2021 in Review (Patreon)

Greetings all, 

Hope you have settled in for an end of year break. Here in the southern hemisphere Christmas means broiling heat and desperately keeping our lawns alive (4 days of 40c+ coming up over Christmas break). Meanwhile, John has informed me that in lovely Russia it is about minus -15c atm. (O.o)

2021 has been a pretty big year for Innkeep! Maybe the biggest ever in terms of just how much got done. So I thought I'd take the time to give a bit of an overview, and talk about what is coming up next year.

Things really kicked off in February, when I started designing a portrait animation system. The idea was to have Torgeir's lovely portraits look like they are speaking by using a few vowel and consonant frames that are mixed together into a loop, in a way that could look reasonably realistic. It turned out pretty good!

Over the rest of the year I would animate all of the portraits that currently exist (a total of 12, with 8 mercenaries, the player, the old innkeep, Captain John, and Morgan the sorceress).

I've got the process down now, and I'm comfortable with repeating it for all the portraits that will eventually be in the game (around 100 I think). It takes about 1 hour per portrait.

Moving into March and April, I was pushing ahead with the intro scene for the tutorial  / game prologue / demo. This is fairly complicated, with quite a few unique animations. We have Vorish killing the old Innkeep, and the player going from dressed in a hooded cloak, to wearing the old innkeep's clothes, with a number of stages in between.

There was also quite a bit of dialogue to write. 

In late April, I ported the project over to Game Maker Studio 2.0. When I started on Innkeep GMS was still at 1.4. When the new version came out a year or so later I avoided as it was still a bit buggy. Then I avoided it out of habit, or thinking Innkeep won't take that long! Or that porting would be hard. What finally pushed me to take the jump though was realising how many resources and tutorials were now made for 2.0, and that some functionality that I was considering was restricted to 2.0. As it turned out, it was a lot easier than I expected, as incompatible code (due to changes in function names and things like how depth layers are handled) was automatically updated to be compatible. Yay!

At the same time I was doing quite a lot of bug fixing and code refactoring. Sometimes this improved the code, but broke a lot of stuff, and that was pretty time consuming. Sometimes it was just trying to make the code in important objects more readable so that other people could potentially deal with them later if necessary.

Still in April, towards the end of the month, I did some work on the options menu. This is designed to eventually be accessible from in game as well.

After a few quieter months focusing on paying the bills, I was back to regular game dev in July. Along with a promo video for Realms Deep 2021 I also got to work on a fancy new in-game drop down menu, using some lovely art by Torgeir.

In August I bit the bullet on another thing that needed doing: relocating the kitchen to be directly below the bar. This was my original idea before I added the stable, because I intuitively understood it needed to be a simple Y axis pan with minimal movement for the player. 

Later however I overrode myself and shifted the kitchen off to the left to make room for a "realisitically" large stable. In testing though, it was clear that there was too much distance for the player to walk, and the camera movement was too extreme and uncomfortable to be repeated often.

So, I got to work, cracking open the old room texture GIMP files, shifting everything around, and then fixing all the perspectival problems / redrawing broken sprites, etc. It took a bit of work, esp. because I had to take into account the cellar which is directly underneath. But the end result was MUCH nicer.

Later that month I got stuck into prototyping the cooking system of the kitchen itself. How would it work exactly? What kinds of pieces would it have? How would the player interact with it? Etc. What size (roughly) would the sprites be? These were the kinds of questions I needed to figure out. I started with pen and paper, then got to work with simple sprites.

The idea was to have a main "preparation" table, where ingredients are chopped up, mixed, etc. And then the cooking would happen at the fire in the oven, or using a cauldron, spit, etc.

Finally, food serving would be organized on a third station. The moving of the kitchen also opened up space to the left for a pantry where more stations could be added later, for ingredient storage, washing up, butchering, grinding flour, etc.

The food prep and serving stations would also have a higher res GUI layer that is opened by clicking on them, allowing you to more easily see what is going on without your player sprite in the way, while still retaining that more hands on, UI free style that I was going with. 

But I wasn't done yet! (August was full time gamedev.) Next I added a clutter system to the tables in the commonroom.

Note: This is not just busywork. In terms of core game mechanics, cleaning tables will give you an excuse to linger around innocuously while listening in on conversations. ;-) There was a fair bit to do here though with making new sprites for the player, coding, etc.

Another job was to get started on a basic message window and code for handling events with the tutorial sequence that follows the opening dialogue.

There was also a lot of work done with positional sound (3D footsteps, relative to center of screen), general bug fixing, scripts for characters, etc. The work kept coming, but everything was really taking shape.

Moving into September, we had a lot of progress made with SFX. John sent me a big package (the file on my computer is just called Johns Big Package, sorry John!) of various sounds, and I started really adding a lot to different moments in the intro. Particularly exciting was work on the footstep system. Basically, we have individual footfall SFX for different shoes on different surfaces, with even distinctions for left and right footsteps. The system then determines what to play based on what shoe type a character is, and where they are. The individual sfx are randomly played from the pool available that matches the requirement, with a left/right alteration. Why do all this instead of just playing a set loop? Because it lets us match the sound perfectly to walking animations of different speeds. It's also easier to generate sound in a 3D soundscape, where the center of the screen acts as the listening ear. So, if the player is walking to the left of the screen, it will sound louder on the left (getting further as the player moves further away).

I also made a couple of One Minute Dev Diary videos in September, getting a bit more practice with video editing. These were fun to do, but although the first got a lot of views from being embedded in an article, the second hardly scrapped any. As much as I enjoyed doing them, I decided to spend my time working on the game for now.

Moving on, I had a few more characters to design for the prologue. The expanded cast was now looking pretty decent in size.

And there were more lovely portraits from Torgeir as well of course.

That month I also hit 1000 followers on twitter. Quite a milestone!

October was more SFX work, more bug fixing, tweaks and improvements, just a lot of small grindy things really. But I did have fun working on this body carrying animation.

In game, the corpse has a blood value, that gradually depletes, leaving droplets over the floor as you walk. O.O

More bug fixing, more improvements, and more tweaking ensued.

Making games is hard work. Prototyping is fun because you can turn around and suddenly a new thing exists. But turning that thing into a properly fleshed out version with all the little possible issues sorted... is a whole other beast.

One more thing to note... improving the decluttering system to be based on individual objects, rather than tables. This is a lot more powerful, and lets me do various cool things.

Then back to some prototyping. This time, a dish washing station.

This was pretty fun to work on.

Later in October I added a serving bench prototype as well. The idea is that you bring your cauldron of cooked stew or whatever, and then ladle it out into bowls that can be carried to tables. I was starting to prioritize videos at this point because of the inclusion of some SFX. I need to remember to make GIFs as well for times like this when I want to embed them!

By the end of the month the kitchen prototype was really coming along nicely.

Capping off that busy month, I made another trailer. This time for the #PitchYaGame twitter event / comp. It went quite well, and I was happy with the result, apart from an obvious spelling mistake that I missed from being tired and not having enough time to review it all carefully.

After a few months of near full time dev, I had to go back to focusing on paying the bills in November, into December. But I did get a bit of time to make small improvements, and to prototype a new language for the game, which shall be known as "Innglish" (Thanks Vorish!)

It's a mixture of old anglo saxon words, a bit of Chinese, some English fragments, and a bit of random "noise". 

The idea is to use this language to record short snippets of character dialogue, which can be played dynamically by characters when they speak. As the language itself is nonsensical, it can be combined with all kinds of dialogue. But because it has a bit of variety, we can still make it sound fairly convincing and natural (I hope!)

That brings us to the final month of December! As you will be aware if you follow me on Twitter, I took to upgrading the graphics of the kitchen prototype, now that I was happy with how it worked. The idea was to have a nice and pretty vertical slice that can be used in an eventual steam trailer. Even if there is not much you can do with the system, it should at least look like a finished product.

This was a pretty big job, but quite a bit of fun. First was the table sprite.

I worked at a high res initially for the GUI layer, which could then be downscaled for the regular game level.

Along with some nicer sprites, I also designed a system for displaying the contents inside the cauldron. That was pretty fun to do. It also fits nicely with a similar system that I have in place for the barrels.

There was a lot of individual sprites to do, especially considering variations for chopped ingredients.

Or cauldron contents.

There was also some work to do on the fireplace, to make the cauldron feel more integrated with the flames. It's not great yet, but looks good enough for now.

Here's a video of the updated serving bench in action.

And one showing chopping of ingredients on the table.

PHEW! So, that was 2021. As you can see, it was quite a busy year. And yet the work never seems to end! That's gamedev for you.

So, what is coming up in the near future?

Here is my tentative schedule for the coming months.

JANUARY: Bill paying work. Boooo.

FEBRUARY: Final polishing of the kitchen vertical slice, and more work on the tutorial sequence. Creating a dialogue sequence with Morgan, and leading into prototype work on the dialogue eavesdropping system.

MARCH: More work on prototyping the dialogue system, and the animation system for the seated guests, with some drinking animations, idle animations, etc. Towards the end of the month, I want to make a steam trailer, and a pitch deck.

APRIL: Working on a pitch for publishers. Spreadsheets. Work estimates. Pitch deck writing. Sending demos to people to test and give some basic feedback. And... PITCHING. 

The idea is to get a decent little demo of the core of the game experience into the hands of a bunch of publishers, and see about getting funding so that I can focus on Innkeep full time through 2022-23. Then, get it into your hands so you can actually play it.

Let's see how that goes.

Well, that's enough from me. I hope you've been enjoying the ride. If you're a Patreon supporter, thank you so much! This year I've been able to commission a bunch of great art from Torgeir again (portraits, pause menu art), and it's also helped make ends meet just that little bit when I turned down paid work to focus on dev. 

Best wishes for 2022. It's sure to be another annus horribilis, but I hope at least you can enjoy playing some fun games. ;-p

Best,

Daniel