Sore Losers: Riot Grrrl

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Progress Report

Getting Out Of Riot Grrrl's Development Hell

This is a cross-post from my general gaming blog, Sore Losers Gaming...

Sore Losers: Riot Grrrl is a game that I've been working on for a very long time. Originally intended as a short project into which I could dump ideas that didn't fit the JRPG formula I used in Sore Losers, it soon sprawled into a much larger project than I had intended. Unfortunately, real life eventually managed to get in the way and I wasn't able, nor willing, to work on the game for over a year. That's obviously a long time, and so getting back into the flow of things has been very difficult... but there's nothing I can do about that other than to work hard. I've promised myself, and the friends who've helped me out, that this game is eventually going to get finished and so finishing it is what I'm going to do.

So, where am I up to? I returned to the game to find that three out of the planned five levels were complete (which had been the situation for longer than my hiatus had lasted), and that I was in the middle of bug testing those levels. This meant that I spent the first couple of months or so bug testing, fixing bugs, and then bug testing over again. Fortunately, I didn't find as many bugs as I'd found when I was making the original Sore Losers, so I'm obviously getting better at this game development thing!

Admittedly, bug testing can sometimes be a very annoying process because it usually ends up feeling like you're taking away from the game rather than adding to it, but in this case it was actually a very therapeutic process. This is as it as it allowed me to familiarise myself with how many of the game's most important systems worked and how they were linked into one another, which in turn made it much on me when I eventually started creating new levels and content.

After finishing the bug testing, it was time to get on with making the fourth level, and that's actually going well so far. Several stages are already complete, and I have a well developed plan for how the rest of the level is going to pan out. All I really need to do is turn my plans into both code (which is actually the easy part because of the clever, modular system I've set-up for generating new levels) and sprites (which is by far the more difficult part because I'm so slow when it comes to drawing out all the level backgrounds, monsters and characters I need).

Overall, it's good to be making progress, so I'll leave you with some screenshots and continue my work!


The final level takes place in a government building, throughout which stand many militaristic statues such as this one (I'm still not sold on the shading; probably needs a touch up).


Given that government in this game are a very paranoid group of people, there are lots of secret passages and security measures to deal with in this particular level!

Progress Report

He's a doctor, but not a *real* doctor...

author=Clyve
So are you done with that PHD nonsense yet?

PhD nonsense? Since I put this game on hiatus I've written a 344 page thesis, worked on and co-authored this paper, co-authored this review, worked on and lead-authored a yet to be published paper, studied for and passed a viva voce, and then had two months of feeling more burnt out than I ever have...

... "nonsense" indeed.

Anyway, yeah, I've been working on this sparingly now that I feel a little less burnt out, but I think it is going to take a while for me to re-familiarise myself with how all the systems work so I don't expect progress to be rapid. I've not looked at RPGMaker for a long time, so a lot of the eventing feels fairly foreign to me. It also feels like some of the stuff I already did has gone missing, but I could be imagining things; it's not like I have a new computer or anything like that, so there isn't any good reason why anything would've disappeared.

---

Oh, and here is a blurry picture of my thesis. I would post a picture of my degree, but it only arrived a week or so ago and I haven't actually gotten around to taking a picture of it yet.

Announcement

Hiatus, Again

Yeah, yeah, I know, I've not been updating people on this at all. To be honest, I've not really been working on this game recently since I've been busy doing other stuff, so I wouldn't have had much to update people with anyway. For those who are interested, all I've really done for the past 6 months is chip away at bugs and other design issues, and that's hardly something you can call progress. At least 3 out of the 5 levels are finished, though, so that's something to be happy about, even if the game has been at that stage for what seems like an eternity!

None of this is really the point of this blog, though. I'm putting the project back on hiatus, despite the fact that I really do want to finish making this game. The problem is that I'm acutely aware that I won't have any time for any sort of game development over the next 6-9 months because I have to write one of these so that I can get my PhD. Getting my PhD is obviously kind of important to me, and not alienating my family, friends and girlfriend by becoming a recluse whilst writing my thesis is also important to me. Ultimately, developing this game further isn't important to me, at least not in the grand scheme of things at this particular moment in time. Which is unfortunate, but that's life.

Miscellaneous

The Fear

I'm blaming this (blog-post) on Max:

Show
First note: if this would be better served as an article, let me know immediately and I will port it to that format. It's a bit of an 'op ed' piece, but I do want to foment discussion.

The point of this thread is to posit a single observation for discussion. It's kind of a simple one, but I think it's really important, and hopefully will provide a basis for some unique insight and discussion.

The truth is...we amateur game developers have a completely different argot for talking about commercial video games than we do for talking about our own amateur games.

I've come to this realization gradually over time, watching LTs and reviews and the feedback and debate and overall cultural surrounding them, that amateur game designers and reviewers hold amateur games to vastly different standards than they do commercial games.

If you're thinking something along the lines of "duh", then I need to add that I think the standards that amateur games are held to are HARSHER.

There is a very extreme attitude surrounding amateur games like those produced by our community that 'The Customer Is Always Right' and that, by extension, the designer is always wrong. Very, very rarely is the possibility discussed that a PLAYER might be playing such a game wrong. For a game designer to suggest such a thing, especially of their own game, is viewed as the height of "arrogance" or "ego", the two things that the amateur game design community hates the most. When a chest is missed, when a puzzle can't be solved, when a battle results in a game over, always, always, always the hue and cry is 'BAD GAME DESIGN!' and never..."player, you're doing it wrong!".

Of course, if you look at the way we talk about game design in PROFESSIONAL games, our vocabulary and attitude is very different. Admittedly, as seasoned game designers we are much more likely to point out the design flaws of any instance of the Persona or Dragon Quest series than the average joe RPG fan. But still, the respect, the benefit of the doubtwhich we afford commercial games is far greater than that which we afford each other's creations. If I mention that I had trouble with 'Mechanic X' in 'Final Fantasy Game Y' the response is just as likely to be: "You suck at Final Fantasy, bro." Can't beat Sephiroth? Try playing better.

Imagine if I was trying to explain being unable to get past a boss battle in Eternal Paradise, on the other hand. Maybe I made an LT of it and posted it on RMN? I very much doubt that anyone would come back with "you suck at Eternal Paradise"...not even Ephiam. Instead, the consensus would most likely be: game's too hard, bro! Tone it down!

Why does this phenomenon exist? Here's my theory.

Amateur games are a dime a dozen. We're drowning in them. They're not just cheap, they're free. They're not just plentiful, they're overcrowding the internet. And as our resident asspear is fond of saying: familiarity breeds contempt. Few of us give even the best looking RMN games the slightest fraction of the benefit of the doubt that we'd give the shittiest commercial game...except, of course, for the RMN games made by our close personal friends...but that's another story entirely, the story of RM cliques, and I'm not going there.

Of course, there's more to it than that. Our aim when LTing an RM game is different than our aim when playing Final Fantasy XXIV. We are not, fully, in the 'player mindset'...we are LOOKING specifically for something to complain about.

Tautology disclaimer time:

Obviously, neither of these extremes are correct. It's not true that a perception exists that it's 'always the designer's fault' in amateur games or that it's 'always the player's fault' in commercial games or vice versa. It's not all or nothing either way, and I'm not trying to say that. I'm not positing that we all think all commercial games are flawless or that players of RM games can't make mistakes. Nor am I advocating a system where we assume that the creator is always right/the audience is always wrong. I would hope that's obvious.

But there are strong, conflicting biases in how we evaluate these games, based in part on the arbitrary 'professional' and 'RM' flags we assign to things. (Games like Hero's Realm that are 'community canon', BTW, get assigned the 'professional' mental flag often and are more commonly evaluated on that basis than any other RM games.)

Now that I work as a professional instead of an amateur in the game design business--the kind that doesn't involve pixels, that is, haters rest assured that video game design as a career is probably never going to happen for me--I feel more qualified than ever to say that the distinction between 'AMATEUR' and 'PROFESSIONAL' games is almost completely aribtrary. So I view these divergent standards toward them as a problem.

Because sometimes even in 'amateur games' IT IS THE PLAYER'S FAULT...and I'm sure that many a developer has made wholly unnecessary and maybe even destructive changes to their game because of our failure to realize this. Because of the communal, attitudinal insistence that 'the customer is always right'.

To support my point...has anyone ever played the classic SNES platformer 'Out Of This World'? Can you imagine if that had been released as an RM game, how immense the pressure would have been to make the (awesome) introductory sequence much, much easier?

Discuss. Not just the silly off the cuff Out Of This World example, hopefully, but the whole ball of wax.

The closer I get to finishing this game, the more I wonder if I'm doing the right things. I'm usually pretty stalwart about whatever it is I'm doing, as you might have realised from the way I go about posting on the forums, but that doesn't mean I'm completely ignorant to the comments that are made about my projects or completely immune to the fear of failure that developers develop the longer they spend working on a project. Unfortunately, and perhaps regrettably, this fear grows despite the fact that a lot of things have been brought to my attention regarding this game. Although I have attempted to fix some of the problems that have been brought forth, I have been quick to dismiss other comments as suggestions that didn't align with what I envisioned this project to be... which was perhaps stupid of me.

Of course, I am not the sole problem here. On top of my stubbornness is a deeper problem: It is hard to know whether or not certain misgivings are only held by the few or held by the many. We are all (I hope) aware that comments are hard to come by around these parts and that makes judging a general consensus a difficult task, so I am making this blog-post in the faint (and perhaps vain) hope that people might give me a list of their problems regarding this game's demo, however small they may be.

What will I do in return? I'll try my best to address, in some detail, what I think of those suggestions and why I think they are/are not worthwhile and - in doing so - I hope to eradicate some of the fear that comes with nearing the completion of this game. It'll probably help people decide whether or not they want to play this game, too, since they'll get a better idea of what my vision is!

Hopefully this will be a worthwhile exercise, although I don't actually expect it to work. If it does work, I hope other developers try something similar so that I can help them with their games in a similar way (even though I'll be the first to admit that I don't have as much time for RM* games as I once did...)

Miscellaneous

Level Complete! (And Some Boring Things That Need Doing)

I've (pretty much) finished all the areas needed for the third level of the game, which leaves me with two more to make (although the last level will have a different format and so shouldn't take as long as the fourth). Admittedly, I need to add a couple more lock-picking minigames and a couple more battles, but you can play the whole way through the level without incident now.

Also, and somewhat luckily, I picked up on a bug that was occurring when using the "Flail" skill against the last enemy in a three-enemy battle, which is a good thing since it was replicated in all the other three-enemy battles the game already had! I need to remember to test my battle-events more thoroughly when I am going to be copy-pasting them into other enemy groups, even though I am pretty sure I'd tested that skill quite heavily already. Oh well, it's fixed now, no need to worry about it!

So, what now? Well, unfortunately, I'm now turning my mind towards a bunch of tedious stuff that I need/want to do before starting on the fourth level. Some of it is just a case of going through the database and messing with values, which isn't that hard to do so long as I am paying attention. The rest is more cosmetic, which means it'll probably take more effort to complete, especially since I no longer get to use old MS Paint for my images (I'm not going to lie; I really miss it!). I guess it's mostly a case of repeating repetitive tasks over and over, so as long as I can deal with the tedium there won't be any major dramas:

1) If you read the instruction manual (look at the tabs at the top of the page), you'll see that different types of attack are effective against different enemy classes, but IMO these classes are pretty ill-defined. They're also pretty skewed towards carrying at least one blunt-type weapon since they're never negatively effective, which isn't what I was aiming for. What I want to do, therefore, is two things:

a) re-define the enemy classes so that they make a little more sense.
b) re-balance the weapons based on the new definitions.

The differences to how the battle-system works and how difficult the battles are will be minimal, I hope. The only real effect should be that things are clearer. Clarity is important when you are aiming for a simple system!

2) The second and third levels of the game have a number of areas where you are moving to the left instead of to the right or where you need to backtrack through areas you've already visited. This makes the current layout of the GUI seem silly as it uses the terms "Previous" and "Next", which aren't always going to be applicable. Because of this, I'm going to replace these labels with "Left" and "Right" so that their use is never ambiguous, which will take a bit of time since I have a lot of different GUI overlays.

"Why do you need so many overlays?", you might be asking. The answer is simple: I'm fucking stupid. Basically, I use a single picture for all 5 commands that are on the screen at any one time, which means that every time I want a "unique" combination of 5 commands it requires a new image. I thought it would be easier to edit a single picture a few times than to position 5 separate pictures on each map, but the sheer number of unique commands I have come up with has made that an incorrect assumption. I'm not going to go back and change how this works now since it's heavily built into the way I go about creating and eventing each area, but it's still something I should remember for any future project I might make.

3) Cutscene graphics. They're currently terrible and disorganised. I really want to have image-based cutscenes (think Alter A.I.L.A Genesis) and that's something I am aiming for at the end of development, although it is not something that I'm going to do right now (because it will get in the way of "proper" development continuing). However, what I am going to do is streamline the way the cutscenes look. From now on, the organisation of each cutscene will be consistent with the others, which will make it easier for me to replace my shitty images with something custom made later on, should I choose to do so. Perhaps I can convince a certain someone to draw some cutscene images for me?*

*Probably not /sadface

Miscellaneous

Getting On With It

I'm going to be starting work on this again soon, so I'm bringing it out of hiatus. I hadn't really felt too inspired to work on this recently, but I've started feeling that urge to work on something again and I absolutely refuse to forsake this game. I like the concept too much and I've put too much effort into the custom systems to let it go to waste, so don't worry about it ever being cancelled (even if it goes into hiatus again, which I'm not going to promise it won't).

Obviously, this doesn't mean that you should expect it to be finished any time soon. The most time-consuming part of developing this game is easily the pixel-art that goes into making each map and this takes me a long time. Even with the simple graphical style I'm going for, getting everything to look how I want it to is difficult. In fact, in limiting myself to such a simple style, I may be making it more difficult as I have to think of ways to keep the environments interesting without being able to fall back on incredibly pretty graphics and lighting effects!

Anyway, just to recap: I'm working on this again but it'll probably still be a while until I finish it.

Thanks for your support! :)

Miscellaneous

Gamejolt And Shit

If anyone actually cares, the Gamejolt profile for this game is here: http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/rpg/sore-losers-riot-grrrl/3437/

Just thought I'd remind people incase the site does get closed down or whatever. And y'all should totally rate that shit up or something anyway!

=/

Miscellaneous

Come At Me Bro

Haven't posted anything in a while, so I thought I'd just post something from a quick cutscene that precedes a "brawl" style battle.

What I mean by "brawl" is that, instead of the normal "hero vs. monster" setup, there are instead two different groups of enemies who are fighting each other as well as fighting the hero. This means that the player will be able to make the fight much easier on themself if they work out which of the two sides is stronger and whittle them down first. Personally, I think that this is an interesting dynamic, especially because Riot Grrrl is a single-hero game, so I'm looking at retrospectively adding more of these fights to the first two levels of the game*. Hope it works out as well as I think it will and, if nothing else, it at least breaks things up a bit.

*There already is one that some people might've come across in the demo, dependent on their actions/fighting style, but I definitely need to add more!

Miscellaneous

Awesome Custom Art Is Awesome

Visit JAG Illustrations for more awesome artwork!
(Alternatively, go here to see even more awesome artwork!)

So, I've started working on this game again as you all probably know by now. The game's coming along really well and I'd like to think people want to see it finished but... that's not really what this blog's about.

What this blog is about is some awesome custom art my friend James did for the project. Working from a single 16-bit sprite and this drunken instruction, "Dude, just draw whatever you want!", he managed to turn out this portrait of Riot Grrrl's main character, Cheska...


CLICK FOR A LARGER ZOOMABLE VERSION!

... and it is basically amazing!

So, yeah, I'm pretty freakin' happy with it. Maybe I can coerce him into drawing more stuff with the promise of more beer (as I definitely owe him a couple of pints after this)!

Don't forget: Make sure you check out his blog!

Miscellaneous

Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiicks

Sore Losers: Riot Grrrl was in the top 5 rated games over at Gamejolt with an average score of something ridiculously undeserved like 4.8 out of 5 over 5 ratings, putting it above the genuinely awesome Super Crate Box. This made me smile :D

Unfortunately, someone decided to give it a random 1 out of 5 rating and knocked the score down to 4.2 out of 5, without even leaving a comment to justify it. This made me frown D:

However, it does serve to prove that it's not just RMN that's populated with dicks, so can we please get on with making more games?

:3
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