Just an Update

Right now I am finding artists to help with the back ground images that will be used and I myself will be writing more endings for Dark Worlds story

Dark World Music Sample

This is a demo for the music that will be used in my new game dark world

A short story about coding

Even though I say I am the coder for Dark World I say it with a grain of salt the size of Australia, this is mainly due to the easy nature of Ren’Py.

For example, to make a menu in Ren’Py you have to type this:

menu

    “Go left.”:

        jump left

    “Go right.”:

        jump right

The words in quotation marks are what appear in the menu and the lumps are functions telling the code to go to the label of left, and that’s it.

This is because Ren’Py was made in python, half the coding is done for you, but Ren’Py also accepts python commands, meaning user’s have been able to make full blown rpgs and jrpg style games, taking Ren’Py to the next level.

My self and the team are taking this in a different direction, focusing more on the story and the players experience of the story, so in Dark World you wont be encountering jrpg style combat, just decisions (that I touched on in a previous post.

Well that’s it for this short post, keep hitting F5 because I am about to post a sneak peak at the music of Dark World.

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Surprise! concept art for a rust monster

So the Lead Artist has given me the first concept of a monster encountered in the game, I am very busy so right now I cant go very in depth with posts, but here is the concept, more stuff coming soon.

The more the merrier

I know I said this blog would be dying down a bit but i have some possible good news.

 

As you know with any game it takes a lot of time and man power to make, which means I will be looking for more artists to help, currently I am looking through my friends list on facebook (Working face to face with people is better really) but after that I may look else where, so for now I can safely say we will son have two new members on the development team.

p.s. I plan to post about the art next, introducing the artists and such and then about the music that will be used in the game, but that will come later in the week

Its coming, and we aren’t dead

The blog itself will be lowering its activity for a bit, rest assured Dark World and this blog isn’t dead, its still being made its still coming so dont worry.

We will be working on a demo to bring to you guys so you can better understand what the final version of Dark World will be, we have also brought on a new artist to help with the work load, but for now, silence.

Keep sending your questions to darkworlddev@hotmail.com and I will answer them on the blog

About the text colour

Sorry about the text colour in the below post, just trying to figure out how to fix it now

Dark World’s story and the illusion of choice

I wont lie when I say Dark World will be big, but it wont be the most free choice pick your path game, writing those kinds of story’s takes time and is possible, but for an electronic visual novel choose your own adventure it can be a bit much.

When I started to write the story to the game it was planned to be a fairly linear type of game, where making the wrong choice resulted in an instant death, this would have been fine but Dark World started to grow, as I wrote more and more I noticed how (in terms of gameplay) back and forth it could get, where in if you die at one point you had to either reload a save or re-read through what you had already done.

This would mean players could memorize the menu options into a sequence, 1,2,5,6,3,3,5,7,6,4, end, to avoid this I attempted to branch out on each of the menus, at first this was fine but presented a problem.

When coding in Ren’Py all of your code is on the one screen, compare that to flash where the code for one screen or room could be in that room, this meant I would be losing track of the story and code, ultimately considering the skill level of my writing and coding I decided to go with a third option, offering an illusion of choice.

An illusion of choice where I maintain the linear nature of the story, but when the player chooses an option that will kill them, the menus branch out again to offer the player several ways to die, still all bad endings but it offers a choice of endings.

This doesn’t mean there is a set path to the good ending, I have thought out a way to keep track of different chapters and what endings they lead to, so now the games story will look something like this:

It’s actually based off of a fractal I designed a little while back, each end point is an ending and each split is a menu that splits into a different part of the many story’s

I suppose that is enough for the writing side of Dark World, but I have a special treat, the first few strings of dialogue directly from version 0.6 (so keep in mind that it is directly from the code meaning it is crude in its display and changes may be made).

“A world enough, perchance to dream.”

“A glistening eye, through which to see.”

“A world enough, perchance to sleep.”

“You wake up in a black expanse, all around you are different shadows and shapes that you can barely make out.”

“Standing up you realise the ground beneath you feels soft as if it were grass, but it doesn’t feel all that alive.”

v “Come with me, you have much to learn.”

“You hear the sound of crying over to your right and footsteps to your left…”

menu:

“Follow the Voice.”:

jump fvoice

“Find the source of the crying.”:

jump fcrying

“Move towards the footsteps.”:

jump ffootsteps

label fcrying:

#image 2

“You attempt to find the source of the crying.”

“Slowly you feel a welling sense of despair creep over you, you begin to cry uncontrollably.”

#image 3

“You were the crying you heard before, and now you shall forever cry a river of tears”

“A Sombre End.”

return

label ffootsteps:

#image 4

“You turn and walk towards the sound of footsteps.”

“Your legs step faster and faster as you try to catch up to the noise you heard before.”

“Yet still you can’t find the source of the footsteps, until you realise you can’t stop.”

“The frustration grips around your heart and pulls it from your chest, yet you keep walking…”

“A fitting end to a troubled mind”

return

label fvoice:

#image 5

“You move towards the soothing voice and notice a flicker of light in the distance.”

v “Calm your mind and let my voice sooth you.”

“The voice seems to calm your nerves and you become used to the darkness.”

#image 6

“Through the void you can see strange twisted shapes that look like they are wrapped around rusted metal poles.”

#image 7

“The light moves further away to reveal a raft on a lake, the raft looks old and rotten but the lake is dead still.”

v “Step onto the raft and I will take you away from this place”

 

An issue has occured

In preparing to post about the writing and coding aspect of the game I have realised the size of the game so far, and how big it will be when its done, right now 100 images are needed, at the end of my writing/coding stint (more on stints to come) it will be 200 images, this is obviously to much for just one artist.

Games take time to make there is no doubt about that, Dark World might be in development for months or even a year, but 200+ images is a big ask of one person especially when this is a non paying job.

It is currently being discussed what to do about the art side, whether or not to cut the images, get another artist, but the main reason I am posting this is to ask a question, should we try kickstarter?

Kickstarter is a way for different people to fund there project directly through the fans and bypass publishers, it is how they are making a wasteland 2 for example, my question is should Dark World ask for money to be able to achieve the enormity currently planned, of course we would offer little incentives to donate towards this project (Beta keys, concept art, collectors edition…maybe).

My question to the readers (all…40 of you) is whether or not you want us to use kickstarter, if we do we can deliver a much larger more enriching game experience.

whoops, you can email your questions to darkworlddev@hotmail.com

Ren’Py and You

Since the development is currently very secretive I can only reveal little things, but I can reveal the engine Dark World is built in.

Dark World uses the Ren’Py visual novel engine, it is mostly used to create visual novels similar in style to Manga’s from Japan, the engine is based in the Python scripting language meaning Ren’py can be very versatile at times.

The reason we are using this engine is because this is our first game and we wanted to take is nice and easy, in the past we considered using flash but not having access to flash (with it costing so much) we decided to use the free Ren’Py engine.

Of course you must be asking “But how can this be a game when it is used for visual novels?”

Ren’Py is a python based engine as stated before, meaning python script can be used to create menus, health bars, party members, equipment and even npc’s, all that though is currently outside our skill level and Dark World is more of an experience than a game.

Making Dark World with Ren’Py has meant avoiding many problems and issues which would have happened if we had used flash or any other engine, and again Ren’Py was the best choice for representing the style and tone of this game.

So far Dark World is still in PreAlpha 0.6, small advances have been made and the different assets such as art and music are coming together, and as a little treat, here is an extract from the code so you can see how big the game is so far.

“The game contains 173 screens of dialogue.

These screens contain a total of 2,071 words,

for an average of 12.0 words per screen.

The game contains 13 menus.”

Keep watching this blog for more info, and hopefully next week we can give you a sneak peak at one of the enemy’s you may encounter.

– Noah Pinder, Lead Designer