Gallium Games

Dead Man’s Rest

Get the DMR demo

Howdy folks! Long time no see.

We’re gearing up for an early access release of Dead Man’s Rest, coming July 16, so mark your calendars!

Here’s how the early access release will work.

On itch/Steam: The game will be available at a discount while in early access. When the game exits early access, the price will rise. You’ll still receive access to an Android copy in a similar state as the PC versions.

On Google Play: Hollis’s route will not be available for purchase. The full game will not be available for purchase as a whole. You’ll still be able to purchase individual routes.

What’s missing in early access?

1 CG from Cartwright’s route

2 CGs from Hollis’s route

Why early access?

It’s been a few months since we hoped to have the game out, and there’s not too much missing that prevents players from enjoying the game. Our CG artist has had some personal circumstances to attend to, so we’ll continue to wait for the remaining CGs to be complete before releasing the game in full. We’d rather not completely lock out Hollis’s route until the CGs are ready because it complicates future updates and pricing. You can always wait until they’re ready before playing his route!

Dead Man’s Rest

John Cartwright’s route is now available to play in the beta! We’ve already smashed some 20 bugs.

All Argent Games Throne-tier Patrons are eligible for participation.

We’re working on Taza’s route next.

You can catch us working on Dead Man’s Rest during various dev streams over on Twitch. Programming progress continues steadily!

Jed route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 99% - Window management: 95% - Sound: 95%

Cartwright route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 95% - Window management: 99% - Sound: 95%

Hollis route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 99% - Window management: 95% - Sound: 95%

Taza route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 10% - Window management: 0% - Sound: 5%

Play the Dead Man’s Rest demo

Add Dead Man’s Rest to your Steam Wishlist

Dead Man’s Rest

The beta period is now starting! We’ve made two routes available to play: Jed’s and Hollis’s. More routes will be added when they’re ready.

All Argent Games Throne-tier Patrons are eligible for participation.

We’re working on Cartwright’s route next.

You can catch us working on Dead Man’s Rest during various dev streams over on Twitch. Programming progress continues steadily!

Jed route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 99% - Window management: 95% - Sound: 95%

Cartwright route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 50% - Window management: - Sound: 0%

Hollis route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 99% - Window management: 95% - Sound: 95%

Taza route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 10% - Window management - Sound: 5%

Play the Dead Man’s Rest demo

Add Dead Man’s Rest to your Steam Wishlist

Dead Man’s Rest

The image pass is being split up into two sections because window management is even more complex in DMR than in RE:H. If you missed it, on Monday over on the Argent Games Blog, we talked about a new, hopefully more efficient, method of traveling between locations, since this usually involves a lot of copy pasting. We say hopefully because it is entirely possible that every travel instance requires some special customization that ends up making the shortcut more cumbersome than copy pasting. Although, at least with the shortcuts pre-defined, there is an easy-access reference for travel transitions.

The first route that we’re tackling with the image/sound pass is Hollis’s, and we plan to complete two routes this week in preparation for the upcoming beta. Beta test, you ask? That’s right, a beta test is coming up very soon, within the next couple weeks. You can access it by being a Throne-tier Patron.

You can catch us working on Dead Man’s Rest during various dev streams over on Twitch. Programming progress continues to be slow but steady!

Jed route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 0% - Sound: 0%

Cartwright route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 0% - Sound: 0%

Hollis route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 100% - Window management: - Sound: 30%

Taza route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 10% - Sound: 5%

Play the Dead Man’s Rest demo

Add Dead Man’s Rest to your Steam Wishlist

Dead Man’s Rest

Continuing with implementing character expressions in, we’ve completed Cartwright’s route, and all of Jed’s expressions are in for his route. We still need to do Lee (and all other character) expressions for Jed’s route, and then there will just be one final route to add expressions in before moving on to the other programming tasks. The plan is to have a beta going in mid-February, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

You can catch us working on Dead Man’s Rest during various dev streams over on Twitch. Programming progress continues to be slow but steady!

Jed route status - Character expressions: 50% - Image transitions: 0% - Sound: 0%

Cartwright route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 0% - Sound: 0%

Hollis route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 0% - Sound: 0%

Taza route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 10% - Sound: 5%

Play the Dead Man’s Rest demo

Add Dead Man’s Rest to your Steam Wishlist

Dead Man’s Rest

Small update to say that all of the character expressions for Hollis’s route are programmed in! Though we say they are 100% done, we do actually change/tweak them a fair amount in later passes. Sometimes the expression change sequence doesn’t work as well as you imagine when playing through the game, or you need more reactionary expression changes from the other character you’re talking to. We’ll be moving on to adding in expressions for Cartwright’s route next. Perhaps because image/sound is easier to implement, we procrastinate on those passes…

You can catch us working on Dead Man’s Rest during various dev streams over on Twitch. Programming progress continues to be slow but steady!

Hollis route status - Character expressions: 100% - Image transitions: 0% - Sound: 0%

Taza route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 10% - Sound: 5%

Play the Dead Man’s Rest demo

Add Dead Man’s Rest to your Steam Wishlist

Dead Man’s Rest

The first route to be tackled is Taza’s. The main character expression pass is complete, and we are now working on the image and sound pass. Additionally, we’re trying to design some alternative dialogue layouts because Taza and Lee often speak while traveling, and the ADV dialogue format can be exhausting to read. NVL mode covers a bit too much of the background though, and it would be nice to let the panning background subtly shine through.

Taza route status - Character expressions: 95% - Image transitions: 5% - Sound: 5%

Play the Dead Man’s Rest demo

Add Dead Man’s Rest to your Steam Wishlist

Dead Man’s Rest

Add Dead Man’s Rest to your Steam Wishlist

The Steam page for Dead Man’s Rest is now live, so you can add it to your wishlists to be notified of its release! Adding the game to your wishlist will also help us with visibility later on.

Note: The demo is not available to play from Steam. We have decided to release the demo together with the full game due to all the hurdles involved with passing Steam review.

Dead Man’s Rest

Get the DMR demo

Hope everyone’s doing well! Recovering from a food coma or looking forward to the weekend? There’s a new visual novel demo out for you to play! Taking anywhere from 45m-2hrs to play through, you’ll get the chance to meet most of the LIs and learn up to 41 period words/phrases.

Let us know what you think! You can find us and other players on the Argent Games Discord in #dead-mans-rest.

The demo is currently only available on itch. We hope to make it available on Steam in the near future, but it is dependent on getting past Steam’s review process.

Dead Man’s Rest

We’ve finished programming all the core materials of the demo! It’s actually two days early (internal deadline of Friday).

A reminder that you can still sign up for the demo beta happening this weekend (copied from the last post):

EDIT: If you are already on the Argent Games server, please add yourself to the demo using a reaction role in #roles-assignment as well as fill out the form below. You must be in the Argent Games server to participate in the demo beta

We’re opening signups to beta the DMR demo! Just fill out this Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScfJJKOSFDjbamWmCkFeChNPnZ93hgjiXSd0hB0u4lZwET0KQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Discord is required to access the beta. We will be using a private #dmr-beta channel in the Argent Games Discord server https://discord.gg/p3pM8rj. The beta is scheduled for Nov 21-23, and the demo is about 16k words long (45min-1.5hrs). We’re planning on releasing the demo before the end of the month :)

Reintroducing the characters again as the updated sprites roll in!

Taza’s facial expressions refuse to stay put, so we have to use ridiculous random numbers to put them back into place.

Lee is actually properly shirtless in this case.

A small hiccup with layers. Locked choices in the demo are for the routes! You will not be able to unlock the choices during the demo beta.

Dead Man’s Rest

We’re opening signups to beta the DMR demo! Just fill out this Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScfJJKOSFDjbamWmCkFeChNPnZ93hgjiXSd0hB0u4lZwET0KQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Discord is required to access the beta. We will be using a private #dmr-beta channel in the Argent Games Discord server https://discord.gg/p3pM8rj. The beta is scheduled for Nov 21-23, and the demo is about 16k words long (45min-1.5hrs). We’re planning on releasing the demo before the end of the month :)

Reintroducing the characters again as the updated sprites roll in!

The GUI has changed a bit since last time. We’re pretty sure even back in the late 1800s, you should not be walking around in public establishments without being properly dressed.

Dead Man’s Rest

We’re back! After a hiatus due to SCU work over at AG, we can now devote time to working on DMR again. Here’s an iteration of the GUI:

Sprites are also getting a slight update! They’ll be a little more aggressive to fit the setting.

We’re also adjusting the resolution of the game down from 1080p => 720p because it gives us more flexibility with the backgrounds, and there were some lagging issues with the animated background. The adjustment comes with some accidents in the generic GUI though!

We have an internal deadline for the demo, so as that gets closer and it looks like we’ll be able to hit it, we’ll make the public announcement! Unfortunately, the previously estimated complete game release date won’t be hit (Q4 2020). SCU took up a bit more time than expected, so those plans made months ago have required adjusting.

Hello all. Let’s talk a little bit about one of our productivity tools that we’ve recently adopted.

tl;dr clock hours, plan agendas and schedule meetings to touch base

As fresh(ish) university graduates, life has moved on quite a bit from whence we first began Argent Games. Dovah continues to reside in the middle of the USA, and gamma is now on the West Coast. No more in-person work parties! Yet, despite the increased distance, we have managed to boost our productivity levels.

How?

>Clocking hours (we use Time Clock Genie, which is free and has a nice interface, though it is a little bit slow to load and doesn’t have a convenient phone app). By treating our work at AG like a proper job (even though it’s all volunteer since we aren’t receiving pay), the stakes are higher for not Wasting Time during work hours. There are a finite number of hours in the day, and we must make the most of them since we’re juggling other jobs outside of AG as well. (It’s helpful that we are both workaholics...)

>>Side aspect of clocking hours is that we have a little Activities log that we fill in with some notes about what we worked on that day. It helps inform the other member what tasks were worked on and/or completed. This information can then be used to ask each other less redundant questions.

Have you finished the script yet?!? --gamma screams without checking the activities log

Have you read the script yet??? --Dovah questions unamusedly

>Meetings! We’ve always found online meetings to be more useful than in-person ones (one reason we love silent work parties/work calls; have we talked about those yet?), but now that we are cracking down on being more productive, as well as diverging in our work (Dovah working hard on REH, among other things; gamma working on some other unnamed projects and picking off lint), it’s important that we touch base every so often. Not to mention, with the upcoming Kickstarter, there’s lots to plan!

>>Agendas (for the meetings). Both of us prepare our own agendas with items we want to cover in the meeting. Many of our items will overlap, which is great! It’s indicative that we are still on the same page. The agendas give the meetings direction, and we don’t need to dig around for scattered tasks, ideas, and questions.

Meetings typically last 30-45 minutes.

We currently schedule meetings as the need arises, rather than having a set time in the calendar. There’s no point in planning meetings ahead and then having to remember to cancel them if no one has anything to talk about.

A bonus to these incredibly productive meetings is that we leave feeling re-energized and motivated, ready to hack at the material that hides the game.

(Of course, there’s still plenty of communication outside of meetings.)

As much as we love our meetings, we do generally dislike meetings, as most of them in our experience are a complete waste of time.

Late post today since there were many tech difficulties.

Hello folks! For reasons you’ll all find out soon, translations/localisations have been on our minds recently.

But first, obligatory reminder to follow @like_a_heretic (Markus) on Twitter. He’s busy gathering the cast now but will be much more active in the near future~

#KILLHOLLYWOOD

Translations! Ren’Py makes it fairly simple to translate all the text in a game. There’s a handy dandy “Generate Translations” button on the main menu of the launcher.

Click that button, and after following a couple of steps, you’ll make some files that just need to have parallel translation text filled in like so:

The lines in blue (underneath the “translate” lines) are the original English text. Translated text just goes in the green area below them.

File structure for translations will look something like this:

Just drop the translation files into the folder, and they will be readily available at the switch of a button! (In the above image, we would be using a “None” language, but usually you’ll have a folder with “language name” instead of “None”.)

If you notice the gui folder there, that’s for translating all the menu/GUI elements, which are images. Those require a little more work, since we have to make new GUI images with the translated text. That means loading up an image editor, copying over the translated text, then saving the new image. This might not sound too bad, but Your Dry Delight has at least 18 images to remake, and toggling layers on and off etc. takes quite a bit of time. Especially if the translation has longer text...how do you fit it into the image without making font minuscule? 

Can you figure out what game(s)/language(s) we’re looking at? Feel free to comment with your guesses! Maybe the correct guesses will win something :3

Hello! Today's post is a little later than usual (a day? many hours?). We're moving our weekly Dev Log to Tuesdays for now to make room for Red Embrace: Hollywood posts!

Let's talk a little bit about image resolution. Keep in mind, we are only experienced with certain kinds of 2D art, used specifically in visual novels. Things could be different for other game genres and art types (such as pixel art).

tl;dr some reasoning behind image resolution sizes, 1080p in Ren’Py can be laggy

Nowadays, modern computing devices allow us to lead a mostly worry-free life, alleviating many concerns with device specs being too weak to run the game at its intended size/framerate--we don't have to worry as much about optimization to prevent lag! While this is great and allows us to rapidly create games, it also makes it much too easy to forget about those without the shiniest devices or greatest bandwidth.

We've recently begun to take a little more care about resolution/file size, especially since Google Play does not make it easy to update apps without requiring a user to download the entire game again.

>Made a 2kB update that fixes a couple of typos or locked images

>Please download the whole 400MB file again!

Another reason is that we've noticed our games experiencing some obvious lag, particularly at scene transitions or during background panning. Sure, the lag doesn't make/break the experience, especially in a visual novel, but it does get a little bit annoying.

> Chess of Blades was made in 1080p, but our next game is scaling down to 720p. Ren'Py lags because it doesn't handle all the image layers and game logic very well. It's mostly a constraint of Python/Pygame/current implementations. If we were more code-savvy and had more time on our hands, we would consider digging into the code to see if we could fix it a little bit. But we are not.

>=> Insert gamma crying here, as gamma loves 1080p and ridiculously high res images.

>=>=> Another option would be to explore another game engine (such as Unity, Unreal, or Godot), which uses lower-level programming languages (flavours of C, for instance), but at the moment, it seems a bit like overkill. Especially since Ren'Py already comes with so many convenient, built-in, visual novel-specfic functions.

>=>=>=> Although in general, you can really use whatever resolution size you want for a visual novel...older games at 800x600 look fine for the most part, and 1024x768 or 1366x768 monitors are still in use.

> We commission our artwork at a minimum of 3x the final game size. This allows us to zoom (scale the image) without quality loss, creating a more animated experience (e.g. "looking around the room" or a character coming closer). Higher resolution also allows us to use JPEGs instead of PNGs. JPEGs are much smaller in filesize, but there is some quality loss since they compress the file with fancy algorithms. However, if you start out with Lots-of-Quality, and you subtract A-Little-Quality, the math should work out to having Decent/Good-Enough-Quality. (That's how it works, right?)

>=> Of course, the bigger the better (gives us more options to explore), so some backgrounds we've received are about 10k pixels wide. Gamma rejoices.

Hello! This past week has been a little busy over at the Argent Games side of things, so there definitely wasn’t much progress at all. (If you haven’t yet heard, we released a free short, fluffy BL game set in the 1920s called Your Dry Delight.)

So here’s a nice little background that will be used for a Learning screen! The idea is that you’ll visit this screen in your first intro to new words. After that, you can always refer to the words again in the Textbook.

...or something like that. There might be a few too many backgrounds/learning screens at this point.

Making these backgrounds definitely isn’t a way to avoid working on proper implementation.

Ciao!