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I’ve finally finished setting everything up and the game is available to download and buy. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if people like it.

I’ve written a lot on this blog about the game but there’s so much more I haven’t said. So many subtle changes that we have made since Dawn’s Light, as well as some not so subtle changes.

We considered making a smaller, cheaper game after Dawn’s Light because I worry that with all the $7 games out there, people will be less willing to take a risk with a more expensive game.

In the end though, we decided to just make the game we wanted to make and let people make up their own mind whether it’s worth spending a little more.

Here’s some links:

More Info

Download Demo

Buy Full Version

We released Dawn’s Light: A Christmas Tale at the end of last year. It ended up being so much fun that we plan to do another free Christmas themed game this year.

Aislingyngaio played through the game recently and was kind enough to write a walkthrough. But this isn’t just a walkthrough, it also features Aislings thoughts on the events that occur. It’s very entertaining, even if she does point out things that are supposed to be a secret.

Hello Harvey.

http://houseofngaio.byethost6.com/?p=3163

The beta testers have been doing a great job so far. As soon as I finish fixing a long list of problems I just go back to the beta forum and get a new long list. It seems like it might never end!

Double Beta

This beta test is pretty rough on the testers since they’re not only testing the game content, they are also testing the new menus and battle system which each have their own share of bugs. Hopefully they won’t grow to despise the game by the time they get done.

All the testers have been very patient, even when I  put up a new version that fixes a broken door that leads to a broken room. Not all bugs are bad though, like potions not going away when you use them. That one is fixed now … take that beta testers!

A picture!

Here’s a screenshot of something I just added.

Jade posted a comment about not knowing which potion to use before choosing it and I finally came up with a solution. Now when you point at a potion, instead of saying “Heal a party member for 25hp”, the description text will go away and you’ll be able to see how much the potion will heal. Thanks Jade, I never thought about that before.

Back to beta

Next things on my list are getting the map menu working, fixing the light puzzles that broke at some point for no reason at all and fixing more bugs.

It’s hard to keep coming up with a new blog every day but I don’t care! I’m doing it! Plus it helps with our google ranking. =)

So for today’s exciting blog I’m going to tell you what I’m doing. I’m just starting work for the day which is usually when I write blogs. Mostly because it’s easier than working on the game. But on the plus side, after I finish I’ve already done something so it’s easier to transition into work.

Each night before I stop working I write a list of jobs for the next day. If I start the day without a list I get a lot less done than if I have a nice list. I’ve also noticed a link between the prettyness of the list and how much I get done.

So here’s my list for today:

Put real data in the menus

If you’ve seen the menu screens you may have noticed the placeholder text. Now I get to go through each menu and put in the final text. I also need to use real party data so when you open the party menu it will show your real party members and their hp and so on.

Finish last menu screens

There’s a few menu screens that still need some work. The biggest ones are the equip screen and the party swapping screen. The equip screen has been put off because I couldn’t decide on a layout. The party swapping has been delayed because it needs to work with keyboard or mouse but I’ve figured it out now.

Skill and state data

The battle system is pretty close to finished. There’s nothing big left to do, mostly just small fixes and improvements. So now I need to fill in all the data for skills and states. We still have a couple of special moves and team moves to figure out so I’ll probably make Andrew help me with that later.

So I should probably get started now

Now that I have my list of jobs for the day I have no reason to not get started but don’t worry, I’ll think of something! If I do get all of these jobs done I’ll be quite pleased but it’s more likely that I’ll hit a roadblock and spend ages on one small thing. But at least that small thing will end up being awesome!

Armor Slots

Each character in Lilly and Sasha will have 6 slots to equip items.

Weapon – Gives strength and dexterity

Armor – Gives defense and agility

Charm – Gives spirit and luck

Trinket – Something interesting

Quick Rune – Changes your quick move

Strong Rune – Changes your strong move

Stats

So as you can see we have 6 stats spread over 3 slots. Here’s what the stats do:

Strength – Damage increase, all damage is the same now

Dexterity – Increases your chance of getting a critical hit. The difference is that there are now various levels of critical hits. So you might get a 20% bonus or a 50% bonus depending on your dexterity.

Defense – Same as ever, reduces damage taken

Agility – Changes turn order which is much more important now than in Dawn’s Light

Spirit – Changes stamina and health regen rates, increases team power gain rate. (I might rename this one)

Luck – More chance for trinkets and runes that have a chance to do something. Get more money and xp from quests and more chance to get items.

What’s Stamina

In another attempt to streamline battles, we’re removing mana. Mana is pretty annoying, if you want to use your best moves and end battles quickly you’ll run out of mana and have to use potions. On the other hand if you have no limits on what moves you can use why would you ever use quick move? You wouldn’t. That’s why we have stamina.

Stamina is only used in battle. You will start each battle with full stamina no matter what you ended the last battle with. Each move will use a different amount of stamina and you gain stamina back after each turn. Quick move uses only a little bit of stamina so you will get more back than you use.

But I’m not even tired

If you use up all of your stamina you will be ‘exhausted’ and miss one turn. You will gain stamina back on that turn which means you’ll be ready to go again. Even if you only have 1 stamina left you’ll be able to use a move that costs 30 stamina. I think it makes for a more interesting decision. If you can finish the enemy off in one strong hit it won’t matter that you’ll become exhausted.

The plan is for stamina to get rid of the annoyance of mana but at the same time remove boring strategies like using one move over and over because it does the most damage. Will it work? That remains to be seen.

Next time I’ll talk about the visuals of the battle system.

Making a good turn based battle system is pretty tricky. A lot of games resort to having 100 moves that are pretty much the same except one does more damage to ants and one does more damage to trees but that’s not something I want to make.

So what we have made is something quite different. I said a while back in the blog that I wanted to streamline the battle system and this is how I plan to do that.

This is the move select menu. The reason it has this shape is so you can reach any move with just one key press. So instead of pressing down three times you just press right. The options are quick attack, heavy attack, special, use item and use a team move. You won’t choose skill and then choose a move any more.

Quick, Strong and Special! That’s it?

So you may worry that there’s only 3 moves you can use but there’s more to it than that. Your quick and strong moves can be changed by using runes. You’ll have slots in your equip menu to place these. So instead of choosing from 11 different moves in battle you’ll set up your moves before battle. It also means you can set up synergies between your characters to work off of each others moves.

Runes will do things like add splash damage to your attack or heal you for part of the damage done. I’m trying to make a lot of them so you’ll really get to build your own strategy and not just use the one I designed.

Special Attacks

So now you might think that all characters will be the same except for the runes they use. That’s not true at all. Each character will have different stats which make some runes better than others. Each character also has a unique special move which is always more than just a damage attack

Team Moves

Then you’ll have your team moves. There’s a party meter that builds up each time you do attacks. When it fills up you’ll be able to use a team move. This means selecting another character to team up with to do a more powerful attack. Each combination of 2 characters will have a unique team move.

Trinkets

The final thing affecting your moves will be trinkets. We had these in Dawn’s Light but now we can do a lot more with them. You’ll just have to wait and see what they are.

Fingers crossed

Hopefully all of this will work as well as it does it my mind. Most of the battle system is done but I’d need to play with it for a while to try out all of this stuff. We’re also having difficulty settings this time so if you just want quick easy fights you can have them.

Next time I’ll talk about stats and armor.

There’s a lot of work to be done on Project Viper and I’m really trying to get it done. There is however a problem. There’s this guy who seems to be intent on making the game take longer to release. He does everything in his power to stop me from getting work done. Why is he doing this? I have no idea.

Yep, that’s the guy and yes, he is always that dirty. He may be small but don’t let that fool you. His powers of distraction and interruption are unmatched.

One of his tactics is to take his ball and throw it so it rolls under a desk. If it doesn’t make it, he will “accidentally” push it under with his nose. Once it gets far enough under that he can’t reach it he will yell at me until I get it for him. So of course I do and as soon as I look away he does it again.

I’ve tried to catch him but that’s impossible. He’s just too small and too slippery. So I give in and play his little games. We become friends and then my sister gets home and it’s like I never existed. Then I remember what work I was supposed to do that day and I end up staying up really late working while he’s sound asleep.

But do I get to sleep a little longer the next morning? no because he jumps on me until I wake up. Then he tells me that he “accidentally” put his ball under the desk…

A Serious Approach

We’ve decided to take a more serious approach with this game. Harvey and friends were all very hilarious (at least I hope they were) with their interesting perspective on things The problem was that they often took the more serious aspects of the game a little too lightly, which might have taken away from the atmosphere of important scenes.

For this reason, we’ve decided to make the characters in Project Viper more serious. They are a little more sophisticated and they don’t erupt into spontaneous free-for-all verbal altercations at every given opportunity.
Having said that, I soon realized how boring a 100% dead serious game would be. There’s only so long you can remain serious when writing out a quest involving tracking down somebody’s fugitive Grammy who sneaks out of the house every time they leave the front door open.

A Semi-Serious Approach

I was in the middle of making my first side mission and I realized just how boring they were being and how the main character just said the same thing over and over again. I’ve made this one especially terrible on purpose, but here’s an example of how starting a quest would have went:

Person: I’m in trouble.
Main Character: What’s wrong?
Person: I have to get a souvenir from each town but there are monsters on the way.
Main Character: Oh no, how terrible.
Person: Please get them for me.
Main Character: I’m busy.
Person: PLEASE.
Main Character: Alright.

That’s pretty much how every quest would have to go, because normal people don’t really have anything interesting to say when it comes to side missions.
It was at this point that I decided that the side missions could serve as the less serious part of the game and the weird conversations could come more from the people that you meet instead of from your own party. It’s sort of like if Harvey was handing out a side quest.

Still Exciting

Of course, while the game is more serious now, my plan is to still make it exciting. You won’t have to put up with never ending conversations with people where they have some kind of loop set up and they keep repeating the same information OVER and OVER again. Some games I’ve played have dialogue that seems like a first draft. As if they just wrote the dialogue for the first time, right into the game and left it.

We use a process that involves revising and re-writing a lot of the cutscenes to make them a lot shorter and to remove a lot the things that don’t need to be said.

My writing process goes like this:

• Take a scene from the storyboard.
• Work out the main points that need to be said.
• Do a first rough draft of the scene.
• Read through the scene and make sure no information is missing. I also need to make sure that each character is getting a chance to participate and that the characters are saying things that fit with their personality.
• After a few passes the scene is finished.

All of this is usually done between the two of us. We both read the dialogue and make sure there aren’t any things that need to be changed.

You find that you can remove a lot of the boring stuff and condense it into a few sentences. Sometimes conversations can even be cut down to half of their original length.

Where would you like to see us take the dialogue in the future? Would you rather a more serious story, or more of a casual, fun story? Do you think that conversations should be short or do you think people should have more time to talk?

Christmas is gone now and that means our Christmas game is getting less and less downloads each day. I thought this would be a good time to write a quick review of how it went.

More Traffic

We were pleased to see many sites mentioning the game either in their Christmas game roundups or just as a separate news item. This got us some fresh traffic from people who had never even heard of Dawn’s Light which definitely helped us with the next thing.

More sales for Dawn’s Light

Soon after we released Christmas Tale, our Dawn’s Light sales picked up. Not quite to where it was when we first released it but enough to make the time spent on Christmas Tale worth it.

Knowing that people had played about 5 hours of content in Christmas Tale and then buying Dawn’s Light was a good feeling. Instead of just playing a short demo they got to really see what our games are like and they wanted more.

Christmas Spirit

This was my favorite part. We received many great comments and emails telling us that they loved the game and wishing us Merry Christmas. It was really a great way to spend Christmas.

Since this went so well, I would love to do it again this year. Maybe we could do a free game every Christmas and include characters from whatever games we made that year.

We’ve finished our new game … and it’s free!

Way back in July when we were still working on Dawn’s Light I had the idea of doing themed games. We first wanted to do a Halloween game but Dawn’s Light took a bit longer than expected. The next option was of course Christmas. So we’ve been working on this whenever we needed a break from Project Viper in the last couple of months.

With the Christmas season lasting only a few weeks, we couldn’t really justify doing a full game based on Christmas. Instead we decided to make a Christmas mini game. Being a mini game meant that we could try a few new things that we couldn’t on Dawn’s Light.

We hope you enjoy the game and stay tuned for more news on … Project Viper!