Music ideas

Adam Fergler was kind enough to help me once again with the creation do a melody for the background of my game.

I've never been good to choose myself a soundtrack or even sound effects, but I do appreciate the importance of them.

I know Adam is busy with his own projects, therefore I never thought about anything different to a single simple melody looping in the background. 

After the first few days of talking about what kind of mood I was looking for the game, what the story was, the game play and the main characters personality, he started coming up with ideas of what could be done.

Because at this point I barely touched any sound related topics for the engine, I didn't know what restrictions I would encounter. My original IDE was to have a tune per stage of courage and simply fade in and out between them. 

After trying for a bit I couldn't find a way to make a smooth transitions and having sudden changes of music was not a good idea.

After some talking and considerations we came up with more practical ideas to represent Kamea's courage increase that in this level's case it increases 3 times plus the initial state:

A) have a the same melody 4 times with the exact timing, but with more and more instruments on each level. The idea was to have them all runnin at the same time in the background on mute and just turn the volume up after each courage checkpoint was reached. This created a kind of layering and would avoid an abrupt change of music.

B) have smaller melodies that sound good looping but that the ending of one is the beginning of the next one. With this method, we expected to be able to loop one until a courage point was reache, stop the looping and once the song is finish switch to the next one which then would loop until the next courage point is reach, and so on. 

I decided to make quick and rough testing playable levels to see if they would actually work. It turns out that the 'coding' behind it was pretty simple and managed to get both ideas to work.

Here's idea A and idea B

(Note that A doesn't line up properly, but that's because one song starts slightly later than the other, but the concept is there).
(Also! just noticed that you sometimes have to refresh at least once the browser window to get the audio working properly!) 

I think the easies way for Adam was to go for option B. He said he had more than one idea that he was already working on, more like Kamea's theme song! 

Maybe that melody will be used for the titles screen :D 

Really looking forward to hear more of it.

Sanctuary - test 2

So I finally came around to make a second test to show for a presentation.
This still keeps the original layout as there's no point to expand the level while testing (the smaller, the faster to test). I also haven't tried some of the sprites, mainly because I've been busy trying to sort out the gameplay itself. Probably in that respect it will be hard to notice the huge amount of improvements compared to the first test.

Click HERE to try the second test version.

Keyboard Controls :
A - left
D - right
Spacebar- Jump
S- jump down
W - talk/open door/pick up stuff/climb (interact is a better word) 

Things might be confusing at this point still, but the idea is to talk to both of the NPCs to be able to access the room inside the tree. The final text will be slower and the dialogue will give hints to what the player should do.
But leaving the story aside (that will be arranged in time) the mayor advances in this version would be:
- Global constants working along with the phasing of the story.
- Camera movement moves responding to the character's movement (still needs tweaking).
- Zoom in and out depending on players movement.
- Die and re-spam if falling of the 'level'
- Inside tree layout.
- Dialogue appearance.
- Initial Xbox controller compatibility (yes, you can play it with a controller or keyboard) 


There are still far too many problems that need fixing, to list a few:
-Fix camera movement
-Incorporate initial and final cinematic events (need to figure out how to do that :-/ )
-Avoid dialogue boxes to overlap
-Fix characters sprite movement (specially with the xbox controller)
-Set a menu screen
-by miracle... hope to figure out how to control text speed and appearance by pressing keys, instead of having it timed.

There are still loads and loads of things that need fixing, but it's certainly time to speed up with the sprites; any future testing might seem with less improvements as I'll have to balance more between the 'coding' and assets' creation.
Any feedback would be appreciated.

Quick introduction to the characters - initial concept art

The ideas I came up with Sanctuary started just as a way to merge my interest in stylised imagery and fantasy, creating a pleasant looking game. After working on the conceptualisation on the main character and some of the principal NPC, I started to reflect some of the personalities of people around me, and even more I started reflecting some of my own personal problems into the characters. 

Without going too into detail or to literally just make a fantasy version of my friends/family, I started creating some personalities for each character. This initial level that I'll be working on, only compels the escape and intro of the potential game. The NPC's that appear here are not necessarily going to be playable characters, but if the project was to go further, I would certainly want to give them an important role in the story. Pretty much all their personalities clash; each character will posses not only a determined personality, but they will have their own insecurities, concerns, strength and weakness. The main character will be an unusual hero type, as I want her to be the one who experiences the world and her task while dealing with insecurities and anxieties about herself. 

Loneliness is a key concept here; each NPC is the last one of their type, and this is the 'quality' that will unite them as a 'family' later on. 

Once I finish each of the characters final art, I'll go in depth on their personalities, in the mean time, here's some of the initial concept art: 

Kamea: The main character of the story, unicorn.

Alba & Kera: Dawn and dusk nymphs.

Teles: The male nordic siren 

Azmer: The Centaur/Wemic

The dragon (working on name)

This is just quick ideas for the 'bad guys'. I thought of rabbits/hares well dressed, as they're serving a rich and powerful wizard. Also wanted to play with the idea of some of them just not caring about their jobs and not being aggressive... this guys might not be on the final level, as I'm not entirely sure if I'll be able to put a battle system. 

Sanctuary - test 1

Well after reading loads and loads of tutorials I decided to start testing and dropping stuff together as I develop the concept art. Over all I can say that the characters, NPC and some of the backgrounds are pretty much finished idea wise, so soon I'll start introducing them. I have a thing about 'branding' my own work, just because I seem to get more attached to it and it's easier to discuss about it. 
The name of the game is 'Sanctuary' so from now on, you'll hear a lot about it. 

If you go to this LINK it should show a very rough version of the game: 
(Hopefully it works, as one of the things I'm testing is exporting the game itself) [you play with the arrow of the keyboard] 
Some of the characters in there are inspiration examples of what I want to achieve, they helped me to get sizes right. The average size of characters is 150 pixels high... 
Things I've done on this test as an achievement are:
-Mobility of the character: walk, jump, climb
-Camera following the character
-'Animation' sprites for the main character (it technically works, yet I'm only using a test image) 
-Invisible collisions and jump though platforms
-Positioning of objects and background in different planes, at the same time adquiring a sense of depth through implementing some parallax motion

There is A LOT to do yet. My next challenge at this point is add the text and 'interaction' with the NPC as for what I can see in tutorials is quite an extensive process that requires a lot of planning. Crossing fingers other people can play it. Bare in mind: 1) this is my first attempt to make games myself 2) graphics wont be this ugly [hopefully] and 3) the movement and collisions won't be rough.