Hi everyone! Lately I’ve been fairly busy with uni assignments and the like. My mind’s especially scrambled today due to a German exam I had this afternoon, which means I’ve been thinking in German for most of the day, before sitting down and writing a blog post in English (it’s harder than you think).
As a result, progress on Ambience has been more in the form of miscellaneous snippets, rather than a concentrated effort in one area followed by an in-depth “Gamedev Grievance”-style post. But some progress is always better than nothing.
So without further ado, here’s what I’ve been thinking about this week:
Ambience effects. Perhaps the Ambiences should look a bit fancier when they’re activated – for example, I’ve been researching some Japanese symbols which could correspond to an Ambience (e.g. wind, rain, etc.) That’s tricky, though, since I don’t speak Japanese at all and don’t really want to risk messing something up. That could get sticky.
Text. The text is still too long, too complex, too boring. I’ve been trimming back on a lot of the dialogues to make them snappier and make the game more gameplay-focused.
Boss battles. I’ve been told time and time again now that the first boss is way too difficult. So I’m scaling back the difficulty of the early game in general. Level-ups are faster, cooler weapons become available sooner, and of course, that first boss is a lot easier to take on now. (Too easy, perhaps? I’m not sure. Time will tell.)
Line of sight. I’ve been getting so much pain from that silly convert-water-to-room scripts ever since I tweaked the water tiles to become marsh tiles instead of ordinary room tiles. For example, in one case I activated the Ambience of Wind and ended up with a pretty pattern of corridors (3) and rooms (4), as seen in the screenie below:
An unusual pattern of corridor (3) and room (4) tiles. That shouldn’t be happening…
That means that standing on a tile labelled “3” will make the line of sight of the player suddenly decrease – even though he’s still standing right in the middle of a room! I did eventually fix it up (see below), but dealing with it still feels like building a house of cards – you change one little thing and the whole system will come crashing down. Maybe that’ll go away with time as I slowly make the system more robust, as I’ve generally found in the past.
A nice continuous room – much better!
And, uh, yeah… think that’s pretty much it.
In future, I might post some of these snippet-like ideas on Twitter first, then compile them in a weekly post should this happen again. (Like I said, things have been pretty hectic lately… but again, some progress is always better than nothing,)
Hi everyone! With my going back to my studies full-time at the end of this month, I thought I’d provide a fairly short post outlining what I’ve been up to with Ambience lately.
Overall progress has been going quite smoothly – as I mentioned before, I’ve pretty much finished the cutscenes for the main story, and now I’m just filling in the gaps with text, sprites, and so forth. One feature I’ve added is the use of emotion “callouts” to express a character’s emotions during cutscenes, including shock and sweating (such as from physical exertion):
Another small little addition: when you have allied characters with you in a dungeon, opening the menu now shows a summary of the HP and SP of each team member. While you can’t give team members items to use (e.g. healing items if their HP or SP is low), this new feature allows you to tell at a glance whether a teammate’s in trouble and needs to rest for a bit. I might add the “giving teammates items” feature later on – we’ll see.
Another thing I’ve also been thinking of adding are a larger range of held items. At the moment, the only hold item that makes much of an appearance is that bandanna the Renegades always seem to be wearing – except for the above screenshot, which is a test dungeon anyway. There are a handful of others, including a Fireman’s Hat which has been there since the demo (and in fact has been “around” since 2013!), but I’m hoping to make held items a much more prominent aspect of gameplay than before.
Finally, I’ve also been working on a bunch of character sprites, including sprites for Sage (the old guy in the tweet above), a female player character (finally!!), and a few other NPCs to make things a little more interesting.
The next few weeks might be a little busy, what with uni going back and everything, but I’ll try and keep up the weekly posts for as long as I can before study gets too intense. On the bright side though, it’ll also be good to get some feedback from others on the game, which should be easier once uni resumes.
Building a game is a bit like writing an essay. If you start at the start and just work your way through, you’re going to get something out at the end… but unless you go back and look through it again with fresh eyes, the end result is going to be pretty poor.
Recently I completed the framework for the main story of Ambience, as I announced in my #screenshotsaturday Tweet last week (see above). That means that now the game is finally ready to play… as long as you’re willing to play through the entire game without dying once, ignore any alternate endings, and endure sloppy placeholder text for a good two-thirds of the game.
I’m not kidding… this is how bad the placeholder text ended up.
But, through all the madness, I had a plan.
I wasn’t aiming to make a picture-perfect game straight away. Instead I wanted to start by laying the foundations for the game – the combat system, dungeon generation, and most of the cutscene actions in the main story. Only then would I start tidying it all up to make it both pretty and playable.
Why? Because I knew from the get-go – and I’m a fairly perfectionistic individual – that, no matter how much effort I put in initially, I would have to tidy up the game at the end anyway. There would still be loose threads to be connected, gameplay to re-balance, and a story line to review.
So I needed a battle plan for reviewing the game and cleaning things up. Here’s three things I’ve decided to work on as part of this plan:
1. Make a To-Do List
(Or several, if you’re like me!)
After completing the main story, I decided to go back to the very beginning and play through the game again to make sure everything was working properly. Then, as I played through the whole game for the second time, I wrote a list of any bugs that might have been absent or gone unnoticed from the previous run.
If the “bugs” or gripes were easy fixes, I went ahead and fixed them straight away. For example, one of the items on my to-do list was to add a “thud” sound effect for one of the early scenes. Since this didn’t involve very much coding or debugging at all, I knew I could implement it in about five minutes, so I went ahead and completed that item immediately. There’s not much point in procrastinating about these really easy tasks, after all.
2. Work On Your Weaknesses
A recurring theme I found in my list was the need to fix up or make new sprites for various things. This was one thing I did want to put off, since artistic stuff in general really isn’t my forte, and I didn’t want to spend too much time working on art when my main goal was to finish off the cutscenes for the main story-line.
With that finished, however, it’s time to turn my focus to making things look pretty, and that means sprites are no longer out-of-bounds items to be put off indefinitely. For example, one thing I noticed about the player and henchmen sprites was that their outfits were a little bit plain (read: single-colour!), since they hadn’t been changed at all since I had upgraded the player sprites to be more humanoid.So I went ahead and added a bit of shading to make the outfits look a bit better. It might need a tad more work later, but it’s a start:
By the way, the “work on things you’ve been putting off” principle also applies to other tasks which I’ve been putting off, mainly other weaknesses of mine. Now I finally have the opportunity to sit down and focus on those things without having too many other, more significant “to-dos” floating over my head.
3. Get Feedback!
Now that I have a semi-finished game, it’s time to get some feedback from others on various aspects of the game as I polish them up. This is actually really important when you’re developing, as it’s always better to get feedback and criticisms early on rather than receiving the same criticisms for a finished product. Some particular points of interest for me at the moment are:
How is the gameplay? Is it too easy, or too hard? (Often the best way to determine this is just to watch people play and see how they go.)
Does the writing work well, or are some parts still jarring or cliched?
How are the graphics? What could be improved, and how? (I’ll bet this one will merit some very lengthy answers…)
How do the cutscenes look? Do they suit the game’s story/graphical style?
For now I’m focusing mostly on the other two points, but I’ll definitely have some more time to focus on getting feedback in the coming weeks and months from various people I know.
One final note: it’s also kind of exciting starting out on this journey again. Part of me already knows exactly what to expect (I made this game, after all!) – but at the same time, that’s not entirely true. Ambience has come a long way since I started working on it in late 2015, and who knows what it’ll look like after this second, full play-through. Wish me luck!
Ever since I started making Ambience, I’ve always wanted to have some sort of ally system where you could traverse the dungeon with a companion, rather than alone. And now, after thinking and programming and debugging for about eight hours straight, I finally did it! The player is no longer alone!
Here’s a short video showcasing the new ally system as it stands at the moment:
Why add allies?
Of course, going through a dungeon alone is much easier programming-wise – but adding in additional characters to help you on the journey has its own benefits.
Firstly, it gives the player a (false) sense of security. Adding ally characters lets me as a programmer ramp up the difficulty more than usual, while the player’s still thinking “hey, this can’t be that bad. I still have my ally here to help me…” In fact, having ally characters to help you out can be a good excuse for making a dungeon much harder without the player realizing it – at least at first. This is especially true late in the story, where you want to throw as many challenges at the player as you possibly can without making the game so ridiculously hard that it becomes almost impossible to progress.
Secondly, it helps with character development. It’s one thing to talk to an NPC a few times over the course of the story, but it’s another thing altogether to have fought by their side throughout the game. Upgrading a character to be a companion with a reasonably helpful and practical role means that the player’s more likely to invest more into that character emotionally. That means that if something were to happen to that character over the course of the story, it would have much greater impact than if you remained reasonably detached from that character all game. (That’s definitely not a spoiler alert, trust me.)
The Process
I mentioned earlier it took me eight hours to get this system working, and that’s not an exaggeration. I had to rejig several fundamental aspects of the game’s engine to incorporate allies as well. The especially tricky part about the ally system is the way it specifically disrupted the general turn order, which had to change from “Player – Enemies” to “Player – Allies – Enemies”.
Turns are dealt with in the game using a single, very long script which moves through certain “phases” of each turn until it reaches the end. Phases could include movement, attacking, using items, and so on. Once the player makes a decision, the general way in which a turn proceeds is as follows:
Allocate attacking and motion “targets” on the movement grid for allies.
Now do the same for enemies. (This ensures that once the allies have moved, any enemies in the room then attack a newly-adjacent ally.)
Allies attack, in the pre-allocated direction. (If an enemy is defeated by an ally’s blow here, then dish out experience, reallocate attacking/movement targets, and so on.)
Allies move. (This means the ally actually performs the pre-allocated movement.)
Enemies attack. If an ally is defeated here, the defeat is treated much like an enemy, except the ally “flees” to the next floor instead and rejoins the player on the next floor. This was mostly to ease a little of the strain on me programming-wise; to be honest, I’m not sure if I’ll change it – it seems to work okay as it is, although it is a little unconventional.
Enemies move.
As you can see, there’s a lot to check and a lot to add. Specifically, I had to add steps 1, 3, and 4 in the list above to the turn sequence; I also had to modify the other three steps to take ally motion and so on into account, rather than just the player. (In other words, the enemies should actually be aware of and attack ally characters, rather than ignoring them and only ever attacking the player.) Overall, though, the presence of a plan helped me get through this with relatively few issues.
Changing Places
Then came the surprisingly difficult part… getting the allies to switch places with the player, like so:
Say, for example, you’re walking down a corridor and decide you want to turn around. If the ally character behaves like an ordinary NPC, they’ll just stand there and not move when you try and move towards them. You won’t be able to “push past” them, let alone swap places with them, and you’ll just have to keep moving in the same direction. As annoying as that may be, it also leaves the door open to the player getting trapped in a corridor between two allies who just refuse to budge, so an ally swap system was in order.
Strangely, it took a lot longer than I expected to get this to work. One of the biggest problems I had was with poor ally movement allocation, meaning that allies would often either refuse to move or simply walk on top of each other. Unfortunately, the decidedly feline philosophy of “If it fits, I sits” wasn’t really suitable for this roguelike, so the bug (eventually) got stamped out.
And, finally, I had a working ally system!
I don’t know how much more work I’m going to do on this ally system, if at all. At the moment the allies operate quite independently of the player, healing themselves at the start of each floor (without using up the player’s items at all), and simply running away to the next floor when they get defeated. I don’t know how well received it’s going to be, being such an unconventional way of dealing with allies, but for now it works. And I’m happy about that. 🙂
The Learning Curve
Here’s some thoughts on what I learned from this:
Don’t skimp out on difficult tasks. I know I’ve said this before, but this is another one of those instances where the fear of failure prevented me from even trying to incorporate allies. Even now it isn’t really a fully integrated system – but it’s still better than nothing, and most importantly it allows me to add yet another layer of depth to the gameplay and storyline. Don’t lose out on those benefits just because you think you can’t do it, especially if you have enough experience to say, well, you probably can…
Sometimes the easiest-looking parts to incorporate can be the hardest in reality, and vice versa. I definitely found this with the player and ally swapping places, which looked easy but in fact was very tricky to get working perfectly. Likewise, I originally anticipated that the movement and attacking system would be the most difficult and time consuming part, but in reality it was neither. And this was partly because I decided to…
Always have an action plan. Know how you’re going to implement it before you start coding. Scribble down some pseudo-code, or otherwise a broad plan of how everything’s going to work and interact. I found that having a clear plan for solving a difficult problem saved me a lot of time and trouble in the long run. Conversely, one of the worst things you can do as a programmer is to “go in blind” and simply start programming without any idea of what you’re doing or how you’re going to do it. (Novice programmers, beware! I know I’ve done this before in the past, and it generally never works out well.)
One final note too – I’m always interested in your feedback about the many ideas I like to throw around on these blog posts. So if you have something to say, don’t be shy! Hit me up on Twitter or Reddit, or even just comment your thoughts below. Feedback and interaction are heartily welcomed 🙂
Introducing the Golden Incense - a new revival item
Hello everyone!
Over the past week or so I’ve made a huge amount of progress on Ambience, and seeing that the past few posts have been pretty general in nature, I thought it’s high time for a proper update.
The Story
Most of my work has been in progressing the storyline as far as possible. At the moment I’m interstate doing vacation work, so graphical work like pixel art is a bit difficult – so I’ve made story progression my top priority for now. At the moment I’ve more or less reached the story’s halfway mark! It’s been very satisfying to take so many ideas that have been floating around in my head for ages and finally bring them to life.
I’ve also been working on implementing some storyline branching points as well. For example, most bosses need to be defeated in order for the story to progress. However, after one boss encounter, the story will progress regardless of whether you win or lose – but the outcomes in each case are slightly different. It’s been a little tricky to implement, but it’s definitely well in the works.
Items
I’ve also been working on a handful of new items and mechanics, particularly the idea of player revival. Normally, once the player hits zero HP, they’re defeated and that’s the end of your adventure. However, now I’ve added a revival item which (for now at least) is called the Golden Incense. This item activates automatically upon reaching zero health (although it can also be used at any time as a “full heal” item), and automatically restores all your HP and SP.
Introducing the Golden Incense, a brand-new revival item.
I especially felt the need to add this item when I began developing later areas and bosses with very high attack power. This in turn brought with it the possibility of the player being OHKOed by a very powerful attack, or simply surrounded and swamped by enemies. I didn’t want the game to get too difficult under these circumstances, so I decided to add the item. Obviously further balancing is in order to make sure it doesn’t make the game too easy.
I also added special treasure chests (simply called “Chests” in-game) which contain rare items! All the player has to do to get the item is to beat away at it until it breaks open…
Until it, uh, breaks open??
… but as you can see here, there are still a couple of bugs to stamp out.
The reason why the Chest “used” the Golden Incense here (which was the stored item) was because under the hood, the game deals with the Chest as an enemy and not an ordinary “item”. I found this to be the easiest way to implement the Chests since the game engine already allows enemies to hold an item and then drop it upon being defeated. The fix for this is easy, by the way – just prevent Chests from using held items at all, unlike other enemies. (I could also have made the Chests another object type in itself, but that’s too much hassle I think.)
A New Demo?
I’m also thinking about releasing a new demo once the game’s closer to completion, just to give people a better taste of what the final game will be like. The only question that remains is how early to release it. I think in hindsight I released the Alpha Demo a little too early in its development, especially seeing how greatly things have changed since then (in only six months, too!)
At the very least, though, I want to make the graphics look nicer and sort out some of the writing first (i.e. character dialogue and development, text in cutscenes, and so on). Then we’ll talk. 🙂
So, things have been a little busier recently than I thought. I’m doing some vacation work in another state and I’ve been fairly busy preparing for it – working out what to pack, where I’ll be staying, and so on. That means I haven’t had quite as much time in front of the computer as I would have liked over the past few days. (Perhaps that’s a good thing?)
Of course, once I’m there and settled into work, I’ll be able to work a little on Ambience in my spare time – it’s just been a little difficult in the lead-up to it. But, that being said, there’s no reason why I can’t write up a game plan before I go… so, here’s a rough plan of how the next couple of months are (hopefully) going to work out, Ambience-wise.
Stage 1: Planning.
Most of the work I’m hoping to do when I’m away will be in terms of writing, story, and just raw implementation of my ideas. I already have a lot of ideas about how Ambience is going to play out story-wise, so this stage is already almost done. However I’d like to pin down the whole big idea and some of the finer details into a “master document” if possible before I start work, just so I can keep check on the direction that Ambience‘s story will take. It’s also a nice gentle task to begin with as I’m settling in.
Stage 2: Basic implementation.
Again, most of the story is already in place in my mind – it’s just a matter of crunching the code and actually putting everything into the game. I’m not really concerned with all the finer parts of story writing at this stage – in other words, I’m not hoping to end up with a literary masterpiece (at least just yet). In fact, perhaps the most time-consuming part of this will be actually generating the cutscenes rather than writing the text that goes in them. Of course, I need a good idea of what the characters will say first before I can implement this – but even so, my emphasis is more on laying the groundwork first before polishing everything up. Of course, this part will take a fair bit of time, possibly right to the end of my work period. So I’ve split this up into smaller stages as well as per the overall story line so I can more easily keep track of my progress. It looks a little like this:
Stage 2a. Events after first major boss.
Stage 2b. Second major boss and aftermath.
Stage 2c. Events after second major boss.
Stage 2d. Minor boss and third major boss.
Stage 2e. Fourth major boss.
Stage 2f. Events after fourth major boss.
Stage 2g. Fifth major boss.
Stage 2h. Sixth major boss and framework for a “neutral ending”. (I won’t reveal too much about this yet…)
Stage 2i. Framework for an alternate ending. A final boss.
Stage 2j. Framework for another alternate ending. Another final boss, aftermath, etc.
Now, this looks like a lot, and I admit it is a little ambitious. To be fair, I definitely don’t think I’ll be getting through all of this by the end of my work period – and in particular, work will definitely be taking priority over this! But all in all, I’d be fairly happy if I completed up to and including stage 2d. (It’d be even better if I could knock out stage 2e as well, though that might be a bit much. We’ll see how things go.)
Stage 3: Writing.
I may choose to do some proper writing in tandem with my work on stage 2, but this may depend on whether I’m feeling up to some heavy coding, or feel more like taking on a more creative pursuit. Also, it depends on how clear a scene is in my mind. If I know exactly how a scene is going to play out, I may want to put my ideas straight into the game and see how it works out. Sometimes though I decide jot my ideas down elsewhere, then look at them later with a fresh mindset to see if they’d work.
Stage 4: Graphics, music, and pretty stuff.
I’ve decided to leave this on hold until I get back from work, since it’ll be easier to handle when I’m at home (with my own desk, keyboard and mouse – and with more time!) It’s also why I’ve been doing as much creative/graphical work now before I leave since I think it’ll be harder to do that when I’m over there. In any case, I’ll need to have the basic scene frameworks ready before I can add pretty things like nice graphics and music to “spice them up” and improve their impact.
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So that’s the basic plan for now! Next week I should be well underway in my vacation work, and hopefully making a start on some of my Ambience plans as well if I get the time.
Oh, and one last thing.
Now I think about it… one of the reasons why I’ve decided to make my plans so open – and also why I keep this devblog – is for two reasons. Firstly, it helps me to keep track of my progress, and there’s also a level of accountability involved as I report my progress and dwell on what’s been happening and what challenges I’ve encountered along the way (“Gamedev Grievances”, as I’m fond of calling them). But I’d also really like to include other people – maybe gamedevs, maybe players, maybe other people entirely – in this humble and sometimes crazy journey.
I don’t know… maybe there are people out there who actually like reading the chronicles of a solo indie gamedev who never learned how to sprite.
Hello everybody! Just thought I’d share what’s been happening in the life of Rhombus, and a few things that have been on my mind lately.
New sprites!
Firstly, if you’ve seen my last #screenshotsaturday post on Twitter, you might have seen that I’m working on replacing the circular sprites with full people-y sprites. Yes, that’s right – I’ve chosen to take the plunge.
So far I’ve done work on remaking several of the main characters – I’ve pretty much finished Zephyr and the vanilla prison guard, and am still working on Vulcan and Pontus. Here’s the new Zephyr:
What’s more, I’m also working on a completely new character… a brave and loyal soldier, but struggling through a deep existential crisis. Meet Ambience‘s new femme fatale, Clarissa:
I’m also working on a new battle theme just for her, which is coming along nicely. I might show you some progress on that in a later post.
Of course, this whole thing means that I’ll have to redo the mugshots for all the characters, which is a job for a bit later I think. Yes, it’s all a big job (as I’ve talked about previously), but I’ve figured it’s a job worth doing in the end.
And one more thing…
At the moment, study’s leading up to it’s big crescendo of assignments and final exams, so it’s getting hard to keep working on Ambience and share my progress. I’ve also noticed that I’ve started to spend more time keeping this blog than actually working on the game itself! While the blog’s great to have and I’m definitely not ditching it, it’s something I’d like to put on the backburner for a little while while I focus on my last bit of study for the year.
That being said, though, I’m not just disappearing into the void! I’ve still got some other posts I’ve already written that are waiting to be released. So my plan for the next month is to release a blog post once every two weeks, instead of weekly, and then I’ll be back in full force around mid-November. Feel free to check out my other posts in the meantime!
Study’s been a bit intense lately, so I haven’t had the time to work on Ambience as much as I would have liked. However there are a couple of things I decided to showcase anyway:
Firstly, the new menu system’s coming along slowly but surely, and so far it looks pretty good. I’ve pretty much finished the stats screen now, and for the first time, I’ve incorporated boosting stats without the need to use the mouse.
The new menu is, slowly but surely, taking form.
Secondly, I’ve been working on a few new compositions lately as well. Here’s one I recently completed: it plays when you’re exploring the Sun Guardian’s abode, Molten Crossing.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed about a lot of “hot”, magma- or lava-themed soundtracks in games is that they always have some sort of “deep buzzing instrument”, such as a synthesizer, to set the scene. In this case, I used an overdrive guitar. However, with this piece I was also aiming for a more adventurous, heroic feel, to remind the player that they have a mission to complete, rather than just that foreboding, you’re-descending-into-the-depths kind of impression.
The Evercold Snowball and Chilli Pepper in action.
Just a quick post documenting what I’ve been working on lately and what progress has been made on Ambience – as well as a new schedule for this blog!
Story:
Making slow but steady progress on the Ambience story. I’ve almost completed the story up to and including the next two dungeons after the end of the demo.
I’m still wrestling a little with the whole branching storyline thing, but it’s getting there. The main idea is for most of the branching to occur with respect to your interactions with the other characters, notably Vulcan and Zephyr; the amount you choose to talk to them and the responses you give will change the way they act and the way they view you. However, there’s more to it than that – I’m also hoping to incorporate those little decisions to influence some bigger decisions later down the track. For example, if you choose to be a total jerk to the Renegades (and you’ll know when you are), you’ll eventually be given the option to betray them completely and side with Foss towards the end of the game. (But in terms of implementation, that one’s a long way down the track for me.)
Gameplay and Mechanics:
Status conditions have been totally revamped from the simple system in the demo. There are four main status conditions, each relating to each of the four Ambiences: Chilled (Wind), Burned (Sun), Soaked (Rain), and Muddy (Dust). You can also probably see how these are related to the Hot/Cold and Wet/Dry relationships. Each condition is “negated” by items or Ambiences relating to the inverse quality; for example, the Chilled condition (cold) can be healed by eating a Chilli Pepper, or avoided altogether by wearing a Fireman’s Hat.
Speaking of items and status conditions… I’ve also added quite a few items that relate to these conditions. For example, the status healing items have been upgraded from generic “jelly” items to things like chilli peppers and watermelon slices. Also newly introduced are single-use items which boost some hidden stats, such as the accuracy and efficiency of attacks.
I’ve also added a couple more ranged weapons which have a 100% chance of inflicting a condition. For example, shown below is the Evercold Snowball, a ranged weapon which inflicts a guaranteed Chilled condition – which our good friend the Henchman counters immediately with a Chilli Pepper. (Of course, a few things here are still subject to change – for example, I’m definitely going to change that dark blue blend colour indicating the Chilled condition.)
The Evercold Snowball and Chilli Pepper in action, as well as the new HUD.
On the topic of weapons, I’ve also been working on balancing all the weapons in the game against each other. This hasn’t been a really easy task, and in particular I’ve found that the Sabre (one of the weapons featured in the Demo) is waaaay overpowered. I’ll maybe talk a little more about this whole “balancing act” in a later post.
Visuals and Music:
Introduced a new, more compact HUD to replace the big bar along the top. I always found that top bar ugly and not very professional, so it’s nice to be able to replace it with something a little cleaner.
I’m also giving the Guardians a complete makeover – and by “complete”, I really mean it. Anything to make them look better than that MS Paint-style, er, “thing” in the Demo.
I’m also working a little on the music, but not quite as much as the other stuff. In particular, at the moment I’m working towards finalizing the battle themes for the final bosses (yes, that’s plural “bosses”).
Blog and Social:
Since study’s about to start again for me, it’ll be a little hard to keep up full production on Ambience like I have been these past few weeks. However, I do intend to remain somewhat active, and in fact I’ve set myself an official weekly schedule: one post every Wednesday, and one screenshot/GIF for Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday. So be sure to stay tuned for more posts about Ambience, game development, and occasionally just stuff in general.
Hello, everybody! Here’s a nice healthy text post for you all!
I’ve been making significant progress on Ambience over the past few days, and I’m finally proud to say that the Ambience demo will be released this Friday, July 8, 2016! I’ve been working on presskits, screenshots and a quick demo trailer, and they’ll all appear at some stage over the next few days as release approaches.
Here’s an overview of some of the features you can expect to see:
Procedurally generated dungeons.
The first four areas of the main storyline, including three boss battles.
A host of items and weapons to be used and equipped.
Customizable stat distributions, status afflictions, and shifts in Ambience (read: weather conditions).
A renegade band of moderately unlikable characters.
An automatic saving system – to make sure that every decision you make matters.
And plenty more for you to discover!
In particular, there are three major aspects of the demo that I’d like to draw attention to:
Customizable stat distributions. I talked about the concept of Ambience in a previous post, but what I didn’t talk about much is how that influences gameplay. In Ambience your character has four stats, each one of which is linked to a particular Ambience. As you level up, you’ll earn points which you can “invest” in a particular stat/Ambience in the menu screen. This gives players the opportunity to create a character with an Ambience that’s anywhere from perfectly balanced to greatly skewed.
Your stats are completely customizable from the Menu.
Prison escapes. In Ambience you’re an escapee from a prison, established by the scientist Foss and guarded by his Henchmen. However, once you escape you’ll be on the run, and chances are you’ll encounter one of Foss’s Henchmen looking to recapture you. If they defeat you, they’ll take away all your items and drag you off to the prisons again. Which means you’ll have to escape. Again.
The upside of this, however, is that you may come across some useful items in the Prison corridors that you can’t find anywhere else…
Character interactions. Next time you’re around Vulcan (or any of the other Renegades), say hello to him. Try and be friendly. Ignore him when he loses his temper or says something stupid. Who knows? Perhaps your interactions may not go completely unforgotten.
I’ll post some updates here and on Twitter as the week goes by. Keep your eyes peeled!
Rhombus Game Dev 