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Weekly Content Blog #20: A Look Back

Weekly Content Blog #20: A Look Back

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This is the twentieth weekly blog post here on Something Classic’s website. We’re also closing in on two years of development time on our main project, Shadows of Adam. How time flies!

In light of these arbitrary time markers, I thought now would be a good time to look at the earliest phase of this project. During the initial few months of this project, a variety of gameplay elements, design, and ambitions were completely different than the project as it exists today.

The Original Project

Like many projects I’ve been involved with, there was not a whole lot of structure or ambition early on. Our team was even smaller than it currently is, and our only intent was to do a fun hobbyist project to get back into working on projects together again. The initial goal of the project was to create a simple 8-bit style RPG in the style of Final Fantasy 1, including selectable character classes, a Gameboy Color inspired aesthetic (even so far as using the Gameboy’s 160×144 resolution early on), and chiptunes galore. Our target platform was to be mobile: Android and iOS.

Glitchy early menu
Glitchy early menu

As a small team of 2, we proceeded to create early prototypes in this very retro style. The original battle system was much more text based, did not feature any on-screen protagonists, and featured a bland white background much like early Pokemon games.

With these parameters in mind, the basic menus, shop system, message box system, and battle system were eventually completed. Tim, who was an old friend of Tyler’s, helped us get up and running with some basic tiles and helped coach our then-artist Matt on some pixel art skills. Our project was getting some structure in place. We frequently had Skype voice meetings in which we sketched out character profiles and began forming a basic plot line that seemingly resembled Final Fantasy 1.

Early Influences

I have always liked the idea behind the much-maligned Final Fantasy Mystic Quest: an easily digestible RPG. While that particular game arguably had a very flawed execution, some of its choices were of considerable interest to us early on.

The plan was for the game to have field items much like FF:MQ (or more famously, Zelda). These were to include bombs, a machete, and even a bow and arrow. These items would have served two purposes: clever puzzles in major dungeons, and accessing areas that were previously inaccessible.

The other key element we agreed upon early on was avoiding random encounters. All enemies must be visible on screen, and touching them initiates a battle. For some reason, this seemingly essential design choice is absent from a vast majority of retro jRPGs.

Coming Together

Very early portraits for characters.
Very early portraits for characters.

Around this time, we began writing the almighty Design Document. The Design Document was to be the holy covenant of this project, laying the precise blueprint, parameters, goals, aspirations, hopes, dreams, and plot outline of this project. Deviating from the Design Document was punishable by death. Creating the document was very, very important and helped codify a lot of project details we still adhere to today. Even if it’s no longer followed to the letter, the Design Document is the foundation for any game development project, and its importance cannot be understated.

The game as we had conceptualized it was an 8-bit style jRPG with heavy influences from Final Fantasy 1, Gameboy Pokemon entries, and Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. What a weird combination, huh? While intriguing, we quickly found that it was not meant to be…

Focus!

An intro dungeon that was later abandoned.
An intro dungeon that was later abandoned.

This early phase of the project was short-lived. Our original artist Matt left the team due to time issues, Tim became a full-fledged member, and we began narrowing our focus a bit. The extreme retro aesthetic began to be ditched in favor of a larger resolution, more detailed battle backgrounds, a (slightly) more pleasing menu skin, and actual instrumentation vs. computerized bleeps and bloops.

The character class system was axed, in favor of fully developed characters who existed in pre-defined roles. As time moved on, we also dropped the (admittedly cool) field item mechanic, in favor of more ad-hoc dungeon puzzles. The bland “save the crystals” plot line was fleshed out significantly, resulting in a much more dynamic set of characters and an interesting game world.

In continuously refining our project early on, we gained a great deal of focus that enabled us to create the project you are seeing today. At the same time, however, the scope and feel of the game had drastically changed during this shift.

Here and Now

New menu WIP
New menu WIP

While the basic gameplay systems and plot skeleton were ultimately preserved from this time period, the early phase of the game almost feels like a completely separate project in retrospect. It taught us the importance of focus and working to our strengths. Rather than heavily emulating a handful of games, we began to find our own style. What began as a low-production value, mobile minded game without much planning has evolved into something completely different. Any game is going to go through a variety of changes along its path to completion, and Shadows of Adam is no different.

 

 

 

 

Weekly Content Blog #19: Budgeting the Art Costs of an RPG Pt. 3

Weekly Content Blog #19: Budgeting the Art Costs of an RPG Pt. 3

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This is the final part of a three part series.
Part 1: Budgeting the Art Costs of an RPG Pt. 1
Part 2: Budgeting the Art Costs of an RPG Pt. 2

Welcome to the last article in this series on budgeting the art costs of an RPG, which to be fair, should have been ‘Budgeting the Pixel Art Costs of an RPG’–  but I digress. In this piece I will be fittingly talking about what it means for us  to “finalize” the art in Shadows of Adam, and what can be expected in regards to the overall art costs for various RPGs built out of pixels. You’ll find that game scope and resolution play a major factor in determining cost.

watergarden

Wrapping Up Early

If you’ll recall, we were about 3/4 of the way through all of our tile needs when our tile artist, cyangmou, took a temporary hiatus. Turns out he was working hard getting a trailer ready for his own game, Tower 57 (subscribe here and here for updates). A month before its official Kickstarter launch, cyangmou graciously stepped in for Something Classic to put in his final time on the tile sets.

It’d be fair to say that we had lofty goals for each environment in Shadows of Adam. Each place was designed with specific functions and mechanics in mind, and a lot of that carries over to the aesthetics of an area out of necessity. Our original intentions were to have over the top mechanics for each area. The kind that require a lot of unique art and showy animations to keep the mechanic novel, engaging, and enjoyable. Turns out that can be really time-consuming to create. Throughout the design of each area we’ve had to make cuts to the scope of what we wanted to portray visually. There has always been a soft cap on how much time should be spent on a single tile set. So when a tile set was reaching that cap we’d often have to make choices between finishing the base tiles with animation, designing and animating a core game play element, or creating a major set piece to make sure the tile set was memorable. The choices weren’t always easy, but all were necessities in order to keep the costs within our original budget plans. Cash can be a good incentive when it comes to making tough choices about what to cut.

In the final stretch of our tile budget we had a limited amount of time to finish up all outstanding tile sets. At minimum this was two major dungeons, the world map, and polish tweaks to a few unfinished assets and environments. In addition to that we had goals for one or two more tile sets, and the editing and expansion of a few other pre-existing sets. All of which we cut in order to make sure that we could fully polish the minimum requirements instead. Cyangmou handled our needs like a champ, often working with me to make sure all of our priorities were being hit, and offering suggestions on what to focus on. His value throughout the project cannot be overstated, and at the end of the run I am happy to say we are 100% tile set complete with no regrets.

tangleanim

Breathing Life

With all of the tile sets done for our game, once all of the mechanics are in place, the game can be fully developed with placeholder graphics. Art no longer being a blocker means we can start exploring what our finished game actually looks like. In a big budget game this would mostly be determined in pre-production. As an indie game you’re always in pre-production, pre-production doesn’t end until you can concretely state every aspect and direction of your game. This is exactly what we’re locking down right now.

Tile sets make up a major part of Shadows of Adam’s aesthetic, but it’s still our job to breathe life into them through the rest of the art. There are character sprites, portraits, enemies, battle backgrounds, visual effects, lighting systems, and various animations that all go into creating an immersive RPG world. Which is not to mention the all important UI. In order to finish our game everything I just mentioned needs to have a set standard, and our final assets need to meet exactly that standard. Fortunately development has been strictly focused on a small sampling of all these requirements. Any time our style evolved, that sampling evolved with it, but we did not create new assets. As an example we’ve been working on this game for two years, and we only have 15 monsters designed. A third of which have been untouched quite literally for years. We still need to design about 50 monsters for our game, but a lot of cost will be saved by getting them fully polished on the first pass.

menu_01

Counting Costs

Speaking of cost, we’re at a point in our project where it’s clear what the total art cost is going to be. Using our outsourcing costs and my own time converted to a dollar amount our art budget falls in the $15,000-20,000 range. Which may be a little surprising to some considering that Shadows of Adam is a game whose scope is reasonable. We’ll have about 12-18 hours of legitimate game play over 5 major dungeons. But the truth of the matter is that making an RPG is extremely costly in terms of the art resources needed to generate hours of game play. In our case it costs about $1000 to make 1 hour of game play. And this is a low resolution game with a highly-polished, but easy to make style of art. If your game is high resolution, has a hard to replicate aesthetic, or time intensive animation, the costs go up exponentially— 8bit RPG $200/hr of gameplay, 16bit $1000/hr, HD $10,000/hr. These are just indie costs for relatively small teams, a full fledged game studio would incur far greater costs than that. When you decide to tackle the art for an indie RPG know that you are going to either be paying for it out of pocket or in blood, sweat, and tears. Even a modest game like our own will have taken over 500 man-hours to create all of the art for. If you’re a one-man/woman-show doing everything on your own, the project could realistically take over 2000 of your own hours.

And on that note all of this talk of hours and working has me exhausted. I hope you learned a bit from me in this series, or at the very least got some insights into how we work at Something Classic. Next time it’s my turn to write I hope that you’ll have a demo of our game in your hands.