Hey everyone and welcome to the Machine Made: Rebirth blog, a place where we talk about the development of my upcoming video game Machine: Made Rebirth, but also a place where we take a step back from the daily grind, and just try to enjoy ourselves as we talk about gaming, programming and other topics of interest!
We've been working really hard on the presentation for this game — let me tell you, adding in a feature like sprinting or having to do a dash puzzle can confuse even the most well thought out of sprite movements, and animation and picture placement when you include things like transparent lights on a map also requires a certain amount of just… normal old reworking… so there has been simply a lot of that going on. So much so that our patch is going to be delayed! That's one piece of news for today. Another is that I've also gotten a little bit addicted to Hearthstone. I've considered adding in things like deathrattle effects that summon more monsters when you kill an enemy or battlecries that do something at the beginning of a battle. It's been a lot of fun, but most of what we've been looking at has been in an experimental or still developing stage.
So let's spend a little bit of time just talking about how graphics and animation impact everything else that you do in a game — because they really, really do.
Parts of this map… this looks like it could have come out of an RPG maker game, doesn't it? The only graphics that they are using here are from the actual gameplay, although in the next image they've stacked text windows to show multiple parts of dialogue. I consider that a weird choice… like what's the significance of the person saying ok? Why is this conversation divided into two windows and not other conversations? I'm not sure, but anyway, this is an early scene from Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, where they have a few simple puzzles and a little backstory right away. Some of this look a little familiar? Okay, I changed the main character's name to Tibby just for my own amusement but I can hardly imagine loading a game without finding one of these types of parallels in there somewhere.
So when is it okay to make stylistic choices with things like the map and the text boxes? I think… as long as there is some presentable artistic theory or some enjoyable element of why you are making the stylistic choices that you are, then it's always completely okay. Largely for this reason, I've tried to keep things in my game pretty simple and straightforward… I'm going to be talking a lot about games that I was inspired by, or games that I think people might compare my game to, just for the same of getting the thoughts out there, with regards to all the things that you can expect and all the choices that we're going to be making regarding the look and feel of this game.
When I talk about these sorts of parallels, it's important to consider that there are graphical and stylistic themes to a game, and that where the player's eyes go to read information or see pictures is just as important as the story behind the game… don't underestimate the power of your graphics to tell a story. Let's look at some similar scenes from Machine Made…
Here we're moving things around the environment instead of trying to escape a dying world…
And we've got some cool parallels here in terms of the archetypes of the wizard and the evil machine…
There are some interesting similarities in terms of the appearance of the maps and the gameplay as well… just the symmetry and design, as well as the colour of the text boxes and text. Load up your old library of rpgs and find out which one has the most similar graphical style to your own! It can be a lot of fun!
I hope you enjoyed today's blog, it's going to be a little short since
there is still a huge amount of updating to do… nonetheless…
rock on and party hard, see you all soon.
Cheers,
Allsvin
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