I’ll keep this brief so it’s not too spammy for just one game.

I’m working with Over00 (and two lovely artists) to create a game for the October challenge. We’re making an RPG because we’re crazy. Well, my pseudonym is “Psychochild”, so it fits…

The game’s name is The Fae’s Wyrd; fae meaning faerie (fairy) or elfin, wyrd meaning fate or future. It’s also a pun on “the fae is weird”. Over00 challenged me to explain why it’s not a roguelike: it’s not because you’re going to be controlling a party, not a single character. The focus will be more on combat rather than solving neat puzzles, although that might come along in sequels that can be developed over more time.

This is also the first public project for a my new company, Psychoavatar. (I told you we were crazy!) Hopefully this first project won’t kill us.

Anyway, I’ll probably be posting a bit on my game development blog as we progress and I’ll post the game up on here when it’s done. Anyway, thanks to the fine folks here for giving a challenge to get us into motion.

Tags: flash, psychoavatar, psychoavatar games, RPG, the faes wyrd

(Cross posted from An RPG in a month.)

So, what’s happening at Psychoavatar? As I mentioned, we’re working on an RPG in a month for October. So, I figured I’d do a “developer’s diary” type entry. Won’t be daily, but I figure a few postings to give a glimpse at what an accelerated development schedule looks like might be interesting. Not that I shouldn’t be working on it instead….

First some organization

One of the first things I did was to settle out tasks between us and set up some tools to help. Dave is working on the visual part of the game, I’m doing the behind-the-scenes gameplay stuff, Kat’s working on tiles and logos, and Sara’s doing player and enemy art. I also set up email addresses for us on the psychoavatar.com domain, and set up a wiki to organize planning for the game.

I’ve actually been holding on to the psychoavatar.com domain for a while. A quick “whois” entry shows that I

I’m pretty old-school in my design style, so I started with Word documents. I’ve slowly grown to accept wikis as an alternative, but there’s still some problems with them. The biggest is that there is a mild level of technical proficiency required, which can discourage people from using it. But, it can also make changes to the system easier than passing around a Word document if you have multiple people who need to edit the same document. Wikis do seem to be more useful as the team grows, so I guess using a wiki for a team of four people shows some optimism in that I hope we’ll grow from here.

The next choice was which wiki software to use. I settled on WackoWiki because it’s fairly lightweight. It also has a few nifty features, like “clusters” (which I just call subpages) that help make organization easier. It also has an editor to help you with syntax, even though it isn’t quite WYSIWYG as WikiMatrix claimed it was. Overall, I think it’s working well.

Now for some design

The next step is to figure out how much of an RPG we can make in a month. I pretty much took charge here since I’m going to be doing the behind-the scenes work. I came up with an informal list of features I wanted, including:

• A party of characters
• Elemental advancement
• Randomized levels
• Randomized loot
• A simple set of spells

Then I set about fleshing out some details. One goal is to separate out the core design and implementation from the data that keeps it interesting. So, for example, I might detail a system where weapons have “ranks” to determine their power and how weapons can have randomized bonuses (so you can get a “short sword of Fire” instead of a normal short sword), but I’m going to wait to define all of those bonuses until the infrastructure is in place. I’ve also prioritized the features, so if time runs short we can decide to cut something.

I also wrote a very brief “backstory” for the game. Nothing epic, just something to explain why you’re trudging through the dungeon to no certain end.

A question of art

Given that we have a month, a fully realized 3D world ain’t happening. Not that you could do that in Flash very well, mind you. So, there has been some discussion about what style we want to use. We’ve settled on a faux-8-bit style. Something a bit more colorful than the true 8-bit games, perhaps comparable to the older version of Spelunky. This is good because it allows the artists to crank out a good variety of art, but it still appealing to more modern tastes.

We’re also working on some logos. You can see a preliminary logo for Psychoavatar on our website. Thanks to Kat for throwing that together quickly.

Current status

So far, things seem to be on track. Dave has completed some random level generation and a basic loading screen. You’ll also note that he’s working on a second game by himself, truly earning the “psycho” part of the company name for himself.

Art is being produced. Sara has created several variations for the player art: male and female, different types of armor, etc. Kat has also created a tileset we can use to create initial dungeons. Lots more art to work on here.

As for me, I finished the design last week and started working on the gameplay code. My goal is to get the basic infrastructure done this week, spend next week inputting data and tweaking gameplay to get a good game, then get something playable by the 24th. I’ll probably post a call for testers on here and on my Twitter feed, so it might be a good time to start following me.

(Also, feel free to leave comments here or on my blog.)

(Cross-posted from: my own blog.)

Time for another installment of the developer diaries. When we last left our heroes, they had a plan: make an RPG, The Fae’s Wyrd, in a month. This is the part where the plan goes off the rails.

Everything takes longer than you expect

I knew making an RPG in a month was crazy. I think most people understand that on an intellectual level. But, it’s different when you’re in the middle of it and you’re up to your neck in it. Looking at that TODO list, which seems to be growing every time to realize another hole in the design, is daunting. I wanted to get the basic infrastructure done last week, then spend this week adding the content. Next week would be polish, candy, and rainbows.

I’m not horribly off-schedule yet, but every day counts when you’re trying to do something in a month. I’ve gotten a lot done, but the code is largely untested since Dave has been slow getting the display and interface code done (more on that in a minute). I’m pretty sure the gameplay code does what I want, but I was hoping to test it as I went along. In retrospect, I probably should have written some simple test harnesses to make sure things work as I expected them to.

The other issue I’m grappling with is how future-proof I want to make my code. For example, in the full design spells can take multiple types of mana from the four basic elements (Fire, Air, Earth, Water). For this initial game, I’ve simplified the spells down to 8 that take only one mana to cast (4 light magic, 4 dark magic). But, in the spell casting mechanics, should I use this assumption that there will only be one point of mana required, or do I assume a spell could have multiple mana points as a cost? In general, I’ve tried to plan ahead with my code, but I suspect that has contributed to me being late.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

I’m not a huge Beatles fan, but I do enjoy that quote from John Lennon.

So what about that wacky French Canadian working with me? Foolishly, he decided to make some personal games in addition the crazy task of making an RPG in a month. Obviously he’s insane enough to fit in the company.

The problem is that another of his single-player games has been demanding some of his time even though he had finished it. The good news is that he found a sponsor for a game, and has officially made $100. Hooray! Not a huge amount of money, but it’s an important step. The bad news is that he then spent a lot of time customizing the game for the sponsor. It was only a matter of adding a sponsor logo and a few buttons to go to the sponsor’s site, but it was new territory for Dave and took some time. On top of that, the sponsor provided assets that didn’t work well in our development environment. Instead of splashing out money for the Flash authoring tool (or, worse, pirating it), we’re using the free tool FlashDevelop. It’s a great program and I highly recommend it, but it’s not quite as easy to use when doing things like embedding .SWF files into your project. I’ll let Dave post about the technical details, since I only know them secondhand. Needless to say, this ate up a few nights of his time, so his side of the work has fallen behind as well. On the bright side, he’s expanded his skill set and if we need to do this on future projects he’s going to be better able to handle it.

Changes in business

So, as you might remember, part of the reason we’re doing an RPG in a month is for a game development challenge. The important part of the challenge is to make money (“sell 1 copy”) of the game. Our goal was to use the wonderful FlashGameLicense.com to find a sponsor. We accepted that this might take longer than the end of the month, but it seemed to be the best way.

But, then Dave found a blog post from a Flash developer entitled Flash game sponsorship dead? In the post, a rather experienced developer explains the trials and tribulations faced in trying to find exclusive sponsors for relatively high-end games. Dave had experienced something similar with his first game, a wonderful, Halloween appropriate, zombie-themed game that fits within the world of his brower MMO Golemizer. He has what I think is fairly original gameplay and it’s a lot of fun, even if he uses the same type of sprites as from his game (meaning, not lush original art). But, while his game seemed to get a fair amount of attention and plays from potential sponsors, in the end the best bid was $100 for a non-exclusive sponsor.

Now, maybe there are extenuating circumstances here. Maybe the original poster having trouble finding a sponsor has upset too many potential sponsors. Maybe the game isn’t striking the right chord with potential sponsors. Maybe Dave was having some problems since he was a new and unknown quantity. Or, perhaps the market has changed and big-ticket exclusive sponsorships are a thing of the past. At any rate, it’s another concern to note as we go forward. In the long term, however, I definitely want to get back into MMOs, and I understand the business models for those games a lot more than I understand them for sponsoring single-player Flash games.

About the artists

Not much to report on the art side of the game. They’ve produced some great work and it’s helping the game come together. The art schedule is proceeding according to the original plan, but there are always little, “Oh, we also need…” situations arising. Although one of the artists is taking some night classes and the other has a part-time job with unpredictable demands, which is keeping both of them busy. But, I think that the art portion of the project is going smoother than the programming.

Will our heroes make it?

We still have a week and a half left of this month. I think we’re not going to make the literal requirement for the competition: finish and sell a game by the end of the month. I think it’s possible we’ll finish the game by the end of the month, assuming Dave doesn’t have to make more changes to an existing game and focuses on this project! 😉 This game is interesting enough to me that I think we’ll finish it release it even if we miss the deadline, but it might be something you see in the next few months instead of the next few weeks.

Taking a look at the current situation, I see the biggest specific risks as being: bugs in the existing code, having a surprise art requirement, and just not finishing the code in time for the deadline.

As always, feel free to ask questions or post them on my blog’s comments. I’ll answer if I’m not too busy debugging or harassing Dave to get work done.

Tags: psychoavatar, psychoavatar games, the faes wyrd