This week I worked on a new mechanic for Viola: playing her trusty little violin. I loved the Nintendo 64 Zelda games and I loved the Ocarina mechanic, letting the player feel like they're playing music with very simple controls. Click "read more" to find out a little more about the process.
0 Comments
I managed to finish up the 'battle' concept art! Doing the background alone was way, way more work than I thought it would be. At the very least, this project has given me a deep respect for the artists in the game industry.
Press 'Read More' to see a few more pictures and some thought process. This week I tackled Viola's artstyle and look. It was getting hard to explain the game without some sort of visual: everybody has a slightly different idea when you say "JRPG". Plus, I needed to iron out what the game would actually look like, both for myself as well as to talk with others about it.
I worked primarily on a "battle" concept art, and also a bit on what the platforming would look like. I didn't finish up either: had I focused on one I probably would've been able to. Click the read more button to read... more. This week, I worked on expanding the platforming mechanics with several objects and wall jumping. I've always enjoyed wall jumping in games, it's just a satisfying feeling and a great way to make levels a bit more fun. It's a common staple in any platformer at this point, and I'm glad to have figured out how it works. I also worked on several objects like pass-through platforms and springs.
Click read more to go in-depth on what I did this week! This week, as well as the last, I spent some time designing characters for the game. After all, this is the RPG where you can recruit anyone. So if the NPC's are the game's unique selling point, they should be interesting! And making characters has always been the most fun part of making a story to me.
Click read more to check out more of the process I put into designing characters. This week I spent most of my time doing the following:
I talked a bit in a previous post about the main two inspirations for this game: the game LISA and a few mods for Skyrim. I have a few more ideas that I want to outline, and where these ideas came from.
Viola is my new personal project. It's a 2D platformer/RPG hybrid, the RPG where every NPC can join your party. A set of mods for Skyrim inspired me to take this angle: one where you can ask anyone to be your follower, and one where you can have multiple followers. This turned Skyrim into a sort of JRPG, except with a lot less character depth. Still, Skyrim had a few fun characters, and it was a lot of fun to customize them with gear, battle tactics, and so on.
I tend to focus on character-based stories. Characters and dialogue are simply the most fun for me to think about, or to write, or to draw. It's no surprise that the first thing I did for the project was to conceptualize the main character, Viola herself. Viola is a story about a young girl, trapped in her own nightmare.
I'm the kind of writer who does a lot of outlining. I want to know what the story is about before I start writing. However, I almost always start with a very specific scene. For Viola, it was a scene about a girl being trapped by her own negative thoughts given a corporeal form by her own fantasy. Starting a new thing is both scary and fun. Scary, because there's a lot you have to do that you want to get right. Fun, because you get to start something new. Scary, because you have no idea where it will go, what it will become, or what will happen to it later on. Fun, because... you get to start something new.
Below I've outlined the project's goals, weekly goals, and what the game is actually about. The next post will happen when I know I can start working for myself full-time. |
AboutThis is a development blog for my own game project, "Viola". Archives
February 2019
Categories |