Limb Replacement

I just finished a round of tree limbs for our heroes:

"His bark is worse than his bite." -pun courtesy of Tim

"It looks weird at first, but he kinda grows on you." -courtesy of Candy

These had been in the queue for a while, and this week I finally veered away from the sky-high heap of user interface tweaking that we've been doing for the last couple months (whoa nelly is THAT a blog post of its own) to noodle around with the hero art.

Replacement limbs are fun, because they're wide open space in some ways, but really constrained in others.

What exactly does it like when your character grows a magical tree arm? I chose to stick pretty close to your standard Ent/tree-golem sort of limb. Starting with a quick scan of google images to get material loaded into my brain:

Then a few sketches on top of one of the rigs—I generally choose the male warrior first, since he's the biggest, and replacement limbs need to fit within that gray square from the first image. Tree limbs lend themselves well to mimicking musculature, but there was still a question of how much I wanted the tree hand to look like an actual hand. Also how smooth vs. pointy, how twisty, how chunky vs. thin, etc.:

Then once I've settled on a design and drawn it up on the male warrior, I go through the other rigs and make sure that I can reuse the limb without too much redrawing. For the tree ones, the arms were very reusable, but the legs had to be redrawn for warriors, hunters, and mystics, since their leg poses are so different.

Other things I need to keep in mind when drawing replacement limbs:

• What will go on top of vs underneath clothes? Arms usually go on top, and legs go under, but this isn't always the case. 
• For limbs that go over, I need to check all the different armors and make sure that the limb attaches in a passable way to the shoulders, no matter what the hero is wearing. 
• For legs, I need to make sure that the limbs don't stick out from whatever robe or vest or shirt the hero is wearing. (Mystics are especially tricky for this, since they're often wearing drapey fabric). I also need to make sure that the hero still looks relatively balanced with the new legs.
• Replacement limbs probably mean you're not holding a weapon, so it's nice to have a design that makes that apparent, so that the player doesn't suddenly wonder why they can't hold their sword with this perfectly-functional-looking hand anymore.

Then, after drawing, tweaking, checking and double-checking how the limb looks with each armor on each hero rig, and saving out each carefully-named PNG (Nate will hear me muttering to myself, "okay... warrior... male... replacement... leg... left... tree...boom. Okay."), we hopefully end up with a new, visually interesting way to mutilate enhance our heroes!

I AM BECOME FOREST. CA-CRAAAWW.

Wildermyth has a trailer! Also, there is music in it

Wildermyth's first game trailer is out! You should watch it. Allow me to make that extremely convenient for you:

Annie is a star. She did a huge amount of work storyboarding, animating, and editing. But since I am not Annie, I'm going to talk about the music involved and the rollercoaster of creating that instead.

Some truths from around the time I wrote the song:

• The team was talking a lot about Wildermyth's opening quest: something strange is happening in the woods, and the threat turns simple townsfolk into adventurers and heroes
• I had learned a little about mountain dulcimer but didn't own one yet
• I spent enough time with my sample library to forget what is idiomatic to the instrument, and was writing impossible things that didn't sound like a mountain dulcimer at all

So I'm binge-listening to mountain dulcimer playlists on YouTube and hoping osmosis will fix my problems, when something glorious happens. Late one night, suddenly everything from team meetings and the recordings coalesced into that elusive thing: muse-level inspiration.* The song came out complete and quickly; it took about an hour to write it down and record a demo on my phone.

Gentle reader, now you can hear that demo too:

I thought of it as a cool little internal thing that might contribute to our inspiration feedback loop. Recently Doug had written a story about the cultists, and it helped bring us all into that world. I wanted to do something similar.

The team liked it! The idea of using it for a trailer someday was born. It was exciting, and far beyond my hopes. I decided to flesh out the arrangement, record it, and then have it ready and waiting for the future. The song was basically done, so the rest should be easy, right? Right? Hahahahahahaha no.

Arranging the song was rough. Everything I tried felt derivative and stupid. Real talk for a minute: one of my struggles as a composer has been to accept that having a toolbox does not make me a hack.** The truth is that having a toolbox means I have experience, understanding, and contextual awareness. Still, sometimes understanding one's own work can masquerade as feeling like it is devoid of meaning or mystery.

There was no deadline, so I worked on it in fits and starts. Eventually the terrible guilt of having nothing to show the team overwhelmed the terrible fear of showing something bad. (I strive to evolve beyond this method of task completion.)***

Asides aside, here's what I eventually ended up with. I'm actually quite pleased by it:

Happy ending, right? But it's not the end yet!

The time comes: we are ready to make a trailer. Annie played with the audio against a storyboard, and made a rough edit that fit the trailer's story-arc and our self-imposed time limit. She sent me this, sped up 15%, for reference. I'm posting it if for no other reason than chipmunk voices are funny.

I made a nice edit for her to try, and a couple other options for good measure. Instead of speeding up the song, though, I found ways of cutting out more time without sacrificing the flow.

But eventually, it sinks in that the song is too slow. Not just, “a verse takes too much time,” but “this doesn't make for an exciting, well-paced trailer”. I realized that using the song was a dangerous assumption. It fits the world of the game and we like it, but sometimes I like this is a poison that keeps you clinging to something ineffective. Killing your darlings and all that. But at this point the best option was to somehow make it effective. Cue: STRESS.

There wasn't enough time to re-record everything, so I looked for tools that could speed it up without changing the pitch, over-compromising the quality, or burning a giant hole in my bank account. I figured out that Audacity could speed up the song and then bring the pitch back down without sacrificing too much audio quality, so things were looking good again. Annie also asked if I could add some pizzicato or something to the verses. For the sake of getting her something to cut against, I focused first on just getting the framework of the edit nailed down, and recording later. But by the time we settled on the edit, she said, “don't worry, I think it will work as is,” and I let it go. Soon after, Annie sent the team the first rough pass of the trailer:

It was immediately obvious why she asked for something more. There just wasn't enough in the music to support the visuals.

I got to work right away. It didn't need a whole lot – a new cello part to function as a bass line, and more drum action – but that little bit made an enormous difference. To keep things consistent, I recorded at the original tempo, mixed the new material into the trailer edit, then sped it up and tuned it down again. There will always be some things I notice due to the speed-up, but overall I'm really pleased with how everything came together. Now, it's a happy ending.

After taking this journey together, I think it's worth watching and hearing the final result one more time in context. Allow me to make that extremely convenient for you:

*I do not believe in muses, but that is another post for another time and another place.

**I could write a very long editorial about this feeling, ways I've seen it manifest in other people, and the environment that allows both it and an attitude that music is worthless to simultaneous flourish, and oh wow, hey why does anybody let me write blogs, I am too serious and introspective for my own good, let's get back on track.

***For anyone who struggles with the same feelings, I will tell you what I did to finish the piece – I made arrangement choices that felt the best despite being hackneyed, and when all the bones were there I embellished some things and took other things away, and kept nit-picking until I felt good about it. If this sounds like basic technique and a painfully obvious solution, you are correct. The important takeaway is this: sometimes the obvious choice is the best choice, and that may not be clear to you while in the throes of self-doubt. Take heart, my fellow stress-writers. Keep confidence in your ability.

Woodworking Digression

For some reason I decided to build laptop stands (kiosks?) for our booth at the conventions. 

SPOILER!

The idea was we would have our game playable on laptops, and anyone could walk up to the kiosk and play. The kiosk should be in-theme with our game, light but sturdy, and collapse down for transportation, including on a plane, to another convention. So it also needs to be really easy to take apart and put back together.

Design Requirements:

• Hold a laptop at bar height, not fall over
• In theme - made of wood, organic curves
• Easy to set up and tear down
• Fit into luggage that can fly on a plane

Anyway I couldn't find a product that did all this, so I decided to make it. Once you're making something yourself, you can add in some stretch goals:

Stretch Goals:

• Looks totally unique
• Branded to our game
• Stretches my personal woodworking abilities, but not too far
• Have to buy at least one new tool in order to complete the project <_<

So, here's the rough design I came up with.

It's designed to go together with 8 attachment points per side for 16 altogether, using through bolts and some T-nuts maybe, and some screws maybe. This seemed like it might basically work, so I moved on to the next phase.

I made a prototype. 

Along the way I simplified the hardware by thinking about how Ikea furniture works. Basically, you can embed bolts, or nuts, into the wood itself, then you don't need screws, and you don't need to manage nuts and bolts, just bolts, which is faster to assemble, and won't strip the wood if you take it apart multiple times. 

The final design calls for 12 bolts, in 1 style and 2 lengths. I'm pretty happy with that. The other thing I ran into was that it was devilishly hard to make an accurate and square cut in a 1x12 using a cheap circular saw. Each kiosk calls for 8+ such cuts, and we're making 2 kiosks, so I felt that basically justified this purchase:

Anyway it's pretty affordable for this category of saw. But I had to square the table myself? Weird. Whatever I love it.

The main fancy part of these kiosks are the curves I wanted to build in to the sides. These keep the design nice and light for traveling, and they look awesome too. Once I got the curves drawn the way I wanted them, I used a jigsaw to very carefully cut the first piece, and a router to touch it up. Then, for the other three pieces (2 kiosks x 2 sides each = 4 sides) I was able to just rough cut with the jigsaw, and make an exact copy with this following bit. I had never done this successfully before (last time I tried I ruined the bit almost instantly by plunging it through several feet of cedar.).

Yeah, then, some more jigsaw work, some more router work, and some sanding, and that's about it for the woodworking.

Annie used a soldering iron to burn our logo into the mid-plate (the logo plate also serves a crucial structural purpose).  And there we have it. 

They also break down flat for packing.

Ah, the joys of being an indie game developer :-D

Con Art!

Wait so, if I'm making art for cons, does that make me a con artist?

Yes?

Thanks. I had hoped so.

Anyway, Austin Game Conference and the Boston Festival of Indie Games are fast approaching, and that means that we need a lot of stuff designed that's not going into the game. Decor for our booths, t-shirts, business cards, all that fun stuff. And I've been peeling off into the world of CMYK for a while to get a lot of that done.

First, if we want to be rollin' up lookin' fly at the conferences, we need a big color-y thing to serve as a visual anchor for our booths. That thing turned out to be a large printed background banner:

Fun fact: I've been working is Photoshop for just about 20 years now, and working on that banner was the first time I got the error message, "Cannot save file because file is too large."

We also got some business cards! The back of the card is an illustration, and then on the front, each team member got a customized hero next to their info:

This is how I want you to remember me, internet.

The banner art and business card art will also be good to have for other marketing purposes. Our current blog banner with the cliff & heroes has done its share of heavy lifting, and soon we'll be able to use more finished pieces of art in place of it.

Every legit company's gotta have a t-shirt too:

I was all set to just stick the logo on a black shirt and be done with it in five minutes, but Nate was all, "We can do better." And I'm like, "Really? 'Cause... I could just, you know, be done in five minutes." And he's like, "I believe in you." And now we have a better shirt than we would have otherwise!

Then to fill out the booth, Nate's making a couple of kiosks out of wood, on top of which we'll have laptops to demo the game (the kiosks will look sweet, we'll photograph them when they're done), AND we sprang for a big old gorgon cut out of foam-board to keep us company:

Cheaper than you might think for a 6-foot tall Gorgon.

She/he/it will just be joining us in Austin, since there's not really a good way to get a large-but-kinda-fragile cutout halfway across the country overnight. The booth banner and kiosks should actually be pretty portable though. We'll be scrambling to get straight from AGC to BFIG the next day, but at least it's a "Oh man this is going to suck" scramble and not a "We literally have no idea how we're going to pull this off" scramble.

It feels weird to be working on this stuff instead of the actual game, but a lot of it we'll be able to use at future conferences as we get closer to launch. And having a cool game doesn't mean a lot if no one knows it exists, so marketing and getting the game "out there" is a necessary part of this whole process.

LIvin' la vida lista

We've talked a bit in the past about game organization and our schedule for the future. As we move forward the game gets ever more impressive, more real, and more fun as we put in the things we've planned.

But let's not talk about the awesome and impressive parts of the game that gets everyone all pumped up. Let's talk about something that only very particular people find exciting. Let's talk about lists. YEAH, LISTS!!!!!!IdputinaninterrobangifIcouldfigureouthow!!!!!!

A list is sort of an atomic unit of organization. All it really does is help you remember things—offload a bit of brain power so your neurons can be freed up to be creative. Since we're a remote team, our lists had to be accessible and editable by everyone. Thank goodness we live in the future and there are many online options.

The tool we're using is Trello. This allows us lists in the form of information cards. I think it's designed to be a sort of Kanban system, although our small team size means that we don't actually have to track tasks all that much. It's just nice to be able to pick something from the task list and, y'know, decide to do it.

We've got a few different categories of lists—called boards in the Trello lingo—to cover major conceptual areas of the game. Within each, we've got categories of backlog of ideas, things we're working on now, and what is complete.

 

The hardest part is actually narrowing down the to work on. There are so many good ideas! We wanna do 'em all! But if we tried to do everything, we'd never finish the game . . . so instead we keep track of the ideas by writing them down on a virtual-space list. After major milestones, we can review the list of all the great ideas and decide which set of great ones we'll tackle next.

Our system evolved a bit over time. We started with the different boards for different game categories. Unfortunately that didn't let us see the unifying theme we were working toward for the next milestone, and also got a bit confusing when trying to pick what to do next. So now we still have all those categories of boards, but we also have a main list that says what we're going to do for the next milestone.

Some folks have also started to use the Trello boards/lists to keep track of their work at a very specific and granular level. Probably means that lists are doing their job helping people work. Or maybe there are just more list aficionados than I thought.

Boston Bound (in September)

Love that dirty water! Dunkin Donuts! Uh . . . go Sox! Baked Beans?

The point is, we're headed to the Boston Festival of Indie Games on Saturday, September 23!

We'll be in the Digital Showcase, with a pretty-cool-if-we-do-say-so-ourselves booth, computers (so you can play the game), hands (so you can high-five or fist-bump, your preference), and answers (to you questions).

The festival is all day, at MIT athletic facilities in Cambridge. Some see us, say hello, and play some Wildermyth!

Rawr.

Roll Your Party, and Scouting

Here's a little thing we put in as we turn our attention to the campaign gameplay. It's a screen that pops up when you start a new Story, that lets you roll your party, and pick options.

Building a party has always been one of my favorite activities in any RPG. I've spent um, many hours building characters, for skyrim, Wizardry 7, Might and Magic World of Xeen, XCOM, etc.. What we have here now is not at that level of depth, yet. But it's exciting for me to see it taking shape.

The other more prosaic thing about this screen is that it gives us access to configure the game as we start it. This is basically required functionality in order to iterate on campaign mechanics.

Mechanics like vision and scouting.

also real pathfinding! Funk little algorithm called Theta-star..

Instead of revealing the land as you walk around, we've added a Scouting step. You can scout at the edge of visible terrain. Scouting is a job that needs to be completed.

When scouting is complete, the terrain, and any hidden dungeons in the area are revealed.

The other major overland mechanic that's coming in to focus is Danger. The Lands are either safe, wild, or hostile. Safe lands automatically grant vision, but wild and hostile land is only visible if there's a hero nearby. We have a new fog of war visual layer to illustrate this distinction, which you can see above.

Funny thing is, as we do this work, our conception of what the campaign gameplay is all about has changed a lot. At least, it has in the details. We used to have a design for stations, resources, and a tech tree. Our current design doesn't need any of that. We like it because it strips the overland game to the bare essentials of exploration, defending and expanding territory, and it lets the individual heroes take center stage with their quests and stories.

In another way, our current conception of the campaign is pretty well in line with our original vision. You push out across the map, making it safe for the townsfolk under your protection, removing threats, finding hidden monsters, and dangerous lairs along the way.

There are more campaign changes incoming. Threats, Dungeons, Calamities, Monster Decks... Lots of fun stuff.

Art History: World Map

Back when we were first proof-of-concepting the idea of a world map, this was really exciting:

Look at that sexy Adobe Flash Player 11 bar up there. Did you know we started this thing in Flash?

It meant that we could use images for trees and mountains to create forests and mountain ranges with foothills, with a village or two dotting the landscape. Nate could generate these, so that no two maps would be the same. You can see some semi-random tinting going on up there too, which adds variation on a bigger level and keeps the whole thing from looking too samey and busy.

It still looks pretty busy though, even given how sparse that particular map is. Let's tone down the outlines and give things a little more fill.

Feels better already. We're missing something important though—a background texture.

A papery texture for our ground seemed like a good place to start. Now we had these big lovely maps that generate mountain ranges, forests, and sites (villages, ruins, dungeons, etc). Next came concepting for the layout of the interface...

(Mystic Manguy: an Everyman for the modern day.)

Things of note here:

• A texture that sits over the parts of the map that are still unsettled and/or unexplored
• Sites being under your control or still full of monsters
• Clickable "banners" at sites that represent the various jobs and quests that are there
• Little portraits of the heroes on the map
• Gray squares over on the side that represent your hero roster
• Friendly ol' Mystic Manguy and his action bar, full of the things he can do (we specifically wanted to mirror the action bar that appears in combat)

Sounds pretty solid. Let's give it a real art pass:

(Barlox Spidermusk was an honest-to-god name that was generated by the game for one of my heroes.)

And the map looked like this for quite a while (or, you know, kinda like this. Mockups never quite look like what eventually ends up in-game). But as the art evolved for the in-mission environments and the user interface, we realized that we wanted to really push the "made out of cut paper" look and downplay the "drawn with ink on parchment" look. So some Photoshop files called "mapRevisit" started happening, and we gave the cut paper look a shot, trying to decide whether we wanted the map to look lighter or darker:

Where we ended up was a more colorful, more verdant (if you will) version that sat between the light and middle maps. Adding papery textures of course:

Exciting!

Because we're still in the process of building out the campaign, things will almost certainly be added to or taken away from the World Map. But we've got a decent, pleasant vision that we're using as a goal for the visuals. 

Milestone, and Campaign Time

We've been working hard and we hit an important milestone. We submitted Wildermyth to a couple of indie game festivals! Here's the submission video we made for the Boston Festival of Indie Games.

This video came together pretty quickly with contributions from the whole team and I'm pretty proud of it. It's not our player-facing trailer yet, but it's getting closer.

Looking ahead, we've started to think in terms of milestones. Which is itself a sort of milestone. Our next big goal is to hit what we're calling ALPHA where the game is functionally complete. (This means it can be missing content and polish and we might add more features, but it's basically a full game that represents our vision.) We think we're 16-20 weeks away from that.

The next milestone on the road is all about building the "Campaign" or "Overland" layer. There are two necessary ingredients in order for the campaign to be a game. One, it must take a significant effort by the player to make it take across the map and achieve objectives. Two, there needs to be some kind of pressure on the player to get to the end of the chapter.

So how are we going to get there? Let's break it down, with examples from other games.

One: Make it Hard to Win

Here's how some other games do this:

XCOM 2 Campaign: You need intel to contact regions and build relays. You need to fight aliens to get intel and other resources to drive research and advance the plot.
FTL Sector: In each sector there are many jumps between you and the exit. At every jump point you can be accosted and you must wait for your FTL drive to charge before you can move forward.
Mario Level: pits, enemies, puzzles.

Wildermyth: The lands start out unknown, and wild. There are hidden threats that make it more unsafe over time. You need to find and remove these threats in order to protect your holdings and make the lands safer. The plot-important sites will be hidden and far away, and you need to conquer them to advance.

Status: Some of these systems have been sketched out already, but. My goal over the next few weeks will be to make completing chapter one difficult. Once it's difficult, we can pull it back to balanced.

Two: Make it Important to go Win

How some other games do this:

XCOM 2 Campaign: Aliens make progress towards their goal (the Avatar Project), which ends the game if they complete it.
FTL Sector: after a certain point the entire map is locked down by the rebels and fights are only bad for you after that point.
Mario Level: you will run out of time and die.

Wildermyth: In each chapter, Calamities will happen over time. Each one permanently increases the difficulty of the chapter (or whole Campaign?) in some granular way. For example, by adding monsters to all missions, or by boosting the stats of particular, relevant monsters. You need Legacy Points to cancel calamities and recruit heroes, but there's a limited amount in each chapter, so you cannot out-farm the Calamities.

Status: This pressure does not exist in the game yet, so I will build it.

Three: Reward Player Activities

Um, I said there were two necessary ingredients, but then this seems pretty important also? Anyway. How some other games do this:

XCOM 2 Campaign: New gear dramatically improves soldiers. Cutscenes and dialogue celebrate your progress.
FTL Sector: Scrap, system upgrades, and new weapons/drones/systems/crew constantly make your ship more capable.
Mario Level: Powerups, coins, stars, fireworks, music, and flags!

Wildermyth: Gear upgrades, Relationships, Hook Quests, Levelups, Stat improvements, and Event outcomes.They all serve to develop hero stories and/or increase hero power.

Status: Parts of these systems are implemented, but a lot of content exists only in design form. We want there to be a slow, steady progression from farmer to gorgon-slayer, with lots of weird stories along the way.

So uh. That's what's going on this milestone. I'm excited! After this is done, we have one more milestone for ALPHA, which will be mostly about bulking up and checking boxes. Wow.

New and Exciting Event Backgrounds.

Is that last one even a background? What's going on with that weird looking mountain?

I'm learning that there are a few types of backgrounds that I'm making here. The first is a more abstract, nondescript background, like the tree trunks up there. The vast majority are this type, so that they can serve as a scene-setting backdrop for the heroes to go about their eventful business,

The second type will be slightly more specific, at the cost of being slightly less widely useful. Maybe the heroes are looking out over a mountain vista (the middle picture above), or they're assaulting a ruined tower.

And the third type will be one-offs made for specific events, like that mountain right there that maybe almost kinda looks like a wolf head. They're less "backgrounds for heroes" and more "the focus of the panel." Not every event will have these, because it would limit the number of events way more than we want to, but if the moment is special and I'm feeling the art bug bite, we can go nuts.

Romance Me Until I Level Up

Love is a box of earth in which you've buried your hopes as seeds. Sharing this box with someone, you become fragile to that person's touch and temper. In her or his hands is your garden. It can be up-dug, it can be drowned, or frozen dead.

When this person then plants her or his own dreams inside, you must be surprised. You must be floored, when she or he places this box between you. And drawn to the heat of it, you crouch over the soil, you nourish it, sing to it, dampen it, wait for it.

What sprouts, what flourishes, thrives or dies, time and the tantrums of weather decide. But setting yourself beside this person to grow dreams together, someday you realize it was this act, this humble task you shared, that fulfilled you most. Not the dreams, the seeds, the gleams of a brilliant goldlit future. Even if they lifted petals to the sky, and drooped afterwards with fruit. Even if they never broke the surface of the earth at all.

It was the little moments you were patient with each other and with life and the dreams you slept for that brought you to wholeness.

I mean, maybe. I don't know. Or you broke up or grew apart because things got weird somewhere, and anyway there was this other box I had, this one I didn't share with you, and the dream in there was the one I couldn't let you touch, I'm sorry, it was. Different.

Sorry, I know, but, and it's just.

Anyway, we're considering doing away with experience points entirely. We think this could be a good route to go.

When and if we do, level-ups will live where relationships do, tied to hooks. Characters who complete their personal stories will become more powerful. Hey! It's just like real life! If this system does get adopted and designed, I'll share more about it later. Mostly, this might just be a loving Wednesday post.

But...

Mm. I love it when you talk about game-mechanical advancement, darling. Speak to me.

...no. Nothing. I'll tell you later. <3

A Skeleton By Any Other Name...

...would still skeleton. It would skeleton everywhere.

Because it's bones.

But seriously folks, today I'm talking names. This isn't only because we're in the midst of implementing stuff that's already been posted about, and don't have much else on the brain.

I don't... I can't actually think of any other reason.

Okay, but so recently we've had some talks about naming our monstergroups. Particularly, there were two that wanted some attention. The first was our group called "Cultists." These are basically people who worship bull/minotaur gods, and thrive in deep places, caverns etc. We wanted a name that reflected their aesthetic, as believers in a certain thing, and then an inkling of what that thing might be. The name we arrived at was Deepists, fanatics whose Deepism is so deepdown they doop and derp without doing any undeeply.

Deep double-deep-dop-doop.

That was a fairly easy name to decide on. It adds the necessary distance between judging their religion and describing it. It maintains some mystery while also being fairly on-the-nose. It can seem to thrill you, until it starts to feel awful and empty.

Um, and that's intentional, but.

And so then we get to our skeletons.

An early-on decision with our direction for foes was: let's not fall back on old tropey mobs, the expected and over-hashed regulars like green-skin-goblin, over-toothed-orc and friends, skeleton-soldier.

But I still like a skeleton. I mean, who doesn't?

The Morthagi, as we then called them, turned into something different. They've got the important necromantic heartbeat, the undeadness. Annie and Nate came up with this idea to make them part-clockwork, a marriage of magic and machinery to reanimate old bones.  

That's right, cocktail-shaker, I called you old.

This is a great start. Feels unique enough, strange enough, mystical enough. It leaves us with so many directions our lore could go...!

These directions, in our most recent discussion, came out while picking a permanent name that would carry these guys into alpha. Here's a primer:

Morthien - Implies an artistic, elegant creator, designing her Morthiens from a studio in her rain-draped mansion by moonlight, sipping wine and fiddling with the mechanizations and incantations that would compose this purposeful servant.

The Morth - A pervasive and bubbling threat, a hidden horde that might rise from beneath us at any moment. A thing we could begin to live beside, until we someday call it master. Sentience and racial identity, a species itself, even if it began as someone's science experiment.

Morthagi - A clattering word for a clattering crew. Morthagi reflects a league of grass-roots necromancers, secret bone-and-brass enthusiasts, who assemble these janky magicalia/machines, and celebrate each others' designs.

We ended up re-confirming our decision to go with Morthagi, for how they fit our world. The Wildermyth describes a wild universe, a collaboration of many strange and equal parts. Gray parts, I would say, rather than black ones or white ones. Morthagi feels right in that context. Their makers live in such a universe the same as anyone: full of wonder, curiosity, hope, joy, doom.

Why this all is notable, I suppose, is to illustrate how simple things like names can affect the lore and idea-group surrounding a game-component like a monster, a place, a character, even an ability, so substantially, that how the game is perceived is always affected. In almost any creative activity. Content points to title, title points to content. Being aware of that, and intending the result, is always a good idea.

And so I guess I'm saying...

A skeleton by any other name is sometimes a Morthagi. And that's just way different, okay?

...

...

...

Nope nope nope don't care don't care.

The Feedback Button

We want to be able to collect feedback from players, and team members. So I made a tool to make it easy for anyone to send feedback from anywhere in the game:

When the player presses F11 we immediately take a screenshot and make a copy of the log file, and place both in a new, numbered folder.

Then, we show this dialog, and let the player enter some information, including steps to reproduce, if it was a bug, things like that, and an email address in case they want to hear back about the issue.

Then all of that is zipped up and posted to a little server app, which forwards it as an email to me.

Now I... I am not what you might call a web developer, or even really a back-end guy at all. I found this (extremely simple) little app to be a minefield full of potholes.

I'm using Google App Engine to host the server-side code, because I wanted to be able to deploy java without paying anyone a monthly fee. (And well, I didn't think I should run it on the same VM as our perforce server in AWS.) Setting up GAE was interesting. Their tools seem quite good but they offer a dizzying array of products and services and most of their material is oriented towards selling you on particular flavors of compute, storage, etc..

great work team.

In the end I was able to create a little app using the IntelliJ plugin. Once I got it installed correctly, this was a really great way to work. I can iterate locally, run the app on a test server, make rest calls to it from a command line (after I installed curl, which, ok, I am on windows...) and eventually from my game as well.

The first hurdle was to get all the data from the game zipped up, posted, and unzipped. This proved to be surprisingly easy. It really just worked the way it oughtta using the vanilla java api. Nice.

The next hurdle was to put that information into an email, with attachments, so that I could act on the feedback. I at first, very naively, thought this would be easy. Email seems like a cornerstone of the internet, built before the social networks, laid down before the dawn of the search engines. Surely sending an email could be no challenge.

But it turns out, google really doesn't want you to send emails from their servers. And there is a great reason for this, it's a four letter word and when the internet was young, wars were fought over it.

SPAM

It turns out that in the modern era, email is assumed to be spam until proven otherwise, and there are things like "ip reputation" that go into proving otherwise. So yeah, you can pay a third party like mailgun or someone a monthly fee in order to be able to send your emails thankyouverymuch.

After doing some more research, it turns out that if you are sending a small number of emails, and you are willing to send them "from" a restricted set of email addresses that are definitely not official-sounding, then google will let you send 100 emails per day for free.

100 emails. per day.

Whatever good enough for now. (Also the mail api is horrible. Like abysmally bad. A better api would have been a huge benefit of going with someone like mailgun honestly.) So anyway once I got that sorted, getting the app running in the cloud was super easy. The intelliJ plugin took care of it for me. <3

In the end, I got my emails.

I am really excited about being able to take direct feedback like this. I have big plans for this little system. In particular, I get logs and screenshots with no extra effort on the part of the player. Keeping this friction as low as possible is important, if you actually want to get feedback.

Also, since it's coming directly from the game code, I can add all sorts of metadata, like what event the player saw most recently, their game settings, other things like that. In a world where we get many bug reports a day, that kind of structured data can be hugely impactful.

Here are some ideas.

Task Integration

We use trello for backlog and bug tracking. Trello has an api. Each time someone presses the feedback button, we could create a card in trello, in the right board depending on the category, complete with attachments, and assign it to a team member for triage. Hot sauce.

Game Integration

• Crash reporting: automatically send logs when the game crashes?
• Event feedback: when you're playing and an event choice comes up, sometimes none of the choices represents what you want. What if you could push a button to suggest a new choice at that point?
• Upload save games: when reporting a bug, you could choose to upload your save game state so that the developer (me) can see exactly what you're seeing.

Data Analysis

Eventually (when we have y'know, players) we can run the feedback into a database instead of just reporting it to the devs, and then we can start to analyze it. This is far out, but it's a cool possibility.

Thanks for reading, send us your feedback!

Designing Gear for the Modern Hero

Life is about swords and changing clothes. Everything else is an old crofter's dream. What is a crofter? Don't worry, I googled it for ya! A crofter is a person who farms a croft. If you google croft, you get a bunch of fairly compromising pictures of Lara Croft. So.

But the point is: Gear.

Gear is everything characters use and wear in the game.

Currently, gear is somewhat implemented, in that there are items and outfits to equip. What hasn't been clear since forever is how exactly the player can acquire new or upgrade existing gear.

Designing this system and process has been far more difficult than I would have expected. I've never had a part in designing a game before, so that goes with the territory. But I think a lot of blithely ignorant folks like me sort of assume that, okay, at some point, I'll encounter item-get, and that will be nice, and I'll put it on my character-doll, and be pleased because, look, she's wearing a top-hat, hahaha, but. So that doesn't seem tough.

Doesn't that, just like walking into Mordor, not seem tough?

Boromir's right, and by the transitive property of equality I think, that applies to designing gear-get and gear systems. He's also attractive and sensible. Look at him. There's a guy that never loses his head...

Wildermyth, as a general rule, wants to bind as much advancement and game-mechanical power to narrative pathways as possible. We exclude some expected features like research, resources, and crafting (I say expected and I mean we expected to use these sorts of familiar systems), in favor of what we want to call a more character-driven model.

That model is: equipment must improve through the story, rather than alongside it. In other words, everything needs appropriate context! Sorry, chest in the middle of a clearing, full of riches and a mage-masher probably, that for some reason no one else but Bardurk Boldenface has ever bothered to open. We don't think you're very credible.

Who, me? Just hangin' out. One of the barrels.

Oh, I also wanted to make some kind of joke about. Chests. And Lara Croft. But. I'm not that immature.

So while that model of story-supported gear-advancement is fine and simple enough, it means we are trying to ensure that weapons and armor and all the miscellanea heroes collect has a story that is at least implied.

An implied story for a piece of gear can be as simple as, "Well, we got it from finishing combat. I assume one of the dudes we killed was holding or stashing it. It's a good weapon, and I'll use it to kill everything." Most of this is never consciously sifted through by the player, but exists as a subconscious impression in the player's mind.

Every implied story necessarily says something about the morphology of an item and its relevance to the world. For instance, in the case of finding it after combat, we have to believe it was something our enemy valued, or at least thought was worth hanging onto. It can't be so remarkable that it doesn't make sense for it to be drifting around, and nor can it be so ordinary that we're like, okay, so why don't we just mass-produce these, or why don't we pick up every piece of a weapon or armor we find? (By the way, those are perfectly viable concepts we've made a conscious decision to avoid as part of the effort to create more momentous and meaningful gear.)

This may seem trivial, but it becomes important when designing a rationally supportable way for a late-game piece of gear to be more powerful than an early-game piece. Both pieces of gear need their own mystique, so why is the Cloak of Gronn so inferior to Mystral's Weatherlight Cloak?

Sometimes, games get away with explaining this through materials. For instance, an iron to steel to mythril weapon-progression that has no real weight (or rationale!) storywise. This totally works for some games, but it's hard to feel comfortable pulling it off in our world.

This, basically.

All of this is to say that for our model of story-supported gear-advancement to work, we must have a Wildermyth gear design that takes care of these implied stories intrinsically.

We need ways to nest power in the tales a piece of gear might tell, meaning the places it was found or the foes who fear it. And all that needs to happen without relying on huge amounts of text because.

Well, because who's gonna write that stuff, Boromir?

Not Boromir.

Our breakthrough on a uniquely Wildermyth gear design came with a monster-specific upgrade-system we imagined for our weapons.

Our new design, forged in a video-call like every great idea, would let weapons have an implied story and gain power as a single movement, without going to great lengths to explain it all textually. Sounds amazing? I don't know, I designed it and have practically no oversight!

How it works is that when you get a 'weapon upgrade,' you pick three digital cards. You select one and the rest are trashed. Each card has a specific upgrade on it, so one might say "+1 damage against gorgon deer" another might say "+15 stunt chance against thrixl" and the third could be "+10 hit against gorgon deer and gorgon boars".

The player will, theoretically, look at these upgrades seriously as moments of implied narrative, that define a character's legacy, and are born from the character's deeds. The upgrade you choose tells a different story about the weapon, and changes how you'll use it. Players will be encouraged to think of the character wielding it differently, going forward, without being explicitly told to do so.

Now, does it make tons of sense for a weapon to get stronger over time, because of the person using it, and the fights it's been in? Yes and no. No, because that implies that the weapon is a living organism that evolves. The reason it works for us is that Wildermyth is about telling stories. As the weapon gets stronger, we are saying that it is becoming more legendary, and the stories it accrues and the power it gains are reflections of each other, rather than two sides of a  cause-and-effect relationship.

The invention of this system for our weapons then led us to looking at our other large gear-group, Augments, and saying, okay, so why not put a similar activation + effect system in place here? That way, we derive more specific characters as the game goes on; they grow more powerful while also growing more iconic to the player, using the same [+story = +power] equation.

The expected effect is that a player will develop a hero who is excellent at fighting gorgons in the forest, who might not be as strong fighting thrixl underground (importantly, the hero is not un-useful in this latter case, but is simply not operating optimally). The player will then have a reason to train multiple new heroes, with different specialties, who each have their moments to shine in the diverse situations and against the diverse opponents they encounter. Why that's great is we don't need to put caps on advancement in order to encourage squad-diversity, and thus we don't run into the problem of "Welp, there's no point in giving capped-out Sheena any more experience or items. No reason to use her now."

And that's about where we are. These designs are going in as I write this. Or. Well, actually, I'm the one that has to make the specific data for them to be art-able and actionable, so no. In any case, they will be filled out soon. And yes, yes, as the Specter of My Latent Self-Doubt likes to say, a lot could go wrong. But.

It feels we're on the cusp of something. I'm starting to feel that a lot with Wildermyth. That we're reaching the thresholds of who we are as a game, coming into an identity we've sought, but never quite inhabited. And it feels like.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes, by Miles Davis:

"Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself."

We are getting there. Gear is a large part of it. Designing gear for the modern hero, you've got to make sure that stuff fits right. Even Lara seems to be dressing more sensibly these days.

Anyway. If you've learned anything, reading this rambling post, I hope that thing is the meaning of life. It's all swords and clothes-changes.