This is a development blog
Here I am, starting a development blog while I already have a Tumblr, and a website, and many other tools supposed to give me an online presence, most of them very rarely updated. So, why the hassle?
Because I need to focus. I’ve been working on this project from time to time for a few years, trying many engines to tell the same story. Nékromegà is meant to be an simple adventure game with a few RPG elements, and a lot of game engines can do that. Pretty easily. But not so many do it in a way that suits my workflow and keeps me motivated. I’ve tried lots of them, and none seemed to be the right tool for this project.
This may sound strange, but I’ve always wanted Nékromegà to have stairs. Not teleporters in stairs disguise that send you automagically to the next floor, but stairs you can actually walk on. I want the game to convey a sense of space and architecture, and to fully embrace the notion of moving vertically. Probably because a long, long time ago, H.R. Giger’s stairs drawings have made a real impression on me. Or, more generally, because there will be ruins, and I can’t really dissociate stairs from ruins.
Hans Rudi Giger, Shaft IV (1966-68)
History and memories aside, ruins are buildings which are slowly losing their battle against gravity, transitioning from verticality to horizontality, from majesty to nothingness. And I think stairs are an important asset to physically experience this collapsing majesty. I don’t want my ruins to feel two-dimensional or decorative: the player should be able to walk around them, inside them, but also to embrace their height. Stairs should behave no differently than corridors and not be treated like abstract links between floors. Obviously, Nékromegà will have its share of deep underground places and tall broken towers, and I don’t envision them as flat blueprints.
But developing stairs caused me intense frustration. Both Clickteam Fusion and GG Maker betrayed my grand vision of stairs. These are still excellent game engines I’d highly recommend, but simply not stairs-friendly enough for my needs.
My first attempt at turning this project into a game was in Clickteam Fusion, with pre-rendered 3D scenes made with MagicaVoxel. I had a mouse-controlled sprite moving over the background in a 2D space, with invisible colliders everywhere, sloppy pathfinding, and a few depth issues. Overall it was looking nice, but the controls were really bad — especially when walking on stairs. My limited maths skills for trajectory calculations and faking 3D with sprites scaling didn’t help either. Worse, the Fusion workflow was, at best, tedious. I have no idea how people find the patience to use its terribly outdated sprite editor and its dull import system. Hopefully, I had Pyxel Edit to do real pixel art work ahead.
My inital design for a test level, made and rendered with MagicaVoxel.
I ended up with a somewhat working prototype, but not with a satisfying prototype. I got bored and put the project on hold. Months later, I discovered GG Maker, which has a really neat visual scripting system, and simple yet efficient 3D capabilities. I managed to export my models from MagicaVoxel and set up a real 3D scene quite easily, if we except the horrible pipeline involving the even more horrible use of Blender to convert my voxel models to stuff GG Maker can use with proper textures and orientation. Overall though, it worked, even if I had issues with displaying my sprite properly, as you can see below:
A clunky and incomplete 3D scene, something I was proud of nonetheless.
But the stairs were still a mess. I managed to build maps with real vertical depth and frightening height, but the collisions were half-broken. My character was sometimes getting stuck for no reason I could understand. So I gave up again, with a clearer idea of what I could do, but not how I could do it. Messing with 3D had brought more questions than answers: isometric? 3rd person? 1st person? All of them?
An early isometric rendering of my first test level.
So Nékromegà, ironically, became an undead project. Months passed again. Then, a few weeks ago, while looking for new development tools on itch.io, I stumbled upon RPG In A Box, decided to give it a try, and found it perfect for my needs. Why? Well, that’s for another post, but to put it simply: it’s voxel-based, and its workflow is easier, faster, and way more enjoyable than anything I’ve tried before. And stairs are dead simple to set up.
Stairs are important, but so are beams, I guess.
The screenshot above shows a very rough WIP map edited in RPG In A Box. It lacks various textures, objects, characters, and at least one floor, not to mention dialogues and choices. And cool stairs. It’s not a terrifying necropolis, just a big house. Yet it should give you an idea of what I’m trying to create. I still have a lot of work to do, not only on this map, but also, and mainly, on game design. While the story is almost done, the game structure and systems need a lot more details.
Good news: that’s the point of this development blog.