The Secret of Varonis

Hey all! Varonis is now on Steam! Not released quite yet (sigh) but we're getting there. In the meantime, you can add it to your wishlist.

There's also a slightly re-cut trailer version.

Hi, this is programmer psy_wombats here, although I'm wearing the designer hat to write a bit about the monster race design. Playable monsters have always been a SaGa series staple, and as we're drawing, uh, a lot of inspiration from SaGa, of course one of our races is also the friendly loveable Monster.

The core idea of the monster race is that they are shapeshifting versions of the generic enemy monsters found in random encounters. Enemy monster drop meat, which can be consumed by party member monsters to trigger a transformation. The earliest incarnation of this system (used in our predecessor game Masters of the Demon World) was heavily modeled on SaGa1's transformation system, where a combination of the eater's tier and the race/subrace of both monsters determined which monster form you actually transformed into. It required a PhD to understand. Like, really, here's a snippet of what our design docs looked like:


We compensated a bit by actually telling the player beforehand what monster they'd transform into, which is a huge quality-of-life improvement in itself, but for the average player, all the transformation tables amount to random transformations and random power gains, which make monsters very inconsistent.


Our second attempt at a monster transformation system had two goals, then: give monsters more predictable power increases, and make the system understandable to normal players. The most straightforward way to do this was to ditch the transformation table -- from now on, if you ate a monster, you became that monster. But of course, having a friendly monster the same levels as the random encounters isn't great, so we introduced a level-up rule. An example of how this worked: if you had a GOBLIN monster and there was an ONI available at one tier higher, a goblin eating goblin meat would instead level up and become an ogre, stronger than the random enemies in that world. However, this also felt random in that for the average players, there was no way to know what monster forms were available in the next tier, so there became these sort of "magic combinations" where GOBLIN + GOBLIN = ONI, but SKELETON + SKELETON just became SKELETON again. So we were back to square one as far as "predictable increases" went.

In this second iteration, we also added meat shops. Meat shops sold meat just like you'd find after random encounters (although at significant markup). This was an attempt to give players a consistent way to imrpove their monster if they were unlucky with meat drops, and it also gave all-monster gimmick parties something to do with their cash. It definitely felt like a win.


For the final iteration, we decided to change the way monsters increased in power. "Eat SKELETON to become SKELETON" definitely seemed like a good step, but we wanted power increases to also meet a few other goals: they should ideally 1) encourage experimentation and eating lots of meat, 2) occur predictably, and 3) still have a "jackpot" feel where players could eat boss meat or something and get a shiny powerhouse monster every once in a while.

We ended up with a "form library" solution. Now, every monster keeps track of its known forms. When a monster eats meat that would transform it into an already-known form, it instead mutates into an unknown form, with a chance of higher-level forms also occurring. SKELETON + GOBLIN results in GOBLIN, unless you've already been a GOBLIN before, in which case you'll probably mutate to a BUZZARD or ROACH or similar tier 1 monster, but sometimes you could also end up with a tier 2 ONI or ELEPHANT. And if a monster learns all the forms of a tier, that level-up mutation is guaranteed.

This way, there are two approaches to monsters: chance into a rare powerful form, or experiment with lots of different forms to consistently access higher tiers. We also added the option to transform into any previously known form via a special SPICED MEAT item, which means that players don't have to worry about losing their favorite forms if they want to return to experimentation. The transformation menu looks something like this:


After a lot of playtesting, monsters definitely feel fun to use and they're in a good spot. While they might not always be the strongest members of the party, they're adaptable, low-cost, and they have access to some abilities that other races simply can't use or won't find until later in the game (such as teleportation, ability use restoration, enemy scanning, or even healing and basic magic at the very start of the game). So don't be afraid to take a monster or two along with you!

Hey all, progress on Varonis is moving along steadily (still working on alternate game modes). A devlog covering just progress probably wouldn't be too interesting so instead expect a bunch of tidbits about design decisions and interesting stuff we've encountered during development, mostly about capturing the Gameboy feel from both a programming and design perspective. So expect a mix of game design theory and obscure technical details!

I'll start off with some notes around our color scheme (old hat if you've read the Masters of the Demon World blog). Some history first though! If you played the original bricklike Gameboy, you’ve experienced this monotone green color scheme.


As you can see, it’s very green and looks a little strange on modern screens. That’s because the original Gameboy LCD screen didn’t have a backlight, and the simulated greeniness looks strange on a monitor. It’s supposed to be more of a black and white feel, which is why modern emulators (for backlit PC screens) usually just render grayscale.


It looks fine, but we can get more authentic than the clean palette even without simulating the original GB greens. On the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance (my handheld of choice), original Gameboy carts would be rendered with a colored palette. Because the original GB carts didn’t provide a palette, just intensity, the GBC would infer a palette. Each of the shades of gray gets mapped to a color.


Interestingly enough, the game now has more than four colors. What’s happening here is that the GBC is treating tiles and sprites differently. The Gameboy rendering pipeline makes a distinction between static maps and moving sprites, so there are actually seven colors here: four shades on the map layer, and then three shades plus transparency on the sprite layer. It's pretty neat.

We do cheat a bit in Varonis by layering "tile" layers, which would be impossible on the original hardware. This is done on maps mostly to avoid the tediousness of making the chair chip, then the chair-on-grass chip, then the chair-on-wood chip, etc. But we also have multiple 4-color layers on top of each other in battle, where both enemies and backgrounds are 4-color layers that would've had to be "tiles" on the original gameboy. Not technically possible, but it looks a lot nicer.


So we stuck with this 7-color GBC-style scheme for Varonis. Characters were actually brown, water was actually blue (or at least green-blue). But the GBC false color palettes were also not designed for a backlight, so the colors look pretty saturated on a PC monitor. To put together the final palette, we toned down the color scheme a bit until things looked only GBC-ish enough to be mistaken for monochrome.


Not too bad! All of this is done in a shader at a pretty high level so we can still do animated transitions like fade-in fade-out and the shader will enforce the palette. Of course, the downside is it’s pretty easy to tell what’s on the map layer and what’s actually a sprite.


Hmmm, not suspicious at all.