Iron Trout Studios

 I LLIIIIIVVEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hey everyone, sorry about not being...well active. On the updates. Don’t worry, I am working on Project Crusade behind the scenes. And as Nathan told you. I’ve been focusing on many aspects outside of the Graphics. One of them being the music! Well here it is, this ones pretty simplistic but It has a reason for being that way. You can check out the track by clicking here

Alright, I’m going to go check in for the afternoon. See you later!

I know it’s not Friday. Too bad. This is Nathan, with the Friday Update. We have a lot of stuff to talk about. Sort of. Mostly. Let’s get started

Code - What’s going well?

This is my specialty, so I can tell you that the game is coming along well. We’re still perfecting player movement so it doesn’t suck. Once we’re finished with that, we can get started on NPCs and dialogue. This is an RPG, after all. I’m really excited to get to work on characters, and implementing the game world.

Code - What sucks?

Everything is pretty good. I’ll try to get player movement real tight this week. I want snappy, responsive controls, and nothing will stop me.

Art/Music

We have art assets finished! We finally have the ability to implement the character Nick’s sprites into the game! Also, music is going to exist in the program, starting this week! That’s exciting!

Story/Plot/Writing

“Nathan,” you say, “Domains are scary, and honestly are a very broad topic, and I want them changed.” Well, lucky for you, domains are being overhauled! Domains are no longer the geographical manifestations of one’s psyche, instead they’re the geographical manifestations of one’s repressed feelings! What does this mean? Not a ton. But, it does mean that some characters have had their Domains redesigned! With the new Domain changes, I should probably explain Soul Crawling once more.

Domains and Soul Crawling

Domains are like onions and ogres, they have layers. And as these layers get peeled back, you may have to face some enemies to go further down. Especially strong enemies have souls. These souls exist as their own separate location. Go inside a strong enemy’s soul, and you can defeat them permanently! This is known as Soul Crawling.

Tldr: Go through a bullet hell section to defeat bosses and mini-bosses.

That’s all for today, folks.

Hi, Y’all. It’s Nathan. First off, an apology. Life got in the way of all of us working on the project for the last couple weeks, and we don’t have too much to update y’all on. What we do have is spaghetti code and dreams. Also, I get to write the entire update. Sorry in advance.

Code - What’s Up?

Behind the scenes, we haven’t got much done. I rewrote the level generation algorithm because I hated how it worked previously. The new one is much more elegant and simple. We have simple player character movement and collision now, so the game is technically playable. This week, I’ll try to get actually good player movement down. If the game isn’t fun to control and play, what’s the point? Also, NPCs are maybe going to exist sometime. Probably.

Code - What’s Down?

The code was kind of a mess for a while, but it isn’t anymore. It’s started to solidify into a usable base. We have the dungeon crawling sections mostly good, and I haven’t found any bugs. Yet.

Graphics + Music - What’s Up?

I’m going to be honest, all 0 Iron Trout Studios followers. Graphics and Music hasn’t done anything major enough to update on this week. Zak has worked on some of the music, but hasn’t finished any tracks. The issue is that he’s also the Project Manager/Leader, so he has a lot on his plate. We should be getting more music soon, so I’m going to shamelessly plug the Soundcloud.

Listen to the music, love and/or hate the music, do whatever. Some new tracks should be up soon. Probably.

Writing/Story

There are two major story things going down. One of them is some more plot changes. We should really have a section to keep track of what we currently have as the Cannon for this game. The other is that the rest of the team has given me a side quest to implement. I have a couple of designs in mind. What I want to happen is for the side quest to revolve around the “Box of Heart Shaped Chocolates” item. Hopefully.

Writing/Story Changes

Followers of Iron Trout Studios, I have another confession to make. I’m not really up to date on the plot. There were some major rewrites, and I haven’t checked recently. So, I’m going to do an up to date summary of what has been written so far. Be ready for lots of capitalized words.

There’s this thing called the Soulspace. The Soulspace is an “intangible, interconnected superspace” of all humans. Basically, everybody’s subconscious thought has been mashed together into a physical realm. The land and solid matter in the Soulspace is called the “Alpha Domain”. This is because it is the main Domain, or the Alpha Domain. Domains are the manifestations of your person into a physical space. The Alpha Domain is the physical space of the manifestations of everybody’s person. The regular universe is for the physical, the Alpha Domain is for the metaphysical, if that makes any sense. There’s this dude called The Overseer. The Overseer feeds on emotional pain and dispair. He is the direct counterpart to the forces that keep the Alpha Domain and the material plane balanced. He cares about only himself, and wants to become the Ultimate God of Despair, or something. He has limited control over the material realm, and tries to induce despair into the world so he can become stronger. He starts small, by ruining a couple people’s lives. Certain people also have control over Domains. To be able to access this ability, however, they have to survive their own Domain, which is generally a hostile place. And that’s all I can give up before I start spoiling things.

That was a giant paragraph, but what can you expect from an RPG?

Closing Statement

Graphics

Hey there everyone! My name is Zak, and I’ll be your waiter for the evening. I would recommend our current special. The graphics section of the “Friday” Update. Just remember that we don’t take cash. 

What’s Going Good? 

I have met my deadline of having the idle animation for Nick’s battle sprites completed. Take a look!

It certainly was a breath of fresh air to be able to have more than a 36 pixels x 16 pixels space to work with. I am taking the battle sprites incredibly seriously, the game is a turn based RPG after all. While I’m still not sure about the amount of animations relating to the battles (I am still in the process of designing it ).  I do know for 100% certain that I will need to create attack, hurt and death sprites.  So those are already in the concept/draft phase. Maybe instead of taking my word for it, I can show you the concepts right now. 

This here is a scan of the rough concept for Nick’s attack battle animation. While idle was a fairly simple animation, consisting of four frames of animation on a 12 frames per second loop. I’m planning on this one to be much more flashy. When drafting I normally use incredibly rough geometric shapes. This is because when creating character animations, you must be able to follow a strong silhouette. You must be able to show the personality of the character from the way they move, attack or even die. These are just the base sprites, the minimum requirement, this will allow me to go back and adjust the sprites however I see fit in the future. Not all of the animation is even depicted here actually, just the first couple frames.  I’ll post a couple more from the designing of the idle animation. 

Layer Breakdown. 

Hair Animation. 

Body Animation.

What’s Not Going Good?

My classes have just started, so everything is a bit tame currently. But won’t last for too long. Other than that everything is going well.  I’m excited to keep working on this Project. I just hope I can stick to my quota.

What’s Next?

Next is the drawing of the attack and hurt sprites. The hurt will be able to build upon the idle, but the attack will take a bit more elbow grease. If I do end up getting those done early I’m going to work on some talk sprites before the creation of the tile sets next week. 

Music

While no tracks have currently started development, I do have a couple concepts to build upon. I have certain instruments and loops in my head that will probably end up going into a song. It probably won’t happen for a bit however. 

So, I’m Ben. I’m the guy that makes sure that the character arcs aren’t cringe while making this wonderful pipe dream of a game.

We’ve decided to add a 5th Domain. You might be asking “What in God’s name is a Domain?”  Well my hypothetical questioner, the domains are a creation of the game’s main villain; an extra dimensional being with their mind set on creating the ultimate brooding and dark story using the four main characters. Which is where the domains come in. After trying to manipulate them into telling his story by causing tragic events around them, he decides enough is enough and actually attempts to manipulate their will and soul, which leads to his discovery of the Soulspace.

The Soulspace is a mirror-like reflection of the characters world that represents all of the suppressed and hidden emotions of humanity. Usually a city consisting of the Spectras (people formed of pure emotions) live on a floating landmass known as Alphaspace. However, the main villain has taken the main character’s Spectra counterparts and used them to create the Domains.

Domains have two Layers, their external appearance and their actual outlook. So, the Domains are essentially physical manifestations of the main character’s outlook on life and their mental state. Meaning that, yes, this game will in fact be pretentious. If you want an idea of what some the Layers will be give the soundtrack a listen and you might be able to figure it out.

Programming

Hey, all 0 Iron Trout Studios followers! It’s me again, Nathan! Once more, I’m going to show you what’s going on in the programming side of things. So, country roads, let’s-a go!

What’s Good?

I finally got random level generation working. Is it perfect? No. Is it functional, and no longer spitting out random errors? Yes. Sadly, the beautiful to watch step by step level generation is gone. But so is every mistake I’ve made. Level generation is finally functional.

What’s Not Good?

Honestly, I’m not working at the speed I want to. I hoped to set up the player character by this update, and I haven’t so far. I should have that functional within the week. I also didn’t get much time this week to design any levels. This wasn’t a productive week, and I plan to change that in the future.

What’s Coming Next?

Coming next is the player character. I may make more changes to the level generator so it works better. Again. Best case scenario, I modify the level generator into what I want it to be like, get some GIFs from it running, make the player character, and design some basic rooms. At the bare minimum, I want to get the player movement working.

~Nathan

Graphics

Hello once again! This is the Friday Update, my name is Zak. Welcome to the graphics section. 

What’s Going Good?

This here is the last of Nick’s most important soul crawl sprites. This is one of Nick’s character-specific abilities while within soul crawl. Each character will hopefully will have an [MOVEMENT] ability and an [ATTACK] ability. This here is Nick’s [ATK] named Sixth Sense, when used it stuns all enemies within the room, allowing for quick escapes within a soul crawl dungeon. It takes a while to build up an [ATK] ability, and the charge will carry over in between battles but will lessen when loosing. Cool huh? 

What’s Not Going Good?

These, like the previous ones, were pretty hard to make, but not impossible. My old crappy laptop, however, decided to erase all my organization folders and the contents within relating to Project Crusade, among other things. I, however, had backed these files up, so nothing was lost. I’m going to have to take some time to reorganize all the files on a larger PC that won’t decide to be a butt. But that’s fine, the main issue, later on, is going to simply be my schedule. My classes are going to start this Monday, giving me more responsibilities but less time to work on Project Crusade. This also is going to happen while I work on the RPG battle sprites, which will be much more time-consuming. It will be a bit harder for Project Crusade to flourish like this.

What’s Next?

This here is my current schedule for Project Crusade’s Graphics: 

8/16: Nick Battle Sprites Drafting (Rough Drafts of sprites and singular polished frames)

8/23: Nick Battle Sprites Progress/Polish (Better Drafts that will be revisited but can make do till then)

8/30: Soul Crawl Tile Sets Drafting (Simple floor, wall and door sprites.)  

Extra Goal: Soulcrawl/Battle UI (Placeholders to Drafts)

Yeah, It’s a ton of stuff. I’m also going to try and make some progress in learning the C# coding language if I can, so Nathan doesn’t need to do it all on his own. I’m more of a writing language guy, not math though. So we’ll see how it goes. 

~Zak

Hello everybody! A new music track has been completed!

https://soundcloud.com/zak-habul/smokey-the-bear

...I didn’t say that the name would be good alright? I’m bad at naming things.

Programming

Hey there! It’s-a me, Nathan! I’ll be your guide to the programming section of the Friday Update. So, what’s going on?

What’s Going Good

Random level generation started working. We got a room based level generator. Think Wizard of Legend or The Binding of Isaac. It works, and we can create as many rooms as we want, and they’ll get added to the possible selectable rooms.

What’s Going Not Nearly As Good

I opened Unity yesterday, and the level generator code wasn’t working! I have no idea why. I think it was due to me messing with the room detection section of the code. I have empty game objects to detect where the rooms are, as they have standardized sizes. I changed parts of the room detection code, it was working. I saved the code, edited the room detector game objects, and then had to stop working on the project for the night. Today, I booted up the code, and got an error, 782 of them, to be precise. I got an error every frame the game ran, until I shut it down. I don’t have a backup, and will be rewriting the level generation code. Yay.

What’s Coming Up Next

Next, I’m going to rewrite the level generation code. Once I do that, I’m going to get work on creating a functioning player character, and spawning him in the scene after the level is generated. Hopefully, I can get that done this week. Stretch goal, I get the level generation working, a fully functioning character, and some unique rooms. Bare minimum, rewrite the level generator scripts.

So, I’ll check in with you when something important happens, or the next week comes around.

~Nathan

Graphics

Hello people, this is Zak! I’m going to be your guide to the Graphics section of this update. So strap in folks, this is going to get wild

...(kinda).

What’s Going Good

All of the walking sprites for the character Nick has been completed!

Look at them huh? Sprite styles change based on the gameplay style. Nathan told me it would be preferable if the sprites for soul crawl were 16 x 16 pixels in height and in length. I believe one of the reasons he gave me was hit-box and level design.  That there is about 1/4 of Nick’s character sprites completed (including some not pictured). I still need to finish his soul crawl attack and special sprites. After that are the battle sprites and then talk portraits if I happen to have any extra time. 

What’s Going Not Nearly As Good

I have a new found respect for the developers of early GameBoy games. Drawing something that fits your “vision” for a character design in such a small space of pixels is way harder then it has any merit to be. There is also some problems with proportion and color going on too. I think that’s mostly from having so many versions of early sprites that I’m forgetting which color pallets correlate to which. I should probably invest money into a notepad. 

What’s Coming Up Next?

Like mentioned earlier, First, the soulcrawl attack and special sprites. Then, it’s going to be the battle sprites. I’m really excited for them, I’m going to be able to go all out.

Music

I just finished a new track!!! It’s probably going to be posted tomorrow, so look out for that I guess.  It’s called *drumroll*

...

...

...

...actually the name is really dumb so I’m going to keep that a secret till then. 

Hello!

If you are reading this, thank you so much for coming over to out little corner of the internet. If you want to keep following the progress of Project Crusade (we really need to come up with a better name) follow the account if you want. We’re going to be trying to work on this project fairly often but we do still have lives to live. So don’t expect daily updates or anything of the sort. We do have a sound cloud playlist for our soundtrack.

You can find it here at https://soundcloud.com/zak-habul/sets/crusade-game-soundtrack. (Be warned that all songs have incredibly dumb names.) 

Anyway, that’s all I  have to say on the matter. Hopefully I’ll talk to you soon!

~Zak

What is Project Crusade?

Project Crusade is a video game that we, Iron Trout Studios, are working on. Project Crusade is a working title for an in-progress RPG focused around the “Soul Crawling” mechanic.

What is Soul Crawling?

Soul Crawling is the main gimmick of the game! Along your journeys, you may have to defeat a couple of baddies. However, the strongest of these enemies can’t just be defeated by beating them in battle! You have to face them head on, on their turf, to destroy them once and for all in a top-down dungeon crawling section! What’s the only way to kill the physical manifestation of your inner demons? Beat the hell out of ‘em.

Why do I care?

We’re making a game! Buy it when it comes out (if it ever comes out), be a playtester, watch us on our comedy of errors as we try to finish and release this damn thing! We’ll try to update weekly, or whenever something important happens!

Who’s even doing this?

Iron Trout Studios is manned by three developers. There’s Nathan, the lead, and only, programmer. Also, he helps design the levels. That’s me! There’s Zak, our artist, musician, and the guy who put this whole thing together. And last, but not least, Ben is our main writer and the only person with an actually good sense of humor.

Where can I listen to Zak’s amazing music?

Here’s the link.

How can I support you, or your idea?

Show interest in the project, send us asks, give us feedback. There’s nothing better for us than getting support and feedback from the community.