience, which is really what most game designers want out of the player. And the best part about it was that the player was self-motivated to follow through with it.

That’s what’s up.

PS The school year has started once again so that takes up a chunk of my time throughout the week, but I hope to keep up with the updates on game development as much as I can. Thanks!

Let’s talk about movement, or rather, means of traversal and how that affects how the player sees the world.

Before I start a project, I usually make a proof of concept (I call it dummy) project first just to see if I can actually implement the features and mechanics I want to have. I wanted to use the same sprite style from the Spike’s Day Off/Out, but i realized that while I was able to construct a decently sized “world“ just from 2d maps, I thought that there might be a way to create a map with both an X and Y axis while preserving the 2d perspective of the sprites… then I realized there was a game that had implemented that map design successively in each iteration.

Paper Mario.

Looking at a standard map of most Paper mario games, I also realized that 2d brawlers also pulled this off, albeit using only a single lane. in this case, Paper mario had the advantage of using its maps for exploration and spectacle, That, and adding mario’s jump gives the map another axis to work with, giving the illusion of 3d space. I am aware that the game’s maps were an actual 3d map with 2d characters to accentuate the paper aesthetic, but the same was achieved with classic brawlers, of which thrived on their raster graphics.

So maybe the same an be done here with Derpy and co.

Above is an image of the dummy/prototype wherein Derpy and an additional party member are walking on a 2-way floor, just to see if the 2d perspective holds up, similar to Dreaming Mary if anyone has played it. I then added one of the default maps to test out the 2-axis movement, and… it needed a few tweaks but it was serviceable- definately doable. Trying this out actually gave me a better idea of what those games did to make travesal seem more natural and more open.

But coming to a set decision, I believe using both kinds of map designs could sell the town ponyville. (the 1 dimensional and 2d, 2-axis approach).

Deuces

Imma try something I've always wanted to do, that is, make a walk-through/Dev Log for an upcoming game I'm slowly abstracting. Basically give you guys my thought process(es) and methods I go through to hobble together these games I seem to be able to chug out. From initial thoughts to coding problems to playtesting, I wanna share what it's like to make a video game, because I really want to show that making games, from complex RPGs to simple point and clicks, is not as high of a goal to reach nor is it as esoterically complex as it seems to be. Basically this is to serve as a record for other budding developers or the curious onlooker to take note of and hopefully learn from.

So the game currently in works now is another RPGmaker game. After playing around with it and using the engine as intended, classic RPG and all, I'm thinking I can pull off some new tricks with it, ie. different perspectives new mechanics, etc.!

The game's working title isn't a really solid thing right now, but as a heads up, it's gonna be another MLP fangame, starring wall-eyed pegasus herself-

DERPY! *thunderously orgasmic applause*

Regardless of its reception, the episode "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?" brought all the setup of the Luna's powers over dreams and the dreamworld to the forefront and created a setting with so much possibility that- yes, a game can be made that's inspired by it! (O__O) /)3

Here's the elevator pitch breakdown: We all dream. Psychology dictates what we see in dreams relate to your life in the waking world. Most of the time, this is to help us deal with what life throws at us. The thing is, we all deal with issues differently- and that's what causes some problems. Using MLP's concept of the dreamworld and what has influence over it, I hope to explore that premise through the lens of a JPRG format.

Sound familiar? That's because that's what the acclaimed Persona series of games explores! While Atlus blows the JRPG genre out the water most of the time, the RPG holds a special place in established game tropes, so much so, that delivering a story through its world and mechanics can almost be universally understood when picking it up. While this may or may not be a good thing, using it as a vehical for an interactive experience is something that must never be underestimated.

So... Derpy-sona? Muffins-RPG? Dreamin' Derpy? Told you, the title's a work in progress and so is the game!
I hope to be able to share more of my thoughts on this next post!

Deuces

(I'm gonna be running this on tumblr too so check that out!)
cheesesteak-horror.tumblr.com/

I normally operate from deviantart, but since newgrounds was my genesis, I'll concurrently post some experimental games, concepts, which I can link to my other sites.

I look forward to entertaining you all.