Remember How I Described That In The Fountain, One Of The Factions Encountered Was A Race Of Tiny Bug

Remember how i described that in the fountain, one of the factions encountered was a race of tiny bug people (elves) with advanced tech? It came back in my mind that i had already conceived of a boss for that section so here a quick sketch to share it.

Who knows, maybe ill bring it back in some form in another project.

Just played through the game and here a quick review of it. Canto I is a short but fun platformer. It took me about 30 minutes to finish and felt like it made full use of its content and mechanics within that time. The art is definitely a big plus, with simple but very well-made pixel art full of personality. The mechanics are, again, simple, but fun and responsive. Balance-wise, the game delivers a fast but fair progression of the difficulty, offering plenty of optional side paths to test your platforming skills for hidden collectibles. Level 3 is where i spent most of my playtime as its treacherous and narrow tunnels demand a lot more precision and mastery of the character movement than anything previously encountered. A pretty noticeable difficulty spike, but nothing insurmountable. My only criticism would be that every levels using the same background makes it difficult to notice the transitions in the levels' themes. (i feel like only knew what each level was supposed to be because i followed the game development) I also think that in many cases, it was far too easy to just ignore an optional challenge and damage myself to acquire a collectible. Overall i would say that Canto I is a simple but more than worthwhile game to try out. It accomplishes everything it sets out to do and makes me hopeful that the following chapters of this little series will only grow in quality and creativity.

Canto I OUT NOW on Steam!

Jump, dash and traverse the "Forest Dark" in Canto I, a small and sweet platformer game based on the first Canto of the Divine Comedy! It's my first Steam game and an incredible milestone for my growth as a game developer. It's a dream come true, I'm so happy!!!! :D!!!!!!!

Check it out for FREE on Steam!!!!

Enjoy, and have a MAGICAL day! :D

irredeamable development retrospective. Part 1: shadow and light This is gonna be pretty messy since what came before or after gets all tangled up when you go back this far, but the earliest project that can be identified in the file is a game about controlling a specter where you could take control of all kind of people or creatures and use their unique attacks and movement ability to navigate the world.

We got humans, cats, snake, ants, succubus, and my beloved mitons, a race of giant rolly polly pillbugs.

Aniway, the story eventually developped into being about a rivalry between two specters sibling. Nox and solaria. They also each came with a unique appearance for each race they could control. Through, i sadly never did make their mitons form...

The idea behind the game was that each chapter, you would awaken as one of the two and try to usurp and destroy whatever the other had built in your absence. Nox eras were more focused on primal cults of fear and darkness while Solaria would make grand empires to worship her. There was a back and forth between the two but time and technology would progress with each era. All i got left when it comes to how the world would have been laid out is this line map that shows the general ways the area connects and the ideas of how certain locations could change depending on the era.

There were also plans to introduce a new antagonist later on with Cain, a new, much more powerful specter that forces the sibling to make a truce. His backstory was that he used to have a similar rivalry with his brother able, but eventually ended up destroying him and is now deeply sad and alone.

So how far did it go? The game pretty much didn't get out of the conceptual phase. Got around to code the possession mechanics and a few of the races' movesets, but that's about it. Anyway, you`re free to get inspired by or even steal anything here. I have way more ideas than i can actually use and everything in these old projects has either been abandoned or altered so much that it's now something completely different. See you next time for the next chapter of our retrospective. Capitalism, IN SPACE!

Irredeamable developpement retrospective: Bonus part: A lesson in commitment

As much as this retrospective may be a self-indulgent exercise in sharing all the project ideas that had to be shelved or discarded during development, it was also a cautionary tale on how much time and effort can go to waste when you keep starting over because a new idea just seems a tad more interesting than the old one.

This can be especially seen in how i had to completely redo the main character's sprites several times, despite the moveset remaining nearly identical. But she was not the only one.

and those are just the ones with direct parallels. A lot of development time was spent, doing and redoing the same few basic enemies and areas with a few minor alterations.

What ive learned from this is to be both more careful and more committed with what i create. Be more thorough with the design process of characters, enemies and areas, but set it in stone once its actually implemented into the game. The result won't be perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good enough, and a flawed game is always better than one that won't ever come out.

Irredeamable Developpement Retrospective Part 5: Project watchmaker

So before we begin this part, i will reiterate the previous warning that this part will contain some spoilers for the actual game, so this is your last chance to go download and play it. For everyone who already have played Irredeamable or dont care about spoilers, lets begin. ----------

Project Watchmaker was another attempt at creating a global setting for my stories, but unlike The Fountain which was all about about a wide fantasy world, full of strange lands, stranger races, and reality-altering magic, this one takes a more vertical sci-fi form where the focus was instead on an extensive timeline. Early ideas involved a time-traveling story, where one would take control of Excalibur, a superweapon with control over time. The character would travel through a series of timelines in a Metroidvania structure, using time gates and timewarp keys to reach different locations at different times. These timelines included a medieval/cyberpunk utopia, a post-apocalyptic snow wasteland, an ancient jungle, a cyber-totalitarian future, the end of times, and a forgotten prehistoric age. This story also included a bunch of characters based on Arthurian mythology. Such as a post-apocalyptic Lancelot (riding a motorcycle), an artificial intelligence lady of the lake, an evil totalitarian king Arthur, and Merlin as a deathless troll sage that can be encountered in all timelines.

I used to have more details about this one, but then i realized that i dont really have any pictures of it. Still, i wanted to talk about it since a lot of this story did make it into the game themes and characters and it makes a nice buffer for the actual spoilers. So we`ll leave things here as we move onto some transitional maps that took place in the transition between this form of the project and the next.

What eventually cemented the setting current form is the namesake watchmakers. It's based on the old flawed argument from Christian fundamentalist apologetics that posits that in the same way we can determine that a pocket watch on a beach is man-made because of its complexity, we can do the same with the universe. What ended up inspiring me through, is the rebuke to this argument. The idea that if the universe was indeed designed, how did you manage to distinguish the pocket watch from every single grain of sand in the first place? I wont really linger on these debates as i never was fond of arguing, especially about religion, but while i havent believed in gods for a very long time, i always have been fascinated by the concept and all the ethical questions they bring forth. In this very specific case, what is it like to live in an entirely artificial world? What would that world even look like? What kind of creature would even do it in the first place?

...and that brings us back to fairies, the little gods hiding in plain sight. Back in the fountain, they represented infinite potential, and here it`s much of the same, except rather than beings of pure magic, they are simply creatures that have access to technology and knowledge beyond understanding. They are not literal god, they would say so themselves, but they have evolved past a point where neither time, death, or even reality has any grasp upon them. They are only limited by their own mortal flaws and incomplete understanding.

They are all meant to be equal, a group of disparate individuals united by a common goal of figuring out how it all went wrong and use their power to fix it. But Morgan, the purple fairy, was always the focal point of the story, the antagonist hiding as the support character. (back in the Excalibur story, they would be revealed to have been leading you into defeating Merlin and the trolls so Fairies could take over the timeline and establish their utopia)

As the fairies were fleshed out, pocket worlds were designed in their image, connected through a central realm and some other junctions, kind of like an ant-farm. Much of the idea behind the world was that it was both a place of research and a prison. A cosmic-sized panopticon that the watchmakers could use to study some of the most dangerous sapiens species and learn how to tame them.

The realm came through many other iterations, and ultimately some of the stuff had to be dropped to reduce scope. Most notable here was the removal of the elves and suhagins, their roles being merged into the Uris and trolls respectively (trolls even took the name)

There was also a brief attempt at having the entire game take place in the city of new eden. Both the Uther and Ursula boss fights were conceived in this version of the story and new eden remained a central figure of the game story and world. Aniway, we`re almost at the end of this part. We only got some progress shematics left. These includes areas and boss concept. Some made it in the game in some forms, other have been scrapped or pushed for later projects.

Anyway, thanks for following this retrospective so far. The next and final part of this retrospective will be about the project as it was during the 2 years i officially developed it on Tumblr. A little game known as Irredeamable.

Just saw that Mollystar has released the final part of device theory for deltarune.

YouTube

DELTARUNE and the Fourth Wall || THE DEVICE THEORY [PART 3: FINALE]

originally a simple theory video about DELTARUNE, turned into an existential disaster of an analysis. join me as i seek to answer how DELTAR

I`ve been a huge fan of her content so im definitely gonna watch it now and you should too.