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Miscellaneous

Hirei's Post Mortem + Download Back Up!

We have reuploaded the build of Kin. It still has a lot of major bugs/kinks.

Notable ones:
-Script error upon loading a save
-Hitboxes...

Hirei's PostMortem

I seem to have a penchant for completing games in a month, however this time I had the chance to work with the wonderful radiostarkiller and shunao as well as several others on this project.

Some of this post-mortem might coincide with the others that have been already posted.

What went well:

Story: We had our story done early on and easily pounded out an outline within 3 days. The storyline was simple enough that it could be easily explained within a few minutes but had enough leeway to be expanded upon / have more development. It's definitely easier to make a story when you have a lot of other people to bounce ideas off of

Art: This is something I think we did VERY well on as the three main developers are mainly artists. We decided to split our work into roles: ex: level design and sprites. I decided to not take a prominent art role this time around since I had plenty of it while working on Reincarnation - Dawn of War - . This left me ample time to tackle something that I'm very weak at: eventing / handling of the prototype. With this said, our team did something very unique for portraits. We decided to collaborate on them. Radiostarkiller did all the sketches, Shunao did all of the lineart, and then I was the one to color them.

With the art direction, Shunao took the lead with selecting the color palates for the characters and levels. I think that this gave our game an edge with having a unique style. Radiostarkiller incorporated the colors into the levels and used them in tandem in order to create distinct styles for the house and the gameplay levels themselves. For the UI I decided to go with something very simple, so it was very easy to do.

I think that we really did our best with providing an amazing atmosphere. In terms of art, it's definitely something that we were the ston9est at.

Music: We managed to snag a musician with Shunao's help. She did an awesome job at providing the ambiance pieces as well as some key melodies in a very short amount of time. In all we had about seven pieces of custom music which was great.

What went wrong:

Overall the gameplay experience is very lackluster unfortunately. There was a bunch of story that we wanted to put in as well as lots of other features that didn't make it due to time restraints. We originally planned for a lot more interactivity and more expanded endings.

The level designs were initially a little difficult to deal with considering the fact that we forgot to account for enemy size and how high the character can actually jump. I also had a lot of difficulty dealing with the platforming system due to my general inexperience eventing/programming. Hitboxes were sometimes too large, or my programmed enemies sometimes ran too close to each other. There were also a lot of frustrating times when things would just simply break. As someone who is a complete newbie at the program, I had to ask miuofstars and another friend to help me beta test and figure out what exactly went wrong. I really appreciated them going through and breaking my game. Yes. I'm thankful for them breaking everything as it's helped me catch all the errors that I've missed. Unfortunately there are still some serious gamebreaking errors that is beyond my expertise. We hope to rectify them soon.

The bugs and general gameplay were so horrendous that we decided to pull out of the All Hallows competition that the team originally entered in. It's sad that we failed, but I think it's important to have failures as much as successes. I was tackling features meant to be handled by more experienced individuals, but I'd still like to improve all the same.

Working with this new team was absolutely amazing. We worked very well together and I'm still glad that we made Kin. It taught me about the importance of failure (my first two games were considered successes), eventing, and much more.

We aren't giving up though! We are planning on making a Kin v2.0 with numerous bugfixes and features that were missing from v1.0.

Announcement

Announcement!

Unfortunately, due to a lot of bugs and such, we’ve had to remove Kin’s download along with forfeiting the All Hallow’s Event for this year. However, we do have plans on making a new and improved version of Kin in the future! For those who have played through Kin, we’re definitely open for any input on improvement, so feel free to send those our way! We'll take anything and everything to make this game great, and we hope that you’ll look forward to a new and improved Kin!

UPDATE: All Hallows' Version of Kin has been put back up again if anyone wants to give it a whirl. Still no bug fixes for it yet, but we'll update it once we do get it fixed!

Miscellaneous

Sai's Postmortem!

Working on this game has been a blast and a wonderful learning experience. Being friends with Shunao and Hirei, I gathered them together to bounce around game ideas, and Hirei suggested we test out the waters by doing this event!

While we're still very green to game making as a team, I'm happy we've completed a game. Not only that, but we quickly found out that we're all very flexible and adaptable as teammates. We all have a lot of energy and creativity working together, and the constant communication helps with a lot of our tasks done in a timely manner. Miuofstars is a godsend as well, being our incredibly meticulous game tester, and her last-minute bug fixes saved our submission. All-in-all, the best part of this whole project was seeing how well we work as a team, and I really feel this could be the start of something beautiful.

Having said that, I definitely know there are flaws. For one, being the person planning the stages, I will admit that planning them was a difficult task, and the end product was something I was not particularly proud of in terms of gameplay. Platform games aren't a genre I play on a regular basis, although I've played a few of them. Quite a few revisions had to be made in order for it to be playable, and even then, the player would probably only make it by the skin of their teeth. Most importantly, to avoid any discrepancies, it would have been an excellent idea to discuss the flow of the stage to smooth out any speedbumps. I would also say that probably using a more suitable engine for platforming might have been a better choice as well. RPGMaker has its limitations, and a few of the aesthetic pieces had to be cut out as well as there was some difficulty. The interaction is also incredibly stark as well, and I regret that there isn't much of it, as it is an important part of immersing a player into a game. Although we had decent pacing as a team, I find that we could have streamlined a few steps in order to put out a nicer game.

Although a lot of it is a huge learning experience, it's good to know our strengths and weaknesses, so as to improve on them on later projects. We can't get stron9er if we don't recognize them! I cannot wait to start on the next project with these guys, because not only are they excellent friends, they're also excellent team mates!

I'll conclude with a hella cool picture of an alternate universe Frann! Perhaps a sort of sign of things to come in the future...?

Miscellaneous

Lyn's Postmortem

Warning: Contains spoiler, so I advise you to complete the game before reading ahead.

Kin is the first game I have ever worked with to put my skills as a spriter to the test. I have worked on several games before, but to be the main pixel artist was invigorating and a huge learning process. This was also my first time working with RMVXA as a platformer.

The Contest:
RMN held a one-month contest during October 2013 called All Hallows’ Event. The idea was to make the spookiest Halloween game ever with one or more of the following themes: ghost stories, survival horror, monster attack, Halloween comedy, or nonfiction horror. Groups would be able to complete the game in any engine.

What Went Well:
Story: Although we did not get the story done in one day, our team played hot-potato with the idea and got something fleshed out fairly quickly. The story was simple and to the point: Frann goes through her twisted house to save her brother, Robin. We wanted to expand the story out more, but with only a month to work on it, we stuck with an easy story to follow through.
Art: Our team is a group of three artists and two programmers who fixed some of the events and heavily beta-tested our game … so art was really easy to work with! We split our job accordingly and even collaborated on a few pieces together. This was the category we were best at and we did not want to half-ass ourselves on this. Sai (radiostarkiller) did superbly well with the sketches of the profiles and monsters, the gruesome credit images, and the chilling background images. So, like, if it wasn’t for his works, our art wouldn’t have any direction to gear towards so many thanks! Hirei, although she was our main programmer, helped with coloring the profiles and gave suggestions to the art. I kept the color palette and animation simple, keeping the characters and monsters separated from the scenes they were in. As my main skill in drawing was lining, I did all the lineart for the profiles and just seeing the pieces put together was amazing. Our game may be eye-candy, but we worked with what we were stron9est with!
Music: Personally, I would love to thank the musician who is a good friend of mine and right when I posted a teaser of our game on Facebook, she quickly sent me a message to ask if she can help. And with a simple yes and a quick summary of our story, Laryssa (laryssachan) was able to whip up eight soundtracks for our game in less than a week! Our team loved it quickly and having it in-game pretty much gave our game the feel we wanted it to have.
Gameplay: We’re going for a platformer, so we went with a platformer with basic platforming mechanics. What else can go wrong …?

What Went Wrong:
Story: Although our story was not going to be longer than it is, there was a lot more of the story we wanted to add in. The choice was not up to player if they got the good or bad ending of the game. Originally, collecting journal entries would be harder and if not all was collected, the player would receive the bad ending since Frann does not know her Grandmother’s true intention. Second, the family that was going to be dead was actually Frann and Robin’s parents (and older sibling? We scrapped this idea midway) to have it appear more gruesome. All in all, the story idea was firm and stuck throughout the whole creation phase.
Art: We had very few problems with the art and the only thing that was troublesome was that some of the monsters were too big for the hall ways and a few of the sprite sheets needed to be redone. Other than that, like I said, art was what our team was best at, so there was very little problems in this area.
Music: Not a problem, but the music files are HUGE. Sadly, that’s what you get from .wav files, but nonetheless, no problems here at all!
Gameplay: Our programmer, Hirei, had the most trouble with working with this. Making a platformer was easy, but creating the triggers and events for the cutscenes were much harder than expected. Many bugs got in our way and our beta testers ran through a lot of trouble the past few days. While many were fixed, there are still many bugs within the game that we were unable to fix due to our time restraint. But hey, we did it! I’m actually a bit too excited to expand on this since I did not work with the programs and events AT ALL.

Announcement

Rapid Bugfixing!

Hirei is finishing up and fixing a few bugs! We'll be uploading the newest version very soon! Thank you for the extra hour and we'll be done very soon.
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