Peripeteia development history, part 1: The beginnings (Patreon)

Gamejams are fun. Always a chance to try something new, develop your skills and learn to work with others, if you choose to. Peripeteia started as a gamejam project, as an entry to Ludum Dare 45, back in October 2019, an exact year ago. Little did we know what it would turn into. And we don’t mean the game you are currently looking forward to! Making a jam game is quite an interesting process, one we were familiar and had fun with.

So, who are “we” anyway? Back then the team was very different, not just yours truly, but plenty more other artists and contributors. It’s a good chance to mention their efforts and how they helped inspire what just might be our dream game. The hastily gathered "friends that have free time on the weekend" team consisted of ... 9 people (!) modelling, programming, doing voice work or just being ideaguys.

The Jam

Ludum Dares take 72 hrs when working as a team and to quote a certain anon commenting on our stuff: there's no "safe" games there, always pushing what's possible to do in such a limited timespan. The Ludum Dare 45 project definitely wasn’t a safe game to make. From the start we wanted to make an action/stealth game. The theme was “you start with nothing”, which could easily fit the genre.

The premise

The first hours during a gamejam are always for brainstorming, and oddly enough our collective musings about the lore did to some extent bleed into what Peripeteia is now. During the brainstorming we eventually settled on a short game playing as a member of an international agency set in Chinese-controlled Africa. We wanted to capture the feeling of dirty mercenary work in a high tech world.  We wanted to make a poor man’s Ground Zeroes but with Polish ninja girl as protagonist, with stealthy weapons and enhanced agility. The name for the project was Ninjemnik, mixing the word ‘ninja’ and the polish word for ‘mercenary’.

The models

There was its share of misunderstandings, conflicts and missed deadlines, but it was fun! For one, the decision to use a low-poly look was something we thought up from the start, but weren’t exactly capable of delivering. Our model guy (with whom we have parted ways by now) wanted the protagonist to be a well endowed lady (“With big ahungalungas” - Snake) in a tight-fitting suit. With the given timeframe, and due to the modellers insistence, we had to agree to a higher poly model. This is what the early iteration of what later became Marie turned out (you saw a glimpse of her in one of our twitter posts):

You should check out his current work, available on https://twitter.com/DustzeroA

The artist spent long hours perfecting the model, kind of neglecting other characters, but here's a fun fact: this part had significantly higher poly count than the rest of the model, as well as 30+ bones.

Our talented animator/rigger TrollSlayer (https://www.artstation.com/thatoneguy359) was capable of quickly turning the mesh into an in-game model, with a set of animations, some of which are still used to this day, they are however subject to change once we’ll be able to deploy a mocap setup.

  Rigged!

Crafting the player model took quite a bit of time and enemy characters needed to be made quickly, We had to use the same rig and animations as the female character, which wasn’t optimal.

  Its-a me! Mario!

The guns were very nicely done, including what is now Marie’s signature weapon and one of our favourites: the VSSK Vychlop.

The UI

The ever talented Cwook (https://cwook.itch.io/) provided us with an awesome, Deus Ex-inspired UI, which layout we’re still using in the game in a way, giving it a few visual and functional upgrades.

(guess the classic Unity Capsule was the first version of Marie)

The Maps and Voice Acting

We built a small port town with a shipping yard and large concrete towers for the local populace. Chinese guards in plastic armor assailed you as you fought to secure… something. You see, we never got around to any specific goal for the level we made at that time, 72 hours simply was not enough. All we ended up releasing was a simple test level with a handful of enemies Shodanon was using for testing the mechanics.

In the end, neither the level Snake made, nor the map made by our friend Ostoru (https://sketchfab.com/Roberto_Lopez) made it into the released version of the game. A damn shame too because Snake’s level had an intro voiced by the one and only Spitfire (https://twitter.com/spitfireva). The attached .mp4 file is a recording of that never released intro.

Ostoru’s map:

None of that could be added to the game on time!

Voice work for the enemies was done by Baller, who is currently the contributing programmer on the project.

The Postmortem

Despite not being able to include all we made, the demo was actually quite good for a jam project. Shodanon, the programmer, had managed to majorly pull through for us.

The guns worked, and were fun! Climbing on buildings and containers worked, and was fun! The movement was awesome, the enemies were tough and seeked you out, and everything had seemed to fall together. The button-mashing hacking minigame was in. Snaketicus’ sfx and music had fit well, the animations ended up working and our artist’s models, slow as they were to make, did the job.

And for a few months, this was how the demo was left. We were exhausted and didn’t even check out what others made for that Ludum Dare, resulting in no ratings. We had a fine little prototype that worked on a basic level and sat on our hard drives as a trophy to the glory of our 72 hour skill. Everyone went on to work on their projects, Snaketicus tested the waters with his mech shooter game and Shodanon continued work on Beelzebox. But a thought began to brew in Shod’s mind. He felt that that little demo we made could be expanded upon, creating something far more engrossing and far more interesting. He had seen the potential and wasn’t ready to let it go.

Thus in January of 2020 we experienced quite a peripeteia. This is what the next dev blog will be about.