As we all know, 2020 has been rife with crises and challenges, not the least of which is COVID-19. You probably don’t need me to go into much more detail. A horrible illness has swept across the world spreading anxiety, death, and isolation. Circa March, most of us stopped going out or seeing anyone who didn’t live under our roof. The lucky among us are still healthy, but probably spending most of their time at home while socially distancing from most of their friends and family. But in the midst of all this, I must point out one personal boon that has come from my experience:
This is an amazing time to be working on Crimson Spires.
Crimson Spires is about the isolation of a small town, the collapse of human reason, and the vampiric nature of capitalism upon the lower rungs of the working class. While all of these problems are being highlighted in the real world, Malcolm and I have been exploring these themes within the narrative of Crimson Spires.
For these reasons and more, we can’t wait to share this story with the rest of the world. We hope it will be a source of catharsis, reflection, and entertainment in the midst of these dark times.
We are currently aiming for a release date of October 27, 2020, the week of Halloween! Thank you for bearing with us as we continue to work on the game; we know we have pushed the release date so many times! We will push it again if we must in order to ensure that this game is the best it can be. But we can’t wait to share this game with you all, and we will do our best to make that happen soon!
Greetings everyone! It’s a new year full of fresh hope and inspiration. Last year brought a lot of challenges for our endeavors at Woodsy Studio. But this year we’re determined to release Crimson Spires and are working hard to complete our best visual novel yet.
Crimson Spires is such a big game that it was easy for us to get lost in fine-tuning minor aspects of the game indefinitely. Over the last few months, we realized that we needed to focus on what mattered most: writing. So we have been passionately writing the remaining romance paths for the story, and thus made significant progress towards finishing the script. Once the script is complete, blocking out the remainder of the scenes in the game should go relatively fast.
Unfortunately, switching so much of the focus to writing the main story and the various romantic branches has led us to scope down somewhat on the exploration and side stories. We’re still deciding where we’ll go with them, but for now we know the most important thing is the story between Erika and her chosen partner. One of the reasons we’ve had to shift more of our attention to the script has been that we realized that these individual branches needed to be much longer than we initially anticipated. Developing Erika’s relationship with each character–especially some of the more sinister ones–required more scenes and a slower pace. Since there are four major paths, this dramatically increased the amount of writing and the full script will be by far the longest we’ve ever completed!
Given the nature of writing a large story, it’s challenging to share regular posts and updates about the progress of the script! We’re far enough into the plot that it’s full of spoilers. So even if we’re quiet, rest assured that we’re still working hard and developing this game towards completion.
Meanwhile, we are able to offer a dramatic scene from the game’s main story path, giving you a big preview of what’s to come. This is a major moment in the main story, when Erika first discovers the true nature of the Bataille family. It also introduces the voice talents of Abigail Turner, who we recently brought in as Maddy when the original VA was no longer available.
In that scene you might have also noticed some dynamic music. That’s because we’ve also added FMOD capabilities into the game, allowing us to seamlessly change the flow of music to match specific moments as you play. This is a new feature that should help with one of the major difficulties of scoring a visual novel: everyone reads at their own pace, so accentuating dramatic or light-hearted moments in an individual scene within a song is impossible without some amount of dynamic music control.
As we go along, we also continue to pick out important scenes for full VO and implement them. We’re very happy with all our actors, and we can’t wait until you can hear more of them! And with new highlighted scenes comes new CG art, which unfortunately also happens to be on the spoiler-y side. It’s hard to share progress in such a mysterious game as Crimson Spires!
We’ve also blocked out a number of new environments, including Bataille’s Dollar Store (which has been converted into a general store where the goods from the train are sold), a local bar built into a barn where the survivalist group Freedom’s Dawn meets, more houses, and a super secret area that we can’t even mention without spoiling the fun.
One good side effect of reducing the scope of explorable areas in the game has been how we construct some of our environments. With fewer concerns about whether certain parts of an area are traversable, we’ve been able to create more dramatic backgrounds for some of our most important scenes. We think for a game like Crimson Spires, this may be a trade-off that results in a more stylish and dramatic game.
As for Woodsy Studio’s other projects, they have regrettably had to be put on hold for the moment. We’d still love to bring Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament to consoles, but considering the scale of what we still have ahead of us with Crimson Spires, we’ve decided that we can’t promise that will happen in the near future. We know this may come as a let-down to folks who enjoyed The Fox’s Trail on PS4 or Xbox One, and we’re sorry that we haven’t been able to continue Sofya’s story on those platforms. This is something that we hope to revisit when Crimson Spires is more complete, so we hope you still stay tuned!
We wish we could give a stronger release window for Crimson Spires, but rest assured we’re committed to finishing the game and putting it out as soon as we feel it’s ready. We’re not used to having the script as a production bottleneck, so predicting exactly when that will be has been tricky. We will at least say that we plan to get it out this year!
Made in UE4, Crimson Spires blends horror with otome-style romance. First-person character control allows you to explore the stark town of Bataille, MO–a 3D environment inspired by PS2-era horror games–while experiencing an interactive story.
The small mining town of Bataille, Missouri has been cordoned off from the outside world for six months. The inhabitants have no idea why. All they know is that ever since the so-called “Contingency,” planes no longer fly overhead, strange creatures have been glimpsed beyond the perimeter, and large mechanical towers gun down anyone who tries to escape. As Sheriff Erika Wright searches for the truth, she must listen to the advice of a serial killer, mingle with extreme conspiracy theorists, and negotiate with vampires.
Expected Work and Payment
There are two types of dialogue for each character: expression lines and scene dialogue.
Expression lines are short, expressive lines of dialogue that occasionally play when a character speaks to punctuate their current emotion.
Payment is $0.50 per expression line, including all takes. Each character will probably have between 30-100 expression lines.
Scene dialogue is what you would expect: full lines from the script. Each “line” in this case is what appears on the screen for each dialogue block at a time, typically 1-3 sentences.
Payment is $0.75 per dialogue block, including all takes.
*Gustave: This character has only a few expression lines, and a long scene of scene dialogue.
*Important Note!* Please be aware that development on this project is ongoing and will likely continue into 2020. After initial recordings, we may occasionally need additional recordings until the project releases. We will do our best to work with your schedule accordingly.
Rating/Maturity
This game will contain adult language, violence, and sexual themes. We are not yet rated officially, but we expect to land in the Mature/R rating category. There will be F-bombs. Romance scenes might get a little racy, but not explicit. Please only audition if you are comfortable with that!
Audition Process
Please record the included audition lines for the roles that interest you and send them in either .wav or .mp3 format to jenny (at) woodsy-studio (dot) com. Please include your name and the character name in the files, such as “YourName_CharacterName.mp3”. Multiple takes and styles are highly encouraged so I have a good sense of your range. The last day to audition will be Saturday, Sept 7, 2019.
WHAT I LOOK FOR WHEN CASTING: When I cast voice actors, what I care about most is your ability to act. This is more important to me than vocal range, accent, or other secondary details. Although I generally don’t judge your audition on a resume or past roles, I find that it’s beneficial for voice actors to have theater experience, so feel free to mention that.
As for demonstrating your ability to act, try to fully embody the character your voicing and let their personality shine through every line. Major bonus points if you can somehow help me see the character in a new way I never even thought of before. Err on the side of feeding an audition line too much emotion rather than too little; I always know I can ask you to tone it down, but I don’t always know whether you can kick it up a notch (and do it well).
CHARACTERS!
Gustave
(Male, late 50s) Details on this character are somewhat limited, because they dive strongly into spoiler territory. But we can give you the following info:
Gustave was once a rich and refined man. He was born privileged, worked moderately to gain more wealth, and once in power, he perceived poverty as despicable weakness. He did not hesitate to use and abuse people beneath him to gain more power. He represents the worst of capitalist America.
In present day of the game, Gustave has since fallen into a mentally unhinged state. He has fits of uncanny rage in which he acts more like a beast than a man. Sometimes he has moments of clarity, enough to assume the shadow of his old self. He can even appear elegant and refined again. But in such times, he is still a monster in terms of greed, conceit, and trickery.
OVERALL PERSONALITY: Fakes civility and elegance to manipulate others, but he hides a raging beast within, hungry to escape. AGE: late 50s ACCENT: American
***********Audition Lines************ Line 1: (Smug, boastful) “I never actually went in the mines. Why would I? I could pay people to do that for me.” Line 2: (annoyed) “Quite frankly, I’m glad you were raised by the help. If I had done it myself, I’d be disappointed in myself.” Line 3: (beastly, angry) *Roar of hunger and rage*
Instructions (Refrain)
Once again, please record the included audition lines and send them in either .wav or .mp3 format to jenny (at) woodsy-studio (dot) com. Multiple takes and styles are highly encouraged so I have a good sense of your range. Please don’t just send an empty email with attachments; at least introduce yourself! The last day to audition will be Saturday, Sept 7, 2019.
Hey everyone! It’s been a while since we updated y’all on Crimson Spires and other Woodsy Studio goings-on, so we thought we’d put out a post on how summer has been going for us. First off, it has been very hot and very humid. There’s a lot of great things about living and working in St. Louis, but the summer is definitely not one of them. Not for us, and not for our studio’s dog, a husky who dramatically changes her opinion on walks for three+ months out of the year.
Mira in the summer sun
Other than that, summer has marked a slow down for us, which brings me to leading with our biggest piece of bad news. Crimson Spires has been delayed until 2020, likely closer to the middle of the year than the beginning of the year.
This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone following the project, as this is very clearly our most ambitious game. When we set out with this project, we thought that we would end up expanding the gameplay scope (to include 3D exploration) but have a similar-sized script to our Echoes of the Fey titles. We were incredibly wrong. Currently, the Crimson Spires script is approximately as long as Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament and we haven’t even written 2/4 paths. The paths in this game are considerably more unique than anything we’ve done before, so we’re probably looking at a script close to twice the size of Last Sacrament.
We’ve also hit other difficulties. In the past, we released an average of a game a year and now we’re at slightly over the one year mark for Crimson Spires. Our quick turnaround wasn’t just about getting money from releases (although that was a necessary factor), but also our own fickleness with projects. We work hard and then we burn out–typically after about a year. That happened, and it sucks.
Finally, we both found that we needed to find other financial support for our studio beyond game sales. A few things happened. First, we didn’t release a game this year (duh, that’s a problem). Second, changes were made late last year to the Steam algorithm for recommending games to users. This has caused a rather dramatic reduction in views and wishlists for indie developers across the board. Naturally, it hit us hard as a studio that really relied on Steam sales of back catalog titles.
The growing 3D landscape of Crimson Spires in UE4
Here’s the good news: we’re not done. You’ll notice we’re not cancelling anything, just pushing it back. And we hope that it will be even better for the delay. To help support us, Malcolm has been teaching game design at a local university and Jenny has begun a full-time job in web development. This is going to slow us down, but it’s also going to give us the resources to make Crimson Spires even better. We’ll be able to ship with more voice acting, for one thing. And we’re not too proud to admit that we’ll use some of the extra money on assets that can improve the world of Bataille, Missouri. We always tweak any assets we buy to fit our game, but it’s especially easy with a game set in (relatively) modern day in a (relatively) realistic style to find useful ways to speed up environmental development.
So, what have we done recently? The 3D world of Bataille is considerably more built-out and explorable. Julian’s path has been almost entirely added into the game project. Maddy’s path is halfway written. New art for new characters has been deployed on the project, some of which we’ve scattered throughout this post.
And we’ve also made sure to start taking better care of ourselves. Jenny’s new job allows her to treat working on Crimson Spires as more of a passion project and less of a piece of work she has to finish to keep the lights on. Malcolm took a quick breather this week to participate in the UE4jam, a four-day long game jam put on by Epic Games. You can see his game here. Both of us know that if we stay burnt out, we won’t be able to provide the story and experiences we want to.
We pride ourselves at Woodsy Studio on finishing games. We don’t start something and just let it wither and die. Crimson Spires is coming, we just ask for a little patience while we make it the best vampire/serial killer romance about late capitalism in the Midwest that it can be.
It’s time for another game development update! Over the last couple of months, we added a lot of exciting features to Crimson Spires and found ways to make our development process more efficient. You can view these changes in action by playing our free demo, available on itch.
COMIC BOOK PANELS
As we began to block out an exciting action sequence in the story, we came upon an all-too-common challenge. How do we suggest a large amount of movement and action within a scene while constrained by static 2D characters? Sometimes movement can be suggested with slides and camera shakes, but other times, those motions look silly and dampen the player’s imagination.
The character sprites can’t properly overlap in this situation…
We consulted a fellow artist who has taken an interest in the project, Mike Harvey, who gave us a great idea. We could take a lesson from comic books and use panels to suggest some action while leaving the rest to player imagination.
Panels show character talk over CG
With panels, we can catch a glimpse of off-screen characters with a more dramatic flare than the typical side-portrait. Scenes like the one above are still a bit tricky to set up, and we might need to keep tweaking it. But overall, panels will be a fun feature for us to play with to increase the drama and action of exciting scenes.
We can also use the panels to display minor characters in an abstract way. Long conversations with a minor character become more visually appealing if that character remains on screen.
PERFECTING A NOISE / FILM GRAIN
We’ve talked in the past about how we occasionally work in/adapt UE4 Marketplace assets to Crimson Spires, but usually that comes up when there is a very specific asset we need and we search to see if there is a sufficient existing version that would save us the time of making it ourselves. This time, something different happened.
Every month, UE4 offers a new set of free assets that all developers can claim and use in their projects. For May, they offered Chameleon Post Process, a blueprint that applies a set of post processing effects. We’ve had our own journey creating the camera effects in Crimson Spires, starting with using the UE4 Post Processing volume to apply film grain, then setting up our own custom effect using Post Processing Materials.
When we tried out the Chameleon effect, we discovered that it could easily do everything that our custom effect could and more. We could still have the scratchiness and CRT noise we apply regularly in the game, but we could also use it for a few other dramatic effects in individual scenes. This left us with a hard decision to make of whether to replace our Post Processing with Chameleon. We could have never known that this Blueprint would later become available to us when we did our initial post processing work, but it’s still hard to throw away stuff you’ve worked on. We eventually decided that the extra effects would be worth our begrudging acceptance that we didn’t have to make the effects ourselves a few months ago.
In-game screenshot with Chameleon film grain and rain droplets
Once the decision was made, we carefully went through and replaced our PP volumes with Chameleon, which revealed some inconsistencies with how we maintained our effects between our player camera and cinematic cameras. This problem would have sprung up eventually, and we’re glad we were prompted to fix it.
As some of you may know, we recently closed our Patreon because we weren’t sure how well we’d be able to maintain it with other life responsibilities getting in the way. But we enjoyed sharing our development process with our supporters, and we’d like to keep doing that in some fashion. So here’s our latest development log!
OBJECTIVES
Prepare new demo for release!
Compose new music for romantic moments
Change the colors of Jones’s outfit
Set up barns for use in the 3D environment
CHALLENGES
Down-sizing a Demo
In case you didn’t already know, we recently released our first public demo of Crimson Spires on itch.io! We were excited to share it with the world, but it took some work to prepare. This game will probably be our largest yet in every way, including memory size. We knew we would need to delete a lot of assets from the full game in order to trim the demo to a pallet-able snack size. And this meant deleting a LOT of assets.
To spare you many tedious technical details, I’ll just say that we had trouble deleting the correct assets without causing errors. Our first few build attempts were missing some important files, so they failed. It took several attempts to juggle files around before we got a build that worked. But we finally got it working, and now we’re really excited to receive feedback from people who try it out!
The Scandal of Jones’s Pants
We also had the pleasure of sharing our demo with a live audience this week. It was a great opportunity to watch reactions in real-time and gauge people’s reactions to the opening of the game. In a group setting, people’s reactions can be heightened and more apparent than an individual playing alone. People might voice thoughts and reactions to the group that would otherwise stay quiet. In this case, a lot of people in the room started laughing when Jones’s first appeared.
We’ve demoed the game before, but always with individuals playing the demo alone. Never before did we get the reaction we got this time: a lot of people laughing hysterically. And it’s because they thought Jones had no pants on!
I’m not sure if it was the size of the TV, the color settings, or if it’s just something that no one had ever commented on before. But it did, in fact, look like Jones’s had no pants! So naturally, after laughing along with everyone else, we got to work fixing this as quickly as possible.
Now Jones has nice blue jeans instead of skin-colored khakis. Someone also suggested we make his shirt red; it’s an inside joke you might get if you play through the demo 😉
De-Bugging Modular Assets
To help build out the world of Bataille, as well as provide some variety to the environment, we’ve ended up using a few content packs purchased from the UE4 asset store. We’re very careful adding these to our game, because we’re aware that haphazardly throwing together different modeling/texture styles can lead to an aesthetic mess. Whenever we use something purchased from the asset store, we go through all of the models and textures and make sure that they are sufficiently low-fi, often modifying them to fit the style we’ve already developed.
Even though this is time consuming in its own way, it still is probably faster than building everything from complete scratch, especially when it comes to modular content. What is modular content? Walls, doors, roofs, and other sections that can be combined to make custom buildings. These are incredibly helpful because (a) they’re usually easier to modify to match our style and (b) they can be used to make a variety of structures.
This week, we picked up a content pack specifically for building barns. Since a decent amount of Bataille is spread out and rural, it makes sense there would be a few farms in the area. Unfortunately, this pack was a little more difficult to use than the other two we’ve added to the project, specifically because of how it flipped certain meshes by using negative scale values. This isn’t something we like to do in our projects for some complicated reasons related to using instanced static meshes, so we had to manually edit several of the modular pieces and build our own actors within the game. It wasn’t a big deal, however, and now we’re ready to fill out some of the outskirts of Bataille with farms/abandoned barns.
Romantic Music for a Horror Game
A challenge we’ve often faced while working on this game is meshing the horror elements of the story with romantic themes. This challenge presents itself in the music, as well. As we worked on blocking romantic sections of the story, we realized we needed softer, happier music that was not yet present in our soundtrack.
To solve this, Jenny composed a new song in a major key, but she tried to maintain a faint element of bittersweet sorrow in a few areas. To balance it with other tracks, she used a lot of the same instruments present throughout the soundtrack: strings, guitar, clarinet, and viola. She threw in a little harp to emphasize to the wistfulness of romantic emotions.
We’re excited to say that we finished our big update for Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation in March, and it’s now available on Steam and itch! The game should now perform better on lower-end computers, and everyone can enjoy remastered artwork and new special effects. Meanwhile, our work on Crimson Spires continues!
WINDOWS OF ILLUSION
A few months ago, we considered trying to make false interior windows in the style of (among other games) the PS4 Spider-Man game. It was a half-realized thought that we didn’t follow through on because we weren’t sure it was worth the effort considering the lofi visual style of the environments.
Well, it turns out there was a good reason to start looking at fake windows, but instead of false interiors we were motivated by creating false *exteriors.* There aren’t too many times you’ll be wandering around inside a house or other area in Crimson Spires, but in the few instances we had, we found that the black reflective material didn’t quite create the effect we wanted. It was just too reflective and looked like everyone was blacking out their windows with paint. That might work for our conspiracy-theorist Thomas Wagner, but characters like Erika and Maddy wouldn’t be doing that sort of thing.
With this in mind, Malcolm decided to re-explore the idea of using bump offset to fake depth and create some background images for windows that look outside. To do this, we created some textures based on screenshots of the open world and built a shader to adjust their depth based upon the angle of viewing. Bump offset isn’t quite as good at this as it is at fake interiors, but given how rarely players will actually walk around the windows to see the seams, we think its an effective way to portray exteriors without having to build out some small version of the 3d world outside every interior level.
This is completely placeholder, because we haven’t taken the final
screenshots for the material yet. When we do, we’ll actually take
three–one for day, another for dusk, and finally one for night. Using a
vector material parameter, we’ll fade between them to correctly show
time of day.
Once this was done, we had to give the fake interiors another shot just in case we wanted to use those as well. They look better in motion than the fake exteriors, so we may end up using those as well.
BLOCKING OUT THE SCENES THAT BLOCKED US
In March, we passed an important personal milestone: blocking out the sequence of the story that gave Jenny writer’s block for so long. This was a segment of the script that she rewrote at least 5 times. She started to fear she would never find an iteration of the script that was solid enough to keep building upon.
At long last, adding one of these scenes to the game felt like confirmation that she was on the right track again and ready to keep going.
Here’s later in that scene, blocked out in UE4:
This whole scene didn’t even exist until Jenny’s final rewrite of that story sequence, but now it’s a pivotal moment that ultimately brings Erika and Julian closer together.
REDO ONE CG, REDO ‘EM ALL!
Similar to how Jenny ended up redoing every sprite in the Immolation after fixing up a few animations, most of the CGs also got a makeover. Jenny knew she could improve upon her old digital paintings. At first she was just going to touch up a few details, but then it was hard to stop.
In this case, it’s easier to show you the changes than try to describe them, so here are some examples.
There are plenty more CGs we remastered, but we’ll let you discover those for yourself when you play the update!
ADDING LIFE WITH MOVEMENT
While working on Crimson Spires, Malcolm started to worry that the world felt a little too static. While we’re still going for a look that evokes older 3D games on simpler systems, we thought some movement in the world might make it more interesting. To accomplish that, we modeled and added a handful of new props.
While no one drives in Bataille, we thought it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to think that no one ever bothered to take down the streetlight. Is this just sleight of hand to let us make a small Twin Peaks reference at some point? Maybe.
It wouldn’t be small-town America without a lot of American flags flying across the town. Since we have incorporated weather effects, we thought the flags should be affected and created this prop with that in mind.
We’ll continue to add other less-than-static tweaks to the environment as we build it out, hoping to make it a more interesting place to explore.
In February, we kept working on Crimson Spires, but we also went on a detour to work on our first game in UE4, Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation. A lot of big changes will appear in the next patch of the game, hopefully next week! Meanwhile, here are the high lights from last month’s development. Check out our Patreon to see updates like these every week!
AVOIDING BURNOUT AT A JAM
In case you don’t already know, we participated in the 2019 Global Game Jam! Overall, it was a blast. But during that weekend, we had to keep a close eye on our burnout levels.
To clarify: we LOVE working on video games. But considering the fact we spend most of our days already working on games, it’s hard for us to get excited about a game jam. We try to spend our weekends doing OTHER things, like going out, socializing, or even just PLAYING games instead of making them! A lot of our good friends were planning to jam, and we wanted to join in on the fun. But we worried it would lead to creative burnout if we spent our whole weekend working on another video game.
All of this changed when we started joking about making a Bandersnatch parody. I’m sure most of you heard of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive movie on Netflix with a lot of hype around its release. We enjoyed Bandersnatch, but all the hype around it annoyed us, considering that interactive stories–and even Full-Motion-Video games–have been around for AWHILE. We also had some issues with the story, which we already ranted about on our blog here. We also heard it praised as a technical marvel for having no loading times, and we were like, “We could do that in Unreal Engine 4. No biggy.”
SO WE DECIDED TO GO FOR IT.
The best part about making an FMV game (for us) was that it would be a huge diversion from normal development. Instead of staring at code all weekend, we’d be FILMING! Mind you, there was still some coding involved, but we survived. Most of the weekend, we got to goof around and make a movie with our friends. And we had a blast!
Malcolm played the main character, Sam. A lot of us on the team took turns playing “Cornelius,” a ghost who lives in Sam’s house. Meanwhile Sarah Wahoff, a talented musician, was the only one who could play the ghost while jamming on a violin:
We’re trying to get an HTML5 version of the game working, but until then you can download and play the game from our GGJ page!
WALK SPEEDS – REALISM IS A DRAG!
Along with getting our fast travel system working, we’ve had to reconsider and tweak Erika’s walk speed many times over. At first, we had her moving at a standard human walk speed–a little over 3 mph. But we found that while playing, this felt excruciatingly slow. We have fast travel now, but we want to encourage exploration and we were afraid the slow walk speed would discourage it instead.
We effectively doubled the walk speed, meaning that in actuality Erika is intensely jogging everywhere. Fortunately, video games aren’t reality and “feel” is more important than realism. We believe with her current speed, she gets around town a lot better without feeling like a hurried sprint (even if, technically, that’s what she’s doing if we apply real life measurements to the game).
RE-DRAWING A CHARACTER I’VE KNOWN FOR YEARS
One of the challenges we faced when revisiting The Immolation involved touching up animations for Sofya. In our new and improved VN Framework, it is crucial that every frame of animated blinks and mouth movement have the same pixel dimensions (more on that below). In order to accomplish this, we would have to redo every single character’s animations. But how could we stop there? Once Jenny started redrawing Sofya’s mouth and eyes, she kept going. She made a lot of small adjustments to Sofya’s face.
As you can see, Jenny simplified the line art quite a bit. She also sharpened the shading. (The only reason her scar and eyes are different, of course, is because The Immolation occurs before her transformation.)
The challenge with redrawing Sofya is that we’ve looked at her existing design for years. We’re so accustomed to it that it’s very difficult to accept any change. But since creating The Immolation, Jenny’s style and process has changed and improved in a lot of ways. She really wanted to bring some of those improvements to Sofya’s design, especially in the hopes of using the changes for an eventual Episode 3.
We’re still getting used to the new version of Sofya, but we hope that the new design will make for a better introduction to Sofya in The Immolation.
ANIMATED SPRITES ARE THE SOURCE OF MUCH STRIFE
Here’s a little more detail on why we have to redo all the blink and mouth animations for the Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation update!
For all our Echoes of the Fey games so far, the blinks and mouths have looked something like this:
If you look at the pixels around each sprite, you’ll notice they’re fuzzy, smudged, and inconsistent. The dimensions of each sprite are different, as well. The second blink is taller than the first. Some of the mouth animations are taller than others, because the entire jaw moves up and down.
Now that we have experience making so many games, we have realized why designing sprite animations in this way is such a horrible idea. When separating the various layers into sprite sheets, it becomes a mathematical nightmare to keep every frame of each sprite in the right place on the character. The tiniest inconsistency causes a blink not to fully cover the eye, or makes the jaw look slightly unhinged.
With Crimson Spires, we finally learned from our past mistakes enough to create a new method for designing animation layers. In the new method, each frame of each sprite layer always has the exact same dimensions. Shadows are sharper to reduce the need for blurred edges around sprites. Mouth animations are smaller, no longer moving the jaw, and causing a smoother look in the finished product. Blink layers contain a half-ring of pixels around the eyes that always stays in the same position with the head.
While moving Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation to our new VN Framework system, we knew we’d need to redo all the animations. So Jenny figured that while she was at it, she would go ahead and fix up the original drawings, too. And that’s why we’re redrawing so much to make The Immolation update as good as possible!
Greetings everyone! For awhile now, we’ve been posting weekly game development updates for Scribe-level patrons over on our Patreon. But as a result, we’ve forgotten to post regular updates here on our blog! So today we offer a summary of our development in January, picking out the best excerpts from our weekly Patreon Dev Updates.
SETTING BOUNDARIES – WITH AN ECHO FROM THE FEY
In the beginning of January, we focused on preparing a new demo build of Crimson Spires. We wanted the demo to include an explore-able section of Bataille. But to achieve that, we needed to cordon off the part of the town relevant to the demo.
Building the full town of Bataille in 3D is a huge endeavor, and we’re far from finished. So there are parts of Bataille that are still empty. Fortunately, the demo takes place in a small section around the town square, but we needed to prevent players from stumbling into the unfinished parts of the game.
To start, we placed long/wide boundary actors around the relevant parts of Bataille. These actors were children of our general “TouchClick_BP” actors used to trigger scenes, just invisible. The goal was to trigger a short scene telling the player to turn around.
These actors, however, had a funny side effect because of a little bit of code left over from Echoes of the Fey. In Echoes, clicking on scene actors from ANY distance would trigger the scene. That worked great in 2D space. In 3D space, this leftover “mouse click” code started triggering the boundary scenes in random spots in the world. The reason was simple: if you surround 3D space in actors that consume a mouse click and trigger a scene, sometimes you’ll accidentally click on them.
Finally, we removed that functionality and the boundaries now work as intended!
ART MANIA: DRAWING A SIBLING
In the screenshot below, you’ll see one of the minor town characters, Principal Vincent.
Well, Principal Vincent has a brother named Caleb Vincent. So far he has precisely ONE line in the script. But it’s kind of important, so I (Jenny) decided to go ahead and draw a portrait for Caleb. Due to the fact he’s Principal Vincent’s brother, I thought I should give them some similar facial features.
Unintentionally, by copying a lot of Principal Vincent’s facial features, my first pass at Caleb looked somewhat effeminate:
I love effeminate men and sometimes draw them on purpose, but it was NOT my intention with Caleb. In fact, I wanted him to be a gruff hillbilly type.
I asked some local artist friends for advice, and it blew up into a huge conversation about what typically constitutes “masculine” or “feminine” in anime designs, which is a difficult thing to pinpoint. The easiest solution for Caleb seemed to be giving him a beard, but for whatever reason, my first pass at that looked terrible. You can see the iterations below, ending with the latest (and perhaps final?).
This is a funny example of how you never know what will take up the most time in game development. I’ve probably designed full-bodied character portraits in less time than it took me to draw Caleb. And the most ridiculous part is that–so far–he only has ONE FRIGGIN LINE in the whole script! *Sigh*
THE CHALLENGE OF WRITING JULIAN’S PATH
Now it’s time for me (Jenny) to be real about something. I have an embarrassing confession to make.
I HAVE BEEN STUCK ON THE SAME FIVE PAGES IN JULIAN’S SCRIPT FOR THREE MONTHS.
Yep. You heard right. In three months, the script for Crimson Spires has not progressed. I have written and rewritten the same five pages over, and over, and over again. But each time I did not feel happy about it.
Firstly, I should point out that this is very rare for me. Writers talk about writer’s block all the time, but it’s something I almost never struggle with, and I’ve been writing novels since I was in middle school. This particular block was also easy for me to ignore, because I could always work on something else for Crimson Spires. There’s always portraits for me to draw, blueprints to code, and music to compose. But now, game development has caught up to the point in the script where I’m blocked. So I had no choice but to confront it.
It’s hard to say exactly what caused this block. Some of it might have been personal. Malcolm and I suffered a big discouragement regarding the project last November, around when my writer’s block started. This was when we thought we might receive some funding from a convention we attended, and were very surprised and demoralized when we didn’t. Creatively, this took a lot of wind out of my sails.
But I think the reason is also related to the challenge of writing Julian’s path. He’s a friggin vampire. On top of that, he’s sort of a snobbish jerk. As his creator, I know what makes Julian lovable and interesting. But getting Erika to fall in love with him has been the real challenge. In so many ways, they are incompatible. The section of the script where I got stuck involved their lowest point, from which Erika was supposed to start falling in love with him. But it just never felt right. I couldn’t find the spark between them.
I can’t go into too much detail without giving away plot spoilers, but I’ll just say that I finally broke down to Malcolm and admitted how much trouble I was having. I’m so grateful to have a creative partner I trust and respect as much as him! He listened and thought about it quietly for a long time. Finally, he told me how he would write it if he were in my position. Although I didn’t fully agree with him, his perspective allowed me to see the story in a new light. I saw where I might be able to create that spark between Julian and Erika.
We kept bouncing ideas back and forth, until finally, I went back to my outline and jotted them down. After a day or two mulling it all over, I knew it was the right way to proceed. Once again, I needed to go back and rewrite large sections of the script. But I finally did. And I finally felt capable of forging ahead.
The struggle has been real, but I hope that it pays off in the end. I hope the romances we write in this game are ones you can all fall in love with!
AND FINALLY, HERE’S SOME MUSIC
Sometimes my creative cycle hits a point where I strongly desire to focus on one outlet, whether writing, drawing, or composing. Last month, I went into a long composition spree. Here’s the primary new song I created, from which I’m developing a few other versions:
This song features a new instrument and starts in a different key than the rest of the soundtrack, so it will be a challenge to keep blending it with the other tracks!
Hey folks! This is Malcolm, and I felt practically obligated to write up a review/analysis of Bandersnatch for obvious reasons. This is cross-posted from my blog over at redbirdmenace.com, but we thought our fans might be interested as well!
Netflix has released their first (relatively) adult-oriented interactive film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. As someone who writes narrative-focused games with branching narratives, I’d be remiss to completely ignore Bandersnatch and as someone who wants to promote himself (however reluctantly) I’d be stupid not to weigh in on a moment of cultural zeitgeist.
If you don’t know what Bandersnatch is and care about spoilers, I’d recommend that you stop reading this post. I’m gonna spoil the shit out of Bandersnatch. If you care, go watch/play it before you read any further.
