Travis

DEVLOG - Moby

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Way back in 2016, Jon Coughlin and I decided to make a game for the GBJam. We had been fiddling around on another project prior to that and decided to set it aside and make a game celebrating a system we both love. We batted around a few ideas ranging from strategy games to arcade games, but eventually decided on something a bit different:  an exploration game where you control a little boy out exploring the outdoors.

 

We did a lot of good things during the week long jam, including getting several systems in place, and creating enough art assets to get us through. There was a solid mini-game to support the collecting of bugs as you explored. The mini-game, the ambient sounds, and the art were all in decent shape and yet we still ran out of time. In a frantic state, we threw together a world to explore and submitted the project prior to the deadline.

 

The jam submission didn’t use the environmental sounds properly, and the world definitely felt fairly rushed. I also threw in some footstep sounds in the last three minutes or so that are somewhat irritating over time. So, we decided that our game idea definitely needed some more love.

58a4c10a11b09_GBJAMitchimage.png.4b99c2c756bc31cf1b4864fee565d302.png

I have been working on it (somewhat regularly) since the end of the jam. Jon has largely been working on his Eyes of Cheatin’ Hitman project, which is turning out to be really cool! He is welcome to jump back in at any time, but regardless, I want to get this game polished up and re-release it.

 

I am starting this devlog to motivate me to push through what is hopefully the final bit before letting people test it. I might be dredging up some old progress here and there just to show some of the game, but I just wanted a place to post some stuff about it as I go.

 

You can go play the jam version of the game if you’d like, but you have been warned of its issues!

 

Thanks for reading!

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What I have been working on lately, in general, is fleshing out the world that Moby is exploring. While figuring out what all should be placed in this (now quite large) area for him to traverse, some of the sprites we had used for the jam started to have issues. As I am placing sprites in front of different backgrounds, they just get washed out and lose definition. The best solution I could come up with for this was to make some of the nature sprites have a more defined look, which will make them a bit more cartoony. I really like the more natural look of the original sprites, but with 4 colors, they just don't show up adequately.

 

Some of the sprites I had made already had a pretty defined, more cartoonish look, so this will also keep things consistent. I think I finally have our three tree types looking consistent. I will probably keep tweaking them (especially if you tell me to), but they are coming together.

 

In the images below, the old tree is on the left, the new one on the right. The new versions allow for good visibility in front of all backgrounds, and when overlapping other trees of the same type. The biggest difference is in the original tree in the first picture that often looks like just branches when placed in front of most backgrounds.

58a4c4aab2390_SpringTrees.PNG.45803f5837f4ef491e3adb09f846ef68.PNG

58a4c4aa77da2_OakTrees.PNG.b173b3817ea9609d4087fe5e14127acb.PNG

58a4c4aa15815_EvergreenTrees.PNG.e13a1975d547e0cc58735730d4341eff.PNG

 

Hopefully these and the other sprites will still feel natural enough when Moby is out poking around in his backyard!

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Oh! This is the game I saw in the GIF you posted to slack. The concept sounds great and I'll definitely follow the development of this. I will try to take some time this evening to check out the jam submission. 

 

I like the updated style on the new trees though the second one is a bit off for me. It looks a bit like a cabbage head or brain. Maybe a bit less separation and some shading similar to the third tree would help. 

 

Excited to follow your devlog!

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10 hours ago, theschap said:

I like the updated style on the new trees though the second one is a bit off for me. It looks a bit like a cabbage head or brain. Maybe a bit less separation and some shading similar to the third tree would help. 

 

 

Ha! I guess it does look a bit cabbage-y. I think if I cut down on the shading between segments it would probably help. I will mess with it some more! Thanks for the input and thanks for reading!

 

I guess I should also say that I am no artist, so the art assets are what I'm most nervous about showing. If you like the way the main character looks... I didn't make him. Luckily a nice guy I used to work with was in school to become an animator at one point and he drew Moby for us during the jam. I could probably hassle him for more help, but since I am/was never too sure how extensive any of this will be, I haven't asked. We'll see how it goes. 

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3 hours ago, osmosisch said:

I gotta say that grass background is giving me eyestrain, way too busy.

 

OK, that's good input. I can tone it down. Thanks!

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For now, I toned down the grass by changing the darker green to the next lighter green. I didn't change the pattern or anything yet, but this definitely looks less busy.

 

58a8b68e24cec_NewGrass.PNG.32673db8060312089ef651df51ded6e4.PNG

 

I also worked on some minor updates to other sprites and things in between placing items and other environmental sounds around the world.

 

Most of the sounds I am using, I got from a fantastic 8-bit sound package on the Unity asset store. It doesn't give me 100% of what I need, though. The slack channel helped me decide to bitcrush a real crow's caw to make it sound 8-bit, and that worked out really well. Now I am struggling with getting water noises. There are a good amount in that package and elsewhere that simulate waves, but I have a stagnant swampy pond and a stream, not an ocean. I have one that works sort of adequately, but I am not sure I am happy with it. I tried to bit crush some real stream sounds, and well, that just crushes it to a couple of blips. I also tried making sounds in a couple of other tools, but that is a skill set I don't think I have time to dig into right now. I would like to "finish" this sometime soon, after all.

 

As far as placing items around the world, I have created several doo-dads and things that Moby can discover during his explorations. I am trying to walk a line here of keeping a GameBoy era feel to the associated text and any implied/environmental story telling, but still make it interesting. I have changed the text on several items many times in hopes of doing this, so we'll see how that comes out. In the gif below, the animation seems to have picked all the frames other than the ones showing his feet moving. Oh well, the point is the text, I guess.

 

58a8bb197e78d_ChessPiece.gif.4131bb774dc3cfe74ee2b7df7c8ae7db.gif

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Looks great Travis!

 

On 2/18/2017 at 3:25 PM, Travis said:

The slack channel helped me decide to bitcrush a real crow's caw to make it sound 8-bit, and that worked out really well.

How did you go about doing this? That sounds awesome.

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6 hours ago, theschap said:

Looks great Travis!

 

How did you go about doing this? That sounds awesome.

 

Well, I have very limited experience with audio stuff, but with some googling I was able to get it to work. I used Audacity and then used a Nyquist Prompt from the Effects menu. If you put in "(quantize s 4)" or some other multiple of 2, it at least simulates this effect. Do I really know what I was doing? Definitely not. I just found some random guy saying this would work online and it was already built in as opposed to everyone else who was suggesting to download extensions and things. It at least sounds right. Whether it is technically an 8-bit sound now or not, I am not sure. I would like to understand what exactly I did, but I decided to move on and avoid one of my many extended tangents... 

 

If you need to do this, I can explain more thoroughly. There are probably other ways too, but this did the trick!

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I don't have too much progress to post about, but for the sake of making this somewhat of a habit, I will post a small update.

 

I finished toning down the grass tiles, per osmosisch's suggestion. This took a bit of time since there are quite a few transitions between grass and dirt/water/whatever. I think it made a big difference, even if it needs further tweaking.

 

I've also been burning down a todo list of minor quibbles and things to add. Some are dull, but make a big difference like adding little UI sounds at some important parts. I also decided to add another glint type. For a while, all of the bugs and any other items that had a glint all sparkled in the same way. I think they should appear a bit different, mainly so if you decide you don't care about collecting bugs at the moment (or ever), you can just ignore those. I made a slightly different animation and set the spawning code to turn on the correct animation for bugs when appropriate. 

 

I might change these, but for now, they are serving their purpose in their lo-fi granduer. The item glint is on the left and the new bug glint is on the right. I hope it looks a bit buggy. I might add some random element to it. The item glint rotates randomly, although you can't tell from that gif. 

 

58ad116adcfc1_itemglint.gif.9aa6298fcc2bee8439e22b040e607e56.gif58ad1169ebc69_bugglint.gif.eabc9f5ea96ab45a001db216206738d8.gif

 

 

I'll try to show something a bit more exciting next time, even if it isn't something new. Although there aren't that many "exciting" things going on in this game, which is sort of the point.

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Hey Trav, this is looking really great. To me the bug glint definitely suggests movement of a tiny thing more than your item glint, so I think you've nailed that one there. I'm really looking forward to seeing where you go with this, especially with the little exposure to the story with the chess piece up there. Great stuff!

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28 minutes ago, phill said:

Hey Trav, this is looking really great. To me the bug glint definitely suggests movement of a tiny thing more than your item glint, so I think you've nailed that one there. I'm really looking forward to seeing where you go with this, especially with the little exposure to the story with the chess piece up there. Great stuff!

 

Thanks, phill! I hope people enjoy exploring with Moby once I am done. This might be hard to pull off with a GB aesthetic and my capabilities, but dammit, I'm trying!

 

An update for today:

 

I made a short video of the opening menu as it stands. Mainly to show that I spent a bunch of time getting the screen and controls menus the way I wanted. One criticism we had during the jam was that using the Z and X keys were kind of awkward, so I wanted to allow people to change how they controlled the game, but still keep that simulated GameBoy feel. You can change the buttons to any letter, number, or a select other set of keys (enter, tab, etc). You can also pick between WASD and arrows to move. I didn't want to let you just go nuts with how to perform movement. So, the menu shows fiddling with all of these things and hopefully keeping you from doing something impossible, like using the A key as a button when you also have WASD as movement controls. A lot of this could have probably just been simplified or left in the Unity default GUI at the start, but I really wanted it to feel like a GameBoy game.

 

The title screen itself is coming along. I'd like to change the logo a bit, I'm just not sure how yet. I now like how Moby walks in with the title behind him. The border fading in is OK, but definitely not something a GameBoy could actually do. I probably worry too much about those things, but I will likely change it to fading between the four colors in the palette or dithering into place with a few frames. We'll see. The birds tweeting may or may not stay. It might be a bit irritating. Jon's friend made an awesome track for us at one point after the jam, so I need to locate that and give that a shot. Only funny thing is that there is no music anywhere else in the game, but that will probably be just fine.

 

On the screen settings, OBS has issues when I change the window size, so that's why the 6X version is still seen when you change to 4x. That is only in the video. Also, there was no way to show going to full screen mode as well. The full screen mode seems to work nicely, although since it isn't a clean multiple of the GameBoy resolution, it gets a little blurry--unfortunate.

 

 

Anyway, this was a big boring post about the menus!!! Next time will hopefully show more #content.

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Among other things the last couple of days, I've been adding some details to the inventory screens. I still (think) I want to add a text box beneath the small sprite picture, but for now, here is an example. Look at the detail on that photo!!

 

photo.gif.49fb43cda1a7a9efbf7510bca50dceaf.gif

 

 

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The clock that I added, and is shown in the gif in the previous post, was so that I could have a light implementation of a day/night cycle. My original plan was to have you be able to explore at night, but that idea is getting cut by the production company. So, I still wanted Moby go home at the end of a day to reset things. Also, because if all goes well, some of the environmental elements will change based on time, but I haven't done that yet and we'll see. Anyway, here is a short gif showing Moby getting beckoned back home and sleeping. 

 

58b5f78f514a1_nighttime.gif.e44106852565536db31c40f8837017a6.gif

 

I think this has a good gameboy feel to it, and I plan to have night come slowly enough that this won't be annoying. You should be able to walk across the map a couple of times in a day. 

 

 

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@Travis This is such a wonderful little gem, I can't wait to walk around inside of it! 

I love the bug glint, and the transitions/being called home thing is really perfect and feels GB-appropriate. 

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On 3/12/2017 at 7:37 AM, infamous space turtle said:

I'm digging this Travis, howd the swamp noise search go? Also a possibly bad idea for the menu tones - changing pitch as you cycle through them. 

 

For now, I'm just keeping in some of the quietest, calmest wave sounds I had available. I think they're alright at the moment. Trying to get things somewhat solidified and then spend a lot of time in there and see how it feels.

 

That's an interesting idea about changing the pitch on the tone. I might try that to see what it is like.

 

1 hour ago, Rilen said:

@Travis This is such a wonderful little gem, I can't wait to walk around inside of it! 

I love the bug glint, and the transitions/being called home thing is really perfect and feels GB-appropriate. 

 

Thanks! I hope it doesn't disappoint. I was going to let some people try it and then I found a bunch of little issues I need to clean up.

 

 

My updates haven't been happening here because I basically didn't do much thanks to Zelda. In some ways, it makes sense, because a lot of what I am loving in the new Zelda is what I am trying to (sort of, nowhere near as well, probably poorly) capture in this game. Just wandering around for the hell of it. I am going to force myself out of that zone and make some more headway this week. I also start a new job next Monday, so we'll see how quickly I can wrap this up after that starts. I was hoping i would be done, but again, Zelda.

 

Thanks for reading, and I should be posting some sort of real update at some point this week!

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Oh, I said I'd post a real update later in the week... over a month ago. Anyway, I have reasons, but I won't bore you with those here.

 

I am just getting back into this and figuring out what I was trying to do before I set it aside. I dug into the save system more and think I might have it working in most cases. I need to come up with a basic plan to test the saving and then I will probably want a couple of people to give the game a whirl. I am open (and planning) to add a few more things in, but I don't know if I need to add a whole bunch more or if there are other glaring issues.

 

I guess I'm also hoping to do some significant playthroughs while I test the save system and see what else jumps out at me. 

 

Let me know (in PM) if you would like to give the game a go sometime soon. Hopefully it will be an enjoyable walk around nature! 

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After digging back into the project, I decided I needed to add another minigame that had been nagging at me, basically since the original jam version of the game. Everybody, young and old alike, loves to skip rocks so it should make the perfect activity for Moby when he's not just exploring or grabbing bugs. Making this minigame was a much larger undertaking as anticipated (which was anticipated). I have now gotten it to the point where it is playable, is somewhat balanced (i.e. not broken), and looks OK.

 

I still need to decide how I want the UI to look and do some additional sprite work. Also, the water is currently moving pixel-by-pixel which is so very authentic and so very much unlike anything else in the game. I will be changing that.

 

I give you a series of progress gifs, followed by a final current state video. I am impressed that I actually enjoy playing this minigame in its current state, but maybe I enjoy bad things. We shall see.

 

The GIFs:

 

Here is the river scene when it was first created. This has stayed the same until now. I need to fix up the water sprites and add a little variety to the rocky shore at least. Probably should do a lot more, but I keep getting hung up with my slow/poor art skills, I probably won't do a ton to fix this up. We'll see.

5915190093623_firstminigameriverimage.gif.44d6b72521a1eb3a6257df8fa625dd01.gif

 

I then added a classic meter and gauge to determine your arm strength and wrist angle or flick. I kind of wanted something less UI-looking for these elements, but everything I came up with just took up too much room. So, for now this is what I have and will at least probably put them in a window with some cues. If you're wondering, the top meter should be shooting for max, and the bottom gauge should be in the middle in order to get the most amazing skip ever.

59151906a41cb_minigamewithworkingmeterandgauge.gif.ca200590cdfca76164ed194219140364.gif

 

Next I had to, you know, make the values coming off of the meters actually do something. Here is an early attempt with the rock going where it is told to go.

5915190501b61_minigamewithmathapparentlyworking.gif.ea038f7a877f9c3a776a425cc8f6d33c.gif

 

Next I started trying to make it look more like it is skipping by adding a shadow. The math is a little hosed still on this one, but the gif makes it hard to tell. I have fixed it since then, and it can be seen in the final video.

591519026e5d1_minigameshadowsortofworking.gif.8870827f1a5515ebe00c1377ea5c03de.gif

 

I also added a few rudimentary splash animations, added some sounds, and made a few other balancing attempts. I will be adding more polish soon.

 

 

Thanks for reading, guys and gals!

 

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Well, things got pretty nuts for me because of Wizard Jam and other various factors. Plus, I have been doing freelance work using Unity for a while now, so getting motivated to fire it all up in my off time is a bit harder. Anyway, I have picked this back up, started remembering what the hell I was doing, and made some progress.

 

I now have palette swapping implemented from the main menu, and a nice variety of palettes to choose from if you don't like the greens we used originally. I am open to other color combo ideas if you have any, as it's pretty easy to set up now. You can see the ones I have in the game here:

 

599b9d6f6f4a7_mobypalettes.gif.8c098d6366b2e0a6062f0fb9b4dae46b.gif

 

The really ugly/muted greens are supposed to emulate that GameBoy that survived Desert Storm and is at the Nintendo World Store.

 

Additionally, I have gotten back into the game saving/loading system and seem to have it remembering interactions that I want to save across sessions, etc. I need to add in an option to clear save data, and then that system should be complete, but definitely needs some testing.

 

After that, I need to spend some time just wandering around the world a bit and see what is missing. I have some graphical things that kind of bug me, but I am not sure how/if I will be fixing those up. I'll see how I feel after some playtesting from me and a couple others. 

 

Thanks for checking in on this oft-delayed game jam expansion project! I am hoping to wrap it up to start on a different game brewing in my head soon.

 

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Whoa this looks so effin' rad. I'm at the right exact age and time in my life to be super nostalgic for Gameboy games, and this is scratching that itch something fierce

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