Fell Crypt

~These Guys Look a Lot Better Now~

I've been revising some old overworld sprites and portraits, they look a lot better, mostly in how they more cohesively capture the style of the art in the portraits, and my art style more generally with more blackspotting and whatnot. I told myself I wouldn't revise the main character sprites after the last round but...I'm so glad I did because the difference is night and day...(pours one out for Aubrey's weird hair growth)

Also been working on the final versions of allllll the character portraits, as seen above the cut...just trying to get one servicable default piece of art in per critter in the game. I hope people can tolerate how gargantuan these portraits are. They're fun to make!

~UI Fixin's~

I worked a bit the battle UI, including slapping together a wip overlay when you hover over an enemy/ally.

Also worked on the status and settings menu UI, the latter of which is very over the top decorative in a way I should probably try to reign in a little...at the very least the plan is to do a better job distinguishing between it and the pause menu UI.

Mostly recently, besides working on sprites, I've been thinking about things that tie into the overall progression of the game, like deciding what skills are available when, etc...which should help me tighten up special/boss encounters. And also testing another tiny little feature of the battle system I may or may not go with altogether depending on how playtesting goes. 👁️

Hopefully I can get it to work in a way that it's not too obtrusive but also leads to some more varied and interesting encounters...I would say in general it feels like I've only dipped my toes into game balance playtesting as it is (peep the nonsense stats in the screenshot - the priority is to program in moves and their effects before I touch stat balancing), which I hope to focus on in the coming few months, so we'll see if the mechanic even sticks around til release, but I figure it's better to program in experimental stuff early on and take it out if it doesn't work than have to add a bandaid at the last minute...!

~Words~

Recent discourse about some indie game made me more curious about what specifics go into the translation & localization processes, so I decided to look more into it and wow I'm sure glad I did!

because it is literally Easy ...to read strings from .csv files, although i am not a programmer and Optimizer by trade so I will probably have to think a bit more about when to load and store data for cutscenes. Etc. for the least amount of obtrusiveness in-game.

But yeah, luckily, cutscenes have barely been implemented into the game, so it was easy to futz with the code to allow for reading in text from files. I…hadn't ever messed with included files in Gamemaker before LOL so it was a nice excuse to tinker with that too. Now I have a "fun" project to sink some hours into replacing rogue strings populating the UI and arrays of the game with reference links to what the names should be per region…

It's already been a "stretch goal" to eventually have the game translated as an immediate step 2 after finishing it, I still have no plans for translation before it releases because I just wanna...get it done...but I can at least set it up to be way easier to edit down the line :P

~That's all folks~

I leave this ominous April 2023 concept art to end this super long post to make up for several months of missed devlogs...! now i Sleep 😴

What did I actually work on this past month?

I set out to do a lot of environment art and generally clean up some of the art in-game mostly for the purpose of having presentable looking screenshots because I really want to get the process of "create assets to represent game on public storefronts" over with

...but like...

...i didnt really feel like it...

which is to say, I did do a lot of environment art and sprites and concepts and experimenting and whatnot, but I also got distracted and did other things. Oh well, thankfully I'm not beholden to any expectations of timeliness besides my own :P

But anyway, since I did some environment art this month, I can talk about what the process for that looks like!!

The way I've ended up laying out tilesets is to separate the floors and walls (and in this instance, more detailed architecture in the walls) of an area, so when I build the map in-engine, I can draw them to separate layers and pretty easily lay out dynamic layouts.

It's also fun to combine this varied template for laying out areas with more specific "setpiece" location art~

Because the characters have 8-directional movement, it felt like a no-brainer to have more varied perspective in the environment.

Something I learned through experimentation, though, was that for as much as I love the look of the sprites at the more dynamic 33-degree angle, with the 8-directional movement the characters would bump into walls in areas like stairwells that they were supposed to be able to smoothly traverse. So I compensated by tweaking the movement code so now the player has TECHNICALLY 16-directional smooth movement (but limited to 8 unique sprite directions because im not THAT crazy) and ALSO making templates for stairs and inclines in a ton of different directions that I can re-use...

Nothing too exciting yet, but that's the downside of making custom tilesets (and jumping around to more spoilery areas of the game.) Hopefully the process only becomes faster and faster the more I do it and the more templates I have available to re-use.

Besides that and implementing some more story cutscenes into the game, I did get distracted partially doing something really exciting which is adding controller support! Thanks to an extra kinda-bogus controller my partner and I got to pair with our steam deck's very suspect bluetooth connection I've been able to start adding in code and test playing with a controller and it feels very good and nice and like playing a video game so far waow

But that's all for this time I think. Over the next month I'm pretty much gonna keep doing more of the same, fleshing out the world through its environments, as well as connecting more of the rooms and story beats to test the progression of the story and game.

until next time!!

As noted above, this is a turn-based RPG, currently being exclusively developed for PC in Gamemaker. I'm a first time indie dev who's been experimenting on and off for several years at this point, I feel like this game has a chance to be something pretty cool so I'm putting my weight fully behind it!!

I'm going for a sort of "saturday morning cartoon for adults" vibe with the game world and writing - trying to strike a balance between lighthearted earnest goofiness and character drama and a dash of genuine creepiness. For reference my inspirations for the game include other RPGs (Trails in the Sky, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, Pokemon,) 80s-90s pop media, the sword and sorcery genre...

But I'll save information about the characters and world for a later post.

To start, here's an abridged version of the development timeline so far (likely to be expanded in a future devlog as I buy myself precious time:)

November-December 2022: initial character and story concepts

2023: prototyping, first attempts at character sprites, wrote a lot of music. Figuring out the tone, aesthetics, and genre of the game. More on that in another post because the journey to get to this point is pretty funny!!

2024: slowly refining things...letting everything sort of gestate...by which i mean I didn't work on this much this year. There's a big gap in my internal devlog entries for this year, I think a lot of progress I made on it was incremental besides the thinking big picture stuff.

2025: did a little bit more experimentation and refining of the concepts, gameplay, a lot more figuring out of the art process, a lot of development with the intention of finishing a demo of the first part of the story, meanwhile the rest of the story, characters, themes, ideas, etc have been more or less solidified by this point.

Because of job and life stuff, the past half year has given me the best conditions to work on this game since 2023. Hopefully things stay more or less stable this year.

My ultimate goal would be to take a few months off work to focus on really pushing progress on this game in the latter half of the year, but we'll see how things go. Whether or not that happens, I'm hoping to have the game finished or like 95% finished by the end of this year.

Which finally brings us to now!!! 2026!

All that said, what does the game actually look like right now...?

Kind of a total mess since my focus has been on testing features and writing before implementing things into the engine! I'm embarrassed to share it, but I think people like seeing messy first drafts and behind-the-scenes of things (I know I do,) so I might as well rip off the bandage and post my wips.

A ton of time has been spent experimenting with finding the "best" way to tackle each part of the process...gamedev is a lot of moving parts. Only very recently do I feel like I've gotten a confident enough grasp on how I should be going about everything. So there's a lot to fix, revise, and finish, but I don't imagine any major roadblocks along the way...just a lot of work, especially artwork and mapmaking.

Here's an overview of some of the gameplay stuff that I've worked out while fiddling with everything else-

Battles- they're tactical, turn-based. Chosen actions are executed one after another based on speed stats (more based on Pokemon-inspired priority moves than a character-based turn order if that makes sense?) Movement is loose rather than grid-based (characters can move anywhere within a set range) so positioning can be kinda cheated to attack opponents in different types of ranges... I like the sort of haphazard chaos a looser battle system affords - ideally this game will strike a decent balance between a linear story and fun somewhat-emergent experiences in both major and minor battle encounters.

Transformation - characters can shapeshift in this game due to weird magical bullshit baked into the world! This takes the place of what would otherwise be a standard equipment system. Raw materials found in the world can be stacked onto a character's "graft slots" to adjust their body composition and thus change their stats, allow them to use new skills, and even change their form. So it's sort of a hybrid between crafting and something like FF7's materia slots? But also extremely weird and silly.

(Voila! You are now a slime guy!! I hope you wanted this!)

Traps and overworld effects - skills can be used in the overworld to interact with enemies before combat starts; traps and other effect tiles can be placed to be triggered by monsters and change the nature of encounters (or vice versa, you can wander into traps in the world.)

You can even summon friend(ly meat shield)s.

So that's about it for the overview of the game. I hope it piques and satisfies the interests of people hungry for more character-driven RPGs like me!

Some of my goals for January are-

Mapmaking for "chapter 2"

More base animations for more of the characters/monsters

Squashing a lot of little bugs

Get screenshots for steam page that don't look like absolute toilet water so I can make a pretty steam page

If you stuck around this far, thanks for reading, and I hope I'm able to share more very soon!!!