DEVLOG [#2] - NPCS, CUTSCENES, ETC. (Patreon)

It's been a little while since the first post, so sorry for the slow development! Been busy with a couple of commissions and personal art...

A full video of some of the things I've gotten done since the last post is available on my Twitter, here.

To be honest, I expected to get a lot more stuff done within the last two weeks. But, with the aforementioned artwork as well as some personal IRL stuff going on, it's been really hard. What I have managed to get finished though is pretty substantial - and will be vital throughout the entire game.

(Raine, Rivers, Aisha, and Chris)

The first thing I did was add NPC entities to the game. This took about a day or two, and works pretty well over all... So far, I've written 5 different NPC AI scripts for how they can move around. It's just typical JRPG stuff to be honest, such as wandering around or following a set path, or even following the player. (As seen in the above video.)

With any story based game, especially RPGs, it's important to have a text and dialogue system. That's a no brainer. With each game I do though, I like to make things a little more stylized than I had the time before, and this project is no exception.

I decided to put a lot more forethought and [SOUL] into this system compared to previous games, and honestly, it was daunting to get started on implementing it. I wasn't totally sure where to start, so I began writing down thoughts and doodles of how I wanted the system to work into my notebook...

(Tailbound - 2021)

The system I had done for Tailbound was alright, but it was far from perfect. For one thing, it didn't integrate very well with the game's Cutscene system, and had to be jankily forced into it. Another issue it had was its internal Markdown system, for things such as making certain words different colors or sizes. In Tailbound, the markdown system was not very robust, and was prone to breaking if not typed out perfectly, and markdown effects weren't stackable. (So, for instance, I couldn't have fast blue text, it had to either be fast or be blue.)

(The Cinematic script shown in the Twitter video)

I couldn't simply copy and paste the code I had done for Tailbound, due to a GameMaker update that ovehauled the engine in 2020 or 2021. (I started work on Tailbound about a year before it had come out) Even if I could though, I decided that I'd rather just start over from scratch so I could kill two birds with one stone - combine the Cutscene and Text system into one.

That's the biggest reason it took me so long to get this working, both systems are kind of their own beasts to tackle, and making them one in the same wouldn't be an easy task. The benefit of doing this however is to streamline the game's backend, and make it a hell of a lot easier to manage both text and cutscenes.

(Thirstchasm 3.0 [2019], Tailbound [2021], Carnal Fatality [2023-?])

As I mentioned in the first devlog post, I was originally intending on making Carnal as a Visual Novel, so I wanted to bring some of that genre's flair to the text and dialogue system. This would mean having both characters speaking present and sort of "interacting" with each other visually... As opposed to Thirstchasm or Tailbound, where you would only see the character currently speaking.

I don't want the dialogue system to feel like a generic, run of the mill RPG text system. I wanted it to feel more alive, more cinematic almost, so I decided to stylize it like a comic book. Funnily enough, I guess I had a similar idea for Thirstchasm but had forgotten about it... Though, I remember that game's dialogue system being completely static, and nowhere near as dynamic as Tailbound's or Carnal's.

(Carnal, Tailbound)

Along with all that, I really wanted to make the art feel like a step up over my previous game's, while sticking to the overall aesthetic of the game as a whole. Tailbound, along with Thirstchasm 3.0 had a sort of issue where I had decided to use antialiasing on the lineart of artwork. While this looks good, it's inconsistent with the rest of the game's visual assets, none of which have any form of antialiasing.

I know that this is kind of nerd shit and likely hard to discern as a player, but it really bothers me! I'm pulling a few tricks and compromises in order to make Carnal's art look leagues above the other game's, while adhearing to this "no antialiasing" limit I put on myself... I'll go through some of the things I'm doing:

1. Carnal's GUI elements, such as the HUD and dialogue system are technically two times the resolution of the main gameplay. I intentionally did this and planned around it so I could be afforded higher resolution artwork, while retaining the pixel art style.

2. The line art is colored this time to give it a softer, more painterly-ish look.

3. Since I don't have antialiasing to rely on, I'm afforded much finer per-pixel detail, which is most noticeable in the character's irises.

4. The character portraits are overall much larger than they have been in previous games, and since they scale up and down dynamically during conversations, the player is able to see more of them. (But not all of them, still!)

Since I don't have much else to ramble on about, here's the full uncut portrait sprites for Raine and Rivers. Technically, Raine is drawn wrong here, as his hat is covering the wrong eye. Of course, that's because the game flips his portrait, and you'll only ever see it flipped like that in-game.

I was looking into the Zoso symbol from Led Zeppelin's fourth album recently, and stumbled into researching alchemical/occult sigils. So for fun, I decided that I wanted to incorporate sigils like that into the game, visible in these two character designs. I'll likely try working them into the plot of the game somehow...

Well, anyway, next up on my list of mechanics to introduce is a pause menu, status screen, inventory/item/gear system, and all the stuff that comes along with it. I'll write another one of these once I get all that done!

Thank you for your continued support!