#indiedev
2nd comic in the 2nd series: Ren joins the TRUNDL.corp team. Watch out for the dirtword! The story so far: http://spite.house/comic/
Post link
Comic #5, match cut to: flashback. Also, earlier issues now have a permanent home here.
Obligatory: What’s he building in there?
Post link
In this installment, TRUNDL’s erstwhile creator learns that the path to dystopia is paved with good intentions. They Live glasses sold separately.
Speaking of promotion, you can test-drive TRUNDL.buddy at Power of Play, this Friday and Saturday (May 20 and 21) in Bellevue, WA.
PREVIOUSLY:Part one.Part two.Part three.
Post link
Three deep in the prequel-verse! Did you know this is a video game that is in alpha? It is, and you can be among the first to play it. We’ll be at iFest in Seattle this Saturday, May 14, then Power of Play in Bellevue (Seattle-adjacent) May 20-21! More info soon…
Post link
First installment of our comic prequel toTrundl.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-Filactery! Check back at blog.spite.house and follow for weekly updates.
Post link
FINDING A TONE THAT ISN’T
Our tactical roadtripper, TRUNDL.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-filactery, flings you through a gauntlet of environments, each with their own distinct color palette and style. Between each one, you’ll guide TRUNDL.buddy through decisions, shaping both mind and journey.
IT IS HARD
Early on, I wanted the music to branch alongside the narrative, incorporating different genres to reflect the changing personality of the player’s character. Violent or aggressive choices might transition to death metal or the militaristic styling of Battlestar Galactica. Pacifistic choices might swing more acoustic, Appalachian. Aside from the obvious challenges of producing such a wide variety of cues for every level in the game, there was another less obvious problem. The baseline song would need a neutral tone.
Creating music without emotion has been incredibly challenging for me. I’ve always felt the two are inextricable. But over the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered an interesting approach. Percussion and rhythm don’t carry much emotion by themselves, just a sense of energy and movement. I stripped out the melodic instruments entirely; built an underscore with just rhythmic textures and a single (tonic) pitch. When the player takes dramatic action, I comment by introducing melody and harmony – emotion.
Another issue I discovered is how quickly the “mix” fills up in-game; ambient sounds, engine sounds, enemies attacking you, obstacles whizzing by and music all playing at the same time. This buries the ambience completely – wind, insects, animal sounds. Ambience serves almost no gameplay purpose, except to ground you in the world. But having grown up with adventure games like MystandIco, I value these sounds highly and don’t want them lost.
PROBLEM + PROBLEM = SOLUTION
I needed neutral music and I’ve got buried ambience. The answer to both, musical ambience. I’ve incorporated environmental sounds into the rhythmic texture for each level’s backing theme. The music now feels connected to the place it’s scoring, still serves the gameplay, and provides a neutral base that pivots harmonically with the player’s actions. And I don’t have to worry about the mix as much. That, friends, is how I murdered two avian friend-beasts in the most primal way imaginable. I don’t even know where this rock came from… I… hello?
Check out the video you probably already watched for some quick examples!
Soren Laulainen
Music Composer and Sound Designer
sorenlaulainen.com
Top o’ the blog post to you. My name is Cassie Murphy. I’m an illustrator based in Seattle, and the lead artist for Trundl.buddy and the Ghostly Wifi-lactery. I draw every glowing, drippy, spindly, nubby, blocky, undulating, craggy, Non-Newtonian Thing in this game.
Though this is my first game studio experience, this isn’t my first video game. That distinction goes to a one-button game called Dinglefling, wherein you must release a family of dingleberries from a cat’s sit-upon to land on items in a room. It was a vague realization that I wanted to do 2D game art. When I moved to Seattle, I met some folks that dug my art style, and the amorphous dream that spurred me to move here began to take shape at Spite House.
SWITCHING GEARS
During life in Virginia, my art developed a one-note style and subject matter: Cute. Fat. Cats. My cat paintings got me featured on Animal Planet’s “CATS 101”,Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, HBO’s Game of Thrones Compendium, the Critics’ Choice Awards, E! Online, BuzzFeed, Nerdist, Tor.com, Threadless, TeeFury, Geek and Sundry and Cat Fancy, to name a lot. I painted hundreds of client cat commissions and slung prints at conventions across the Eastern seaboard.
After 8 years of pun-based feline success it began to feel like work (in a bad way) and I gave up the ghost. Er, the cats. To draw ghosts instead.
TRUNDSETTER
(The puns die with me.)
Working on a team like this is a creative’s fever dream. Our SoDo warehouse workspace buzzes with the urgent energy of invention and/or the trillest (only) trap in the building.
It is also the most challenged I’ve ever felt in my professional life. I’ve never needed to work on a team to create cartoons before, let alone whilst meticulously ensuring the art fits not only the lore we’re weaving, but also within the technical bounds of Spine and Unity. The re-work process is a hard reality of team-based art-making; something I’m mitigating through simpler sketches and real-time concepting. Learning, when done right, is never comfortable.
Being the lead artist affords me a surprising measure of creative control over the project as a whole. It feels like pressure, but also gives the satisfying illusion of power in this monster of a process. My favorite thing to do is slip things into my art that inspire a change in the story or gameplay: faces in the canyon walls, ghost expressions conveying their motivations, lava lamp-like innards of massive Wi-Fi towers. Sometimes a design goes over like a lead balloon (R.I.P. wispy skeleton-robot concept). Other times I design a character or environment that elicits rare, sweet guffaws from the lovable gruffians I work with.
THE CANYON
We’re in the final stretch of developing the canyon, which sets the template for future biomes, so I’m hoping we worked out all the kinks. The main kink = my making the dimensions and format of each asset work correctly in-game (see Ray’s post). It’s a continual learning process between the dev and myself to make the pieces of our cartoon world fit together. For example, the canyon walls shouldn’t follow one-point perspective as I would like to draw it, but rather need a flat bottom so as not to float off the ground. Unity takes care of the perspective. Or breaks it. Unity takes care of and breaks a lot (visually), I’m learning.
I love a challenge. Needless to say – and saying it anyway – I’m pouring my heart into this game, and I can’t wait to show you more. Stay tuned.
Cheers,
Cassie
Hey there! I’m Soren Laulainen, composer and sound designer for TRUNDL.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-filactery. After spending a little over a decade scoring films and webisodes, this is my first foray into interactive music – which, to me, continues to be a relatively nascent and unexplored territory.
TRUNDL.buddy is a deliberately small project with high ambitions, designed small so that the inevitable scope creep doesn’t capsize us. An exercise in creative opportunities borne from constraints. A game which certainly won’t fully realize every creative goal I would love to accomplish – immersion! synesthesia! synchronicity! – but might break new ground all the same.
Finding the “musical soul” of the game is an exciting process. Our character begins life as mindless, expressionless robot, but those eyes are brimming with idiotic bliss: the impulse to just drive imbues him with a sort of dogged enthusiasm in spite of his empty mind. And what better way to capture both a lack and extreme intensity of emotion than with Vocaloids?
Vocaloids are synthetic pop singers who have become very popular in Japan. You write lyrics and melodies and the Vocaloid software synthesizes vocals automatically. I’ll be using them for the main theme in TRUNDL.buddy, which we return to a few times throughout the game. My goal is to have them convey parts of the narrative and adapt to various choices the player makes throughout the game. Here’s one of my first music sketches with them.
Soren Laulainen
Music Composer and Sound Designer
sorenlaulainen.com
So we’re close enough to the end of needing art assets for the canyon biome that I get to really flesh out my concept for the swamp biome. I want this level to be a complete departure from the visuals of the canyon (warm oranges, rocky terrain, dry dust). I intend for everything to look cool in temperature, jewel-toned, ethereal, and even drippier than usual. As in the canyon, I’m drawing each swamp tree to stand parallel to the viewer as they whip past. Some will be in shadow and others more detailed as they stick out into the light. I hope you love it (rough as it is), and I can’t wait to share more as the team puts it into motion!
Cheers,
Cassie
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
NOW IN DEVELOPMENT: TRUNDL.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-Filactery is a fast-paced tactical roadtrip game developed by SPITE HOUSE.
TRUNDL.corp’s newly-conscious flagship product awakens with a head full of voices and a singular impulse: DRIVE.
Swerve through countless (five) environments toward one of many (three) endings. Equip your fat little body with armor and weapons to face hostile bots sent to flatten your chassis. Collect glimpses of an inevitable future haunted by sound and color and also ghosts. TRUNDL your buddy hard enough and you may answer the voices’ call. But what will you say?
Grow a mind. Swerve the world. But mostly… NEVER. EVER. STOP.
Post link
Watch our wall get pretty. Cassie paints a very large, very on-the-nose mural featuring a dead bird, pink ghosts, and highly accurate view of the meatspace that surrounds us all. It is called ‘VIDEO GAMES.’
Art - Cassie Murphy
Music - Soren Laulainen
Happy #WishlistWednesday!
Take a look at one of the mechanics our JRPG has where you can power up your abilities by repeating a sequence. Show me your move!
Wishlist and try the demo here!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/786510/Oracle_of_Forgotten_Testament/
#indiegame #gamedev #JRPG #touhouproject
Happy weekend and happy #ScreenshotSaturday, everyone!
I’ve decided to put the beta version of Three Mazeketeers into the public! Join the adventure of three heroines in another world on our Itchio, GameJolt, or Steam!
Itch.io:https://dragonemperors.itch.io/the-three-mazeketeers
GameJolt:https://gamejolt.com/games/3Mazeketeers/655127
Wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1889370/Three_Mazeketeers/
Stuff I’d like to talk about Lastone: Behind the Choice
About the dilemma ‘easy mode and skip button’.
… It is one of my concerns as a developer to see someone not enjoying the game we’ve developed. But, the satisfaction it brought for the players when they finally solved the puzzle and read the story of their character, reminded me of the purpose of this game. We deliver the story and the puzzle as a whole package. Without the puzzle, it will just be a linear visual novel reminding you how changes might happen instantly. And, without the stories, it will be no different than the first version of this game, which maybe some of you remember as Cengkeh Batu. Together, they create a new experience which is this game, where you rack your brains on the puzzle section and be rewarded with stories to read and to feel. …
See more: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1844990/view/3139576859094806999
Check the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1844990/Lastone_Behind_the_Choice/
