Legacy is Moving

Nick has decided to move on to other projects, so I'm pulling the Legacy development back over to the Yondering Lands blog.

Concept Music #1

I wanted to wait to share this until I could make a real recording of it, playing, you know, real instruments, but it turns out that two weeks of practicing cello doesn't make up for two years of not playing it, ha. It'll probably take me a few months before I'm up to snuff for this, and there's no sense in waiting that long to share it.

I sat down a few weeks ago and started writing out all the intellectual ideas I had about the music. What kind of instruments it uses, what kind of meters I wanted to use, the philosophy behind it, etc. I could have written a concept piece following those ideas first, but I decided to get out of my head a bit and poke through some of the art that Annie's done until I found a piece that grabbed me with an idea, and then just see where that went. A counterpoint of sorts.

I imagine our band of heroes seeing this castle from afar, a relic of an older civilization perhaps, a place with mystery and old tales about it. It's early to mid-morning, and the mist around the castle is thick but still in the distance. Just the top of the ruins is visible, and a stray beam of sunshine pierces through. As they move into the mist, they wonder how much further they have to go. The day waxes on, the mist begins to clear, and suddenly the castle is visible again, towering above them with might. It's a lonely place, filled with echos.

Play time

This post is late as things go, but it's something I wanted very much to remember.

Up until recently, we had a lot of discussions about what the world of our game is like and how the game progresses in a general sense, but not many about the particulars. We knew we had battles and what they were about, but we didn't know what they were like or how they worked. Nate had the idea to get together for some play time so we could start sussing these things out.

the early battlefield

Nate and Annie just so happen to own a copy of Descent, which just so happens to be an amazing set of toys for mocking up dungeon scenes. We gathered characters and monsters from our game with random stats, matched those characters with vaguely representative Descent pieces, put together a map we liked, and slowly started going through the motions of a battle, without much of any idea what we were doing except that heroes and monsters took turns.

Surprisingly, it wasn't very fun. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy myself, but playing a game is very, very different from making up rules for a game and trying to balance them as you go along. I don't think any of us quite expected how much it would feel like hard work. We beat two, maybe three enemies over the course of the exercise and didn't make it past the second chamber in our map. It was a grueling, unsatisfying pace of play.

the last stand

When we finally called it quits, though, we had a large number of resolutions and ideas about how battles progressed, how the content of a single turn should be balanced, what kind of chances different things should have at success, and a basis of how magic and teamwork work in our universe. Annie put together probably two full pages of detailed notes from the things we jotted down along the way. It was, in my opinion, a huge success.

Another success was getting all four of us together to talk and brainstorm for a long period at once. Usually it's a smaller set of us at a time, and due to other commitments I hadn't been able to get in the trenches much yet at all. It also reminded me of how important it is to a collaboration to have shared space and experiences beyond just discussion and access to information. 

even monsters need hugs

Creating something together that's metaphorically related to your project is one of the best things you can do to get people on the same page and invested in what they're doing in the early stages of development. Also, it helps make it an actual collaboration, instead of just a collective effort. After that day I certainly felt a lot more like I was helping to make and guide the game instead of just contributing to it.

Emotional debates

"I want everybody to have watermelon heads"

"I'm not so sure that fits into our game, for everybody to have watermelon heads"

"Too bad. I want everybody to have watermelon heads"

"Watermelon heads are derpy, and nobody will want to play our game if we have watermelon for heads."

"I don't care if people hate our watermelon heads, they can have two watermelon heads then."

adding edges

I've had this shader in my head for either days or weeks, depending on how you count. Last month when I was showing the prototype to my friends, Seth asked if I could add thickness to the figures. I said "maybe." Just recently Annie put up a comp that showed walls and set pieces with thickness, giving them a kind of cardboard feel that really sold their physicality.

So here's the card shader I made today:

I think it actually works pretty well. You can tweak the edge thickness and color per item.

It does funny thing if you go all the way edge-on, but I think we can smooth that out. Also need to see how it looks when lit. I probably don't have a good way to calculate the normal, for example. Though I suppose I could pre-process the images or some nonsense... :-s

I'm actually supposed to be working on Actions, so I'll leave this here for now. But when I get back to environments, I want to try to make the interior dungeon scenes work with the walls and underwalls. :-D

Oh also picture.

Everything's Heavy Underground: Part 2

I can't figure out how to add images into a reply, so I'll be making a new entry anytime I have a picture.

Playing with a few different ways to show what's underneath the floor, using "walls" that would just extend below the floor instead of above it. I'm calling them underwalls here.

1. Underwall has same setup as walls: solid piece with jagged/shaped edge to suggest material.

2. Underwall fades to transparent, same as those front walls right above them.

3. Underwall doesn't "fade" per se, but is illustrated to show it breaking away/disintegrating in whatever way makes sense for a particular environment.

We could always have some combination of the above as well. And employ or not employ swirly fogs and whatnot.