I don't know why it feels like this game has been out forever. I know nothing about developing a game, but it seems to take a tremendous amount of time for something that doesn't look all that stunning. Looks like it might come out in June. See you guys then (if I remember).
Well, let me go over what goes into making our game; that might make it more clear where all the time goes. I don't blame you for thinking that way though, as a lot of what we've got planned for the game and a lot of the content we've got done for the game hasn't been seen in any of the demos, not even the Patreon-only ones.
I'll be using the GameJolt information about it and expanding on that in this post (updating it in some cases).
This is going to be a long post, but there's a
lot that's went into this game, too.
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20+ enemies, 7 bosses, and 120+ H-animations!
I need to get this out of the way first so we can just get it all out there in one go; all the art in the game is hand-animated.
This means we're not using anything like Spine or any other skeletal system.
For people unfamiliar with what that means; if you play a game like Night of Revenge or Dead Cells, you'll notice that the character has a "skeletal" system (some people might call this ragdoll physics, although that's kind of a subset of what comes with having a skeleton/rig for your character).
The benefit of a system like this is that once you've got it going, you can make animations much more simpler and faster than if you had to draw the animations frame by frame.
The downside of a system like this is that unless you're a master at it and put in so much work to the point you might as well just hand-animate it, you aren't going to be able to do the "retro pixel art animation-ish" style we're doing for animations, because skeletons are more for realistic proportions and less "stretch and squish stylistic" stuff most of the time.
So, as TriangulatePixels is the
only artist on the game, this means that every single tile, background element, prop, enemy, animations, CGs, etc. were all 100% done by him. This takes a considerable amount of time, especially when each level gets completely new mechanics/visuals and
the bosses are generally fairly large, intensive animation jobs (more on that later though)
The enemies themselves almost all get 2 attacks, 2 sex animations, and a CG as well as the standard walking/hurt/idle etc. animations.
Later on in the game, enemies start getting even more complex, with the Earth Level enemies getting *two* sets of attacks and animations, and The End enemies having a set of mix-and-match sex animations that allow any of the four enemies to tag team with any of the other four enemies, with 1, 2 ,3 or 4 enemy combinations for sex animations. Again, none of this is procedural or modular, it's all done by hand.
Speaking of the H-animations, we have no pallette swapped animations nor did we re-use any sex positions + camera angle combos in the game. This took a bit of planning out and setting up, but we think it was worth it.
Going back to the bosses, each of the bosses is fairly intensive like I mentioned; the Earth Boss is the size of the screen vertically, the Fire Boss is half a screen width, and the Ice Boss gets multiple phases and environments. The boss for the Electric Level is a lot more intensive programming-wise for the fight itself than it is art-intensive, but the puzzle rooms before the boss are pretty art-intensive as we made a whole set of props and enemies just for those puzzle rooms.
The boss for The End was a huge amount of labor; they get multiple attacks that mirror Talia's, as well as phases where the entire room moves (more on that later too).
And finally, the True Final Boss that we're working on now is more art-work than
every other boss in the game combined, easily.
Just to give an idea of the scope of the artwork for this boss;
This is
one part of the boss. Every part of its body is animated like this, and that is the in-game size, not scaled up or anything like that.
This boss has a whopping
ten attacks, as well as four QTE events that all get their own artwork/minigame setup, and of course the entire background and special effects and all that goes with that, too.
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150+ optional interactive cutscenes; your choices during them matter, and based on what actions you take throughout the game, you'll end up with one of 40 possible endings!
200+ optional databanks to read to find out more of the story of Future Fragments!
This is something that is probably the least shown off in all of the demos so far; the story/cutscene system.
I don't want to spoil much about the story here, and I also don't want to make this anymore of a wall of text than it already is, so I'll just post some visuals to try and get across what we're doing with this.
Above, you can see the connections between databanks > cutscenes, cutscenes > cutscenes, and those events being connected both in-level and between-level.
As with everything else, none of this is some modular system I can just plug this in from a spreadsheet and have at it; all of this has to be manually input using our custom level/cutscene editor.
I've also got to write script for all of these cutscenes/databanks too, while keeping in mind the dates of events for everything across the 150+ databanks and 150+ cutscenes so that continuity isn't broken, and remember "information permanence" too.
What I mean by that last term is that if Talia (the player) learns something from a databank or cutscene,
all future events should take this into account. So if she reads something about say, hamburgers being blue in the future and this is because only synth meat exists in the future (not a real plot point, just making this up),
any conversation where she would attempt to be mislead on this would instead result in her countering that she
knows that future-hamburgers are blue.
So I've got to make sure I'm checking for anything like that across all of these too, besides the normal connections where if you interact with event A, then events B, C, and D are affected, and how you react to B, C, and D can change E/F/G/H/J/I etc. all the way down the line.
And on top of all of
that, every time you make a choice in a cutscene (or even some actions outside of cutscenes), you raise or lower your points in one of eight values;
Hatred, Kindness, Pacifism, Violence, Optimism, Pessimism, Justice, and Sexuality.
Future cutscenes are further altered/you get more choices based on what your current maximum value is, as well as cutscene interactions with bosses.
I've got to balance the cutscenes in the game so that one of those values isn't overwhelmingly more dominant than the others on a casual playthrough, so that's being kept track of on lists and all that too.
Finally, the final ending of the game (and the true final boss battle) is affected by those values too; whatever your maximum value is, that's your "core" ending. Then, based on if your sexuality was positive (had a lot of sex), neutral, or negative (rejected a lot of sex), the ending gets twisted further.
All endings will be getting CGs, and they will all be getting unique music and will be drastically different from one another; no Mass Effect 3 endings here.
There's also almost another 20 secret endings that can be gotten by playing significantly out of the box, in unexpected ways. Almost all of these get their own music., too.
So the story takes up a lot of time and effort to get to work right (this isn't even counting things like cutscenes and events between just Talia/Faye/Vie; the above chart is only backer-based cutscenes/databanks).
Oh, that's another thing to note too;
nearly every cutscene/databank in the game is a Patreon backer's requested character/event, which I then had to fit into the existing worldbuilding and such. I'm not complaining about this, don't get me wrong, it was a hell of a fun challenge, but that also takes a lot of time to gather those requests and work them into the game in a way that pleases the people who got that reward while simultaneously not breaking your own story/intended design for the game.
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50+ powerups; you can mix and match up to 3 at a time!
Alright, now we're getting into the pretty straightforward stuff.
You can equip 3 of these powerups at once; the powerups have pretty dramatic effects, from being able to shoot downwards in the air to float like in Johnny Bazookatone, or increasing your speed the longer you move in a specific direction, or being able to have your bullets instantly travel across the screen, or reviving yourself when you hit 0 HP... as long as you can make it to a health orb before a timer runs out.
By themselves, bugtesting these as well as balancing them for gameplay alongside the Boss Utility Abilities would be a challenge; since you can mix and match 3 at once though, that results in
over 19,000 combinations. We clearly can't test all of these reasonably with every situation, so instead, we're going to test for single powerup functionality and 2 powerups equipped at once, like on the grid up above.
Luckily, we've got a bugtesting team for this one, but it still takes up a lot of time filing/organizing the bugs for Frouge (our programmer) and obviously for him to fix said bugs.
This is made even harder when you consider that there's...
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5 expansive stages, with lots of secrets to find; Fire, Ice, Electric, Earth, and "The End", each with significantly different aesthetics!
The mechanics for each level to consider.
Every level gets its own set of mechanics, as well as environmental hazards that work into navigating around the level too.
For example, in the Electric Level, when you reverse gravity,
everything reverses, including doorways, enemies, powerups, you name it. Some enemies you even have to do some puzzle work with to shut them off or turn them on for certain areas to navigate them to where you need them to go.
For the Earth Level, we actually had to give an enemy pretty robust pathfinding AI as he'll chase you all over the level, vertically and horizontally.
For The End, we had to do our toughest challenge yet; many of the floors, ceilings, and walls in that level stretch and shrink in real time, which is combined by basically a hell of a labryinth for a map (more on the maps later).
Now, again, by themselves, the map mechanics wouldn't be
too bad, but remember you have to consider not only the enemies in the levels, but ALSO the powerups, and ALSO the boss utility abilities in terms of softlocks with map design, powerups not working as intended with mechanics, or enemies, etc.
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25+ hours of professional voice acting for the entire game across 60+ voice actors!
This one's really straightforward; it takes a lot of time to communicate with actors, get them setup (thank god we've got a casting studio/manager), give them voice direction/feedback on lines in the documents, and so on.
Then, once I get the lines, I need to pick the take I think best fits a particular cutscene or databank, and then chop it up into individual audio files.
Those audio files are then sent to Lewd K. our SFX guy, who adds in relevant sound effects to the databanks and cutscenes and equalizes all the audio across the voice actors so that no one is blaringly loud or quiet in-game.
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A Hub Map system that allows you to choose the order you complete maps in!
If you've been to one of my map making streams, you've probably seen how over the top I am with the maps; I test them over and over for things like avoiding roofs too low over Talia's head so you don't bump your head when jumping, gameplay flow so you can quickly go from platform to platform without feeling like your rhythm will be off, spacing between jumps, enemy placement so it doesn't feel extremely hard or too easy to defeat them, equal placement of powerups/gold databanks/databanks per maps, props placed to divert your attention here or there (plus continuity with prop placement and map design in general that has to be obeyed to not break established story).
It may seem excessive, but it's one of those "you don't really notice it when you're playing, which means we're doing our job" things.
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Dynamic music and sound that changes based on the events going on around you, in real time!
This is also a fairly large part of the process I think a lot of people don't realize; there are
three hours of music in the game now.
The dynamic music setup means that all the levels in the game get multiple variants of songs, which are then running in tandem.
I go over these with our musician, Wishful Simping, and then I send the result to Frouge and TriangulatePixels so that we can debate on if it's how we like it or if we need to change things.
95 times out of 100, Wishful nails it so we're great with his first attempt, but redos are done quickly, and I can't say how much we appreciate that from him (same goes to the few times we need Lewd K to redo SFX!)
Speaking of sound effects, there's probably around 700-800 unique sound effects in the game by now, too. Frouge has to plug all of these in, one by one, and then make sure they don't clash with other sound effects or the songs for the level, that they don't have bugs, and all the usual stuff.
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Other stuff I didn't mention on GameJolt
One of the biggest things I've somehow failed to mention on there and I need to add is the Collections Menu.
This menu has a number of things in it, including;
- keeping track of all the Databanks you've ever read, allowing you to re-read them at any time, as well as see if the databank is connected to any other events in the game so you can better keep track of what's going on.
- functioning as a "sci-fi" glossary for words within the game's universe, like "ThinkBlip" or "Celodst" or "ADMN fluids..
- containing the Achievements menu, which has up to a max of 100 achievements you can get across the game, none of which are grinding or fetch-quest based; they're all skill or exploration based. Getting 5 achievements in a level (20 per level) gets you all sex animations and CGs for the level, so you don't have to lose to see any of the sex in the game.
- finally, it has a listing of all enemies in the game and strategies on how to deal with them, too, once you've encountered them.
There's also a fairly robust options menu that auto-remaps your controller, which will eventually support as many controllers as possible, with sound options that let you mute all voices, or only the main character's voices, or only NPC voices, and so on.
Then there's the level editor/cutscene creator; you can make your own stuff with that and pass it along to other people in map packs, as some have been doing for a while. This will come built into the game, for free, at launch. Keeping that bug-free has been a heck of a task too, but we plan to have map repositories on our website we'll be setting up, as well as a general wiki for the game.
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Extra Note
We plan to translate the game soon after launch into Japanese and a number of other languages; I'll need to make a translation bible for that, as well. so that the localization is as accurate as possible, while still being unique to each region with enough flexibility for the localizers to put their thumbprint on it, so to speak.
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None of the above is consdidering things too, like;
- bugs popping up out of nowhere
- things just simply taking longer than we thought to get working in a way that's fun/fair gameplay
- designing things throughout the course of the game's history democratically; if 2 out of 3 people don't agree in our group, then we either compromise or scrap the idea and come up with something better that we can all agree on. we also have fairly frequent Discord calls to organize things and such, too.
A LOT of time was spent making the engine too; at this point, it's 99% our own code, but all that time spent means that future games will be exponentially faster on programming because we've got an engine robust enough to allow us to make most 2D genres with a super high level of utility for us (cutscene maker stuff being built in from the getgo, etc.)
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I hope all that clarifies things; if it doesn't, and you still have questions, feel free to ask!
