I will admit that it is nice to crawl from under a rock and participate in a big event (as big as it gets in a little Baltic country). GameWave2021 was an interesting event to participate in and very accommodating for online participation. And I don’t know why I still get surprised, because if any industry should be able to do this it would be game development industry. A bunch of interesting things and unusual opportunities.
Shout out to game jam team Neguli for being super kind and letting me be a digital nuisance for short time. it was fun to doodle!
And now to dust off an old concept, stuff it into TabletopSim and see if it hold any water…
-Here is the idea: we make a crossover between Pokemon combat and FF combat, but real-time instead of turn-based. There will be monsters to catch and tough boss battles. And I mean proper tough! Players will have to die and adjust their team compositions and strategy. All the game outside the combat is going to be basic as hell, standard RPG grind. Don’t forget plenty of back-tracking.
-What about the story?
-The story will be packed with cliches and tropes from several well-known cultures in real life, so no need to be original there. Characters will be clueless about the most obvious things. The main protagonist will be a little boy and his mom dies in the first minutes of gameplay. He will have a Jamaican-accented (*note: In the English version) sidekick who will shame and bully the kid into overcoming his trauma to save the world. Basically, this will be a story for a kindergartener with the gameplay for an experienced player.
-Dunno. Feels a bit stretched…
-We get Studio Ghibli to make the models and fully animated cutscenes. That will make it work, surely?
And it did. The end.
This is how I imagine Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch got developed
I am one of those people who used to pirate games back in the days of my school days, since I’ve had no money to just buy them. Nowadays when I stumble upon those games, I buy them for my library collection. A lot of old games finally spilled into Steam lately and I was notified of the fact the King’s Bounty was available. Not the 1990 King’s Bounty, but it’s “spiritual successor” from 2008. It turns out that they they also released a couple of DLCs and I thought that I’d give a quick try to the last one in the line – King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North.
As I started the game, a picture of a surprisingly suntanned viking looked at me from the starting screen and a thought crossed my mind:that I have seen that bulging forearm somewhere before. I am only aware of one glorious barbarian in pop culture, so a quick search for “arnold with sword” revealed that I was probably correct in my assumption.
A sudden reminder that the industry has been photobashing since before people even knew what Photoshop is.
Some cool visuals from the latest raid in Final Fantasy 16. Now I really need to play NeiR Automata, because the soundtrack is too cool. The developers used the NieR soundtrack in the raid, it makes the encounter feel positively epic. Edit: There was a soundtrack here, but copyright ate it, unfortunately 😦
Why write this after 8 months? Because there was this last comic that our artist made and it was a shame to just let it disappear.
So, let’s summarise what happened.
We got to jam for 2 months.
Our “pre-production” turned into production directly. As a result, things got messy.
We ended up with a nice skeleton of a story, an attempted visual style and a prototype.
Tones of fun of just experimenting
Bonus event: Spider invasion at the main “office”.
Unfortunately, the team had to break up due to an artistic meltdown and people, who despite there being a pandemic, thought that they should have at least one day of heavily IT-oriented studies AT THE SCHOOL, because, you know, it is so important to socialize at least some times, so let’s have one mandatory attendance day.
This was an interesting summer experiment that might be resurrected in the future in some form.
I usually don’t bother with the Steam suggestion queue because at this point I browsed through most of the games. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a fresh title that looked like a sibling to Caeser, Pharaoh, Zeus and Emperor!
Nebuchadnezzar takes the familiar mechanics and applies them to the Babylonian culture. I must say that Nabuchadrnezzar nails the aesthetic both visually and musically. But, unfortunately, we live in an age of Covid unfinished and perpetually-in-development games. The mechanic side of the game, which is a new combination of familiar elements, is pretty unbalanced. I couldn’t get past mission 9 out of 12 total. Also, there were no sandbox maps to just build a city without restrictions. So I did not get my hands on the temple modelling mode properly.
Well, like I said, this is the age of constant patching. Turns out the developers will release a patch the day after I post this in my blog. The patch will introduce, among other things, taxes (a basic fucking thing in these types of games, if you ask me, but ok).
Super interesting to see where this game ends u after a year. I’ll definitely have to come back to make the biggest city ever with the biggest custom temple ever.
Dear reader, this text may put you in front of a personal dilemma and and this could change your perception. By continuing to read this text you consent to this risk. You can stop reading this text at any moment. The following is the author’s opinion:
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The Context:
9th of August, happened a complete falsification of the election in Belarus which lead to a political crisis in the country. The reason being a dictator who refuses to let go of the power. The peaceful protest was met with an unprecedented cruelty in the middle of the European continent.
Welcome to the stage, Wargaming.net (Wiki). You might know this company for their game World of Tanks. This company is know as a Belarusian company, and yet the headquarters is on Cypress (ha-ha).
The company is so well-known, Belavia (the only airline company in Belarus) even painted one of they’re planes in their honour. So you can’t deny the fact that this company is in the public eye. And what has the company done so far? Has it showed its support and taken a clear stance towards the situation in their home country? Let’s explore:
Several articles about Wargaming mentioning that they might have to move the office if you search in Russian. Here. Here. These are not the only examples.
Anywhere you look the dates are the first days of the protest. It has since been several weeks and the things have escalated beyond all reason, yet Wargaming is being quiet as a mouse; as neutral as the representatives of clergy. Those priests, an orthodox bishop and a catholic bishop, got kicked out of the country just for their neutral comments.
Statement 1: Games are politics to the same degree as books, movies, radio, and any other type of medium.
Statement 2: Taking a neutral stance is now equivalent with taking the side of the oppressor.
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
A quote not by Dante Alighieri
To Wargaming.net company and its community,
You are welcome to join the peaceful protest in a more active way. Some suggestions: start posting about the current situation in your social media, make in-game events about the theme of the topic, stop censoring political discussions on your official forums.
From the day of this post, the longer Wargaming remains silent, the more it becomes evident that the company supports the current lawless regime. As such the employees have a reason to reconsider their own ethics and perhaps act individually. Fans of their games will also get a chance to evaluate if they want to support a product from a company in cahoots with a dictator.
To the gaming community of the world,
If you happen to play games with citizens of Russian Federation, you may accept the role of envoy and pass on this simple message:
Belarusians only seek peace. Do not let the politicians destroy the bond between our peoples.All deals made with the dictator will be null and void.
Welcome to the 5th week of this “project” where 3 game students are spending their free time trying to make a game and have some fun.
This week we spent time iterating inside our level, figuring out what mechanics we wanted to introduce to the player and trying to find a good flow for the movement of the player in the scene. As usual the more we fiddle with the scene, the more we find interesting things that need implementing.
The art side of the project has dedicated their time to testing animation methods and the use of parallax for our purposes.
This week’s screenshot: I’m not gonna go into the story of how the catgirl ended up in the scene, but suffice to say that we were testing the parallax and running speed.
Welcome to the 4th week of this game jam where 3 game students are spending their summer trying to make a game and have some fun. After the disastrous previous week, we have made a couple of nice pushes. One of them is the creation of the first level which we want to function as the tutorial zone. So we have finally moved on from prototype test scenes and to a shared scene where we can start getting the feel of the game flow. Hurray to the first iteration of our first level! Another push was made in the art department. First designs of the main character have been created. Enjoy the images.
Now, let’s talk more about what is this game? So far it is a 2D platformer in a Sci-fi setting. Do we have a strict plan of action? Not exactly. We have a story and we are creating gameplay to support that story. All the participants enjoy the process of creating a game in its many aspects. We keep changing our ideas and designs as we move forward and we aren’t restricted by hard deadlines and goals. So, if you are curious about these blog entries, you have to understand that this is a passion project.
For that reason, this blog might be somewhat vague about the details of development, because there is a lot of mocking about. But if you are interested in getting more details about something, feel free to leave a message.
lostingame.design 