#devlog

I’ve been on contract with SPITE HOUSE to develop Trundl.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-filactery for a little over a month now, and one of the biggest issues is 2d art in 3d space. The whole team has wrestled it enough to share some initial observations. If you’re a dev, you might find them useful. Preface: we’re using Unity as our engine, but you might find these concepts helpful in others.

SHADERS AND MATERIALS ARE A PAIN IN 2D ART

Do your research if you plan to pull any fancy lighting, material or shader tricks with your 2d art! Anything that doesn’t use the standard sprite shader has given us trouble with z-fighting and lighting, and we’ve had to do a bit of custom shader work to overcome this. Be wary!

USE QUADS

This is mostly if you want to be able to do lighting or repeat textures, but quads (at least in Unity) are built to be 1x1 units, allowing you to resize and position things with certain accuracy. For example, our grid needs to be defined by how many spaces it contains, as well as the size of the spaces themselves. Quads let us make quick and easy calculations.

LAYER YOUR OBJECTS

Achieving the illusion of depth and height is very difficult with 2d art, but we can fake it by layering our objects on the distance axis. This lets us create rough canyon walls with varying details and depth without having to worry about stretching art across a side-lining quad.

USE CAUTION WHEN DRAWING PERSPECTIVE

As long as most of your art is drawn assuming the camera will point directly at it, you can pull off perspective and depth pretty easily. But in some cases you’ll want to draw perspective into your art, as seen in our canyon walls. Plastering them to a quad lining the edge of our road made things look very flat and lose detail, especially at a shear perspective. We ended up drawing our perspective into the art itself, then facing them directly to camera. This allowed us to retain detail while varying quad placement along the horizontal axis to craft interesting “geometry.”

I’m sure there are many solutions to problems like these when using 2d art in 3d space, so don’t take my word as law; you might find your own solutions! I hope this will make at least some of you aware of the challenges and considerations you’ll have to make with this approach.

Ray Grice
Designer and Developer
raymondjohngrice.com

Welcome back to another Verloren update. It’s been a while since I did a proper update for this game. First I want to thank how kind you all been supporting me, I’m not the most active with updates but I’m really thankful you all stick by me. Really warms my heart.

On to update talk! I been working on character bust for the past while, most of their expressions are still sketches but for 4 characters I got their first expressions done which is a big thing for me since it took me months to finish them. Well 1 took me a few days since I got the style down and done and they were a simple character. 

Cutscene art is also in wip, so far 1 out of 4 are done. The first area of the game just as 4 cutscene images, though taking my time so they look super polish. I do wonder what is wrong with Chris here?

OvO/ This is all I can really show since maps are wip, I do hope I can get more done. Really taking my time since I want Verloren to be a game that I’m proud of. Though I really do hope I can finish the first area and push a demo out. ;w; since that’s a mini goal of mine, so get people to know what Verloren will feel like. (;D also would allow me to do voice acting auditions, since the demo will give a great idea what type of game this will be and a low chance I’ll drop the game. This is future stuff though.)

Thank you for supporting me and I really do hope you all have an wonderful day. Make sure you all take it easy. And Until the next update, bye bye.

It’s been a while since I actually really talk about Verloren. The progress has been happening though a lot of it is things I don’t want to show off just yet. Because spoilers and it’s mostly concept art (no one wants to see that).

The only thing I have to show is a map that I took out since it really didn’t fit the game. It would be sad not to show off the map. 

The map replacing this map fits a lot better with the theme of the area and looks way better. Sadly, you won’t be seeing that map until a while. This map did help me to draw new things like pancakes and other things I normally don’t draw. This map even though it’s not going to be use did help me learn how to draw new things. Also, this was my first try at pancakes after a few maps in I got way better at drawing pancakes.

OvO)b I’m going to work super hard to get more content done with Verloren, and hopefully sometimes soon I can give a amazing announcement. 

Also on April 31st Verloren turn officially one making this the first game I been working on since a year. Sadly I had no time to finish the picture for the day. Hopefully next year I can make a picture for the next time. 

OvO/ I hope you all the a wonderful day/night, and I hope enjoy this update.
Also I put a doodle I made of Chris on this post since I thought it turn out nice. I hope no one minds me putting that doodle there. 

Hi all! I’m here with another progress update. I’ve got some good news to share with you this week: the first draft of Sho’s route is 95% finished, and it’s been sent to my two awesome volunteer editors to begin the editing process while I finish that remaining 5%. It’s basically done except for the few minor things I have to finish writing. Yay!! ✨

I’m sure you’re wondering why it took so long to finish - or maybe you aren’t, but I’ll talk about it anyway. My original idea for the route way back in April or May was for Piper/the player to have the choice of what to cook with Sho for the cooking contest - and that depending on which one you pick, a large chunk of the middle of the route would be different. In practice, this ended up making the route fairly complicated, to the point that I was basically writing two routes that lead to the same possible endings. So, when Sho’s route is eventually finished, you’ll actually be able to play it again and see several completely different scenes and dialogue options.

I’m proud of how it’s turning out, but suffice to say, I probably won’t be doing something that complex with any of the other routes, once this one is done. ^^;; It’s caused the route to balloon into something much longer than I ever intended, and it’ll require a lot more proofreading and playtesting than if I had just employed a little creative self-control. But I’m learning how to make VNs as I go along, so I’m considering it a learning experience! ✨

That’s a real screenshot from the Google doc. I don’t think the route will go past 40,000 words by the time I finish the last 5%, but it might get very close. Whew! x_x

No idea when the route itself will be complete and uploaded to Itch.io, considering that all my estimations on those things have been wrong so far.  On top of that, after my huge writing marathon during September, I’m in need of a short break. But my goal at this point is to ramp up my efforts to get the art assets finished once I’ve had my break, and you can be sure that everything I get done it eventually get posted here! ✌️

As always, thank you for playing and for reading! (and I’ll be posting this update to Itch.io today too, so sorry for the repetition if you follow me on both sites!)

Hey, all!

Happy Halloween! We may not have much in the way of  the full game or a demo update, but we do have significant news  regarding the progress of development.

Firstly: Pediatric is rapidly approaching completion, and while you may not see it in the demo, you can see plenty of it on the game twitter which I am trying… VERY hard to update frequently, though it may not happen as much as I like.

Secondly:  As we continue to rebalance characters and enemies and overhaul the  combat, we’ve decided to overhaul the Despair/Anxiety system! While I  was alright with the current system- the way it is in the demo as it is-  after some feedback and talking with our encounter designer, we’ve  thought of a more dynamic and engaging way for players to interact with  this mechanic, while still preserving the feeling of anxiety and the  helplessness that comes with it. So, come the next demo update- or the full game, god willing, your menu will look like this!

That  stress meter will be the new implementation of the Despair system. Put  simply, the more you have, the less you can do, and a lot of stuff makes  it go higher- taking damage, using moves, and certain events. As the  player, your job is to manage that bar so Robin can continue to take  part in the action, keep up her pace, and avoid the Panic Attack state- a  state where Robin isn’t likely to take commands, and may skip her turn  entirely! With more detail on it, a word from our Encounter Designer  regarding the system:

All of Robin’s unique abilities will essentially have two costs:

1. The amount it increases her Stress by.

2. The overall amount of stress she must be at or below to use the skill.

This means that exceptionally powerful abilities can be  balanced around either their availability or stress cost or even both,  leading to a greater level of decision making for players.

Certain skills, like Deep Breath, regulate stress and lower  it alongside their other effects. A means of showing her character  growth and support network through the game can be to give her and her  allies progressively better coping skills that lower stress by a greater  amount and may even supply other benefits!

To compensate for managing a somewhat complex mechanic like  this Robin is, generally, being balanced to be a strong character. This  is already true in the current demo version and is something I want to  carefully hone in future versions.

Having her be a strong party member is also an incentive for  players to learn and engage with the new Stress mechanic as, currently,  it is generally faster to win battles non-boss battles with just Jay  and SG. Even in cases where using Robin as well is ideal having every  battle require a single, static action that completely purges Stress for  just one battle is not engaging in a way we are seeking.

If Robin’s stress meter caps out or goes above a value of  100 she will enter a ‘shutdown’ state, much like the current status  effect where she cannot take most actions until her stress is properly regulated. She is still in combat  and still can be targeted by skills and attacks.

I (the encounter designer) will be drawing up an in-game  booklet explaining these mechanics in simple, easy to parse terms that  will be given to players by Jay shortly after meeting him. That way,  players can easily reference it if they are ever confused or forget how  part of this mechanic works. I don’t want this mechanic to be stressful  for our players! Just for it to represent Robin’s own stress.

I still intend for the game to be completable without a huge  amount of trouble for players. This is mostly a way of making Robin’s  stress more engaging and parseable for all parties! It also gives us,  the developers, the ability to make more challenging and complex  optional battles for players who want to dig into those!

Thank you all for taking the time to read this and I look  forward to doing my part to help deliver the best version of Ghost  Hospital that we can!

And lastly, not so much of an announcement, but  please remember that if you want to have some custom dialogue or add  your own NPC to the game, have custom icons and art made for you, or  just want to support the project, please consider subscribing to the Patreon! While I may not post there that much, I try to make up for it by posting elsewhere.

Thank you all, and happy Halloween!