The ghastly death of Radus is a platformer in which you are a mentally ill person. You suffer of serious paranoia and hallucinations so much that you are closed to your world. In this illusionary universe you will have to face many events before the delicate hand of death takes you away from this living nightmare, but not so simply. Everything around will try to fool you while it falls apart and looses all sense and logic.

dimanche 20 novembre 2011

Desura publishing request sent

DesuraI just sent my request to Desura to have a game page, any to clarify many other details about our future publishing.

I don't know if this link works, but if it does, you'll be able to have a preview of TGDOR on Desura:
http://www.desura.com/games/the-ghastly-death-of-radus.

So here's a new briefing of where we are:
• Online Demo in 7 days (hopefully)
• Buy C2 license
• Possibility to publish a .exe file with C2? (If not, it is certainly possible to compile html5 files to exe or app through external compilers)
• Work until Xmas

Things are becoming serious!

samedi 19 novembre 2011

Music

The game won't have any music, or it will have a special one. Let me explain you.
The first key element is the health displayed in BPM (beats per minute), as a heart beat. This will create a continuous rhythm in the game.
The second element is the surfaces: walking on some surfaces will launch a sound (a complex-toned note) that will create an atmosphere.
The last element is perhaps the most linked with music. The shapes (leafs, rorschach clouds, etc.) will produce a short and atmospheric melody (not more than 5 notes). These shapes will be triggered only once.

So the game will always "produce" sounds, no need of music!

vendredi 18 novembre 2011

"Introducing the Xmas club"

I'm quite busy these times, working for my studies, but never forgetting TGDOR, I saw THIS great news. It's a 2nd "october challenge", for those who weren't able to finish their game (TGDOR!!!). It has already started and will end the 15th of December 2011, 10 days before Xmas!
The game was in a kind of pause (still thinking of design, but stopped creating assets) for serval reasons (exams), but the next week-end we'll start again working seriously on it.

This IS what our game needed!

Our first objective is to have our 2 or 3 demo levels online.

dimanche 6 novembre 2011

Design vs Enemies

In a previous blogpost I said that I'll be doing some enemies but I redesigned what we call the DevDoc (for normal games it's a 50 pages doc in which you find everything about the game, it is a sort of GameBible). Instead of having my fancy lists a bit everywhere I put all my ideas into bubbl.us. The interest of doing this is that now I can have an overall look of the game in just one time. I can also check what's done and what needs to be done. But this is only possible because we are only two looking at this "bubble draw", a big team needs more descriptions and guidelines to be kept on the same game idea. Anyway, the assets looks clear to me now. Here is how i'll proceed before creating them: have an idea of the chapter (design), make a prototype of the chapter (with the app Tiled), make it look good (art phase), add the details and the assets (polish). So you can see that the enemies that I was talking about previously are a non sense in this phase of the developement.
I have actually designed all the 12 chapters, and made 5 with Tiled that waits to be tested.

Buy a license? And other publishing questions... (read the last sentence)

The team is thinking about buying a Standard license of Construct 2.
Here are the arguments for this question.

Pros:
• have an unlimited use of the product
• sell games
• it's still under development so it can only be better
• useful tool to have (for fast prototyping for example)
• HTML5 = cross platform?
• it's cheaper now (23€ instead of 47€, early adopter)

And unfortunately the cons:
• it's still under development so we haven't got the full product
• we do not really know the product for the moment
• no big game or successful game used it (it's new!)

You may have understood that we are likely going to buy it but a bit of hesitation remains...


This brings a new question, will TGDOR be free? I think that we might make both, a free working version and a paid version (not more that 5$). The free version would have a limit (introduction levels) or just an online free demo (but more complete than usual demos), or a working alpha or beta (as desktop dungeons did), and naturally the full version would include everything!

Infact that free version, as I see things for the moment, would be a couple of online novel levels (they won't be in the game). It would be like a trailer by introducing the player to the world, giving him a taste of it but keeping the game content secret!

The game would be sold on Desura and maybe other downloading platforms. But I'm not really confident about having it on direct download. We might also make a Boxed version...
And maybe join an Humble Bundle (not for profit, just to get known and reviewed, that's for me the most important point)
A first version of the game's icon, or even splash screen...

That's what we project for the future in terms of publishing, oh and the game SHOULD be released before Christmas!!!!

Submitted the game to IndieDB

The game is now waiting for activation on IndieDB.
link to our (NEW!!!) indieDB page: http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-ghastly-death-of-radus

samedi 5 novembre 2011

bubbl.us

The Brainstorming online tool bubble.us is really useful, as it eases mind mapping through its ease of use. All the game is now in bubbles. Check by yourself:



vendredi 4 novembre 2011

Levels, enemies and events

The levels, or the chapters should I say, will follow the 12 "stages" of the Hero in Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces". As there are only twelve parts in the game I think it is better to avoid repetition, and it's not a game of challenge so unique details and visible "sotry" seduces me more. This induces me to create and invent more elements and thus more work! But I'm getting used to this workflow so it souldn't be a big deal.
So the 12 chapters are listed on the link above (this is Campbell's titles; TGDOR won't use the same). We will try to reverse the heroic adventure to fit more with the hero's death (being his "objective", his release). The first one will be the intro. No interaction at all, just to understand what's going on.

Let's move on to the enemies. Following my above rule, the player souldn't be able to meet too many times the same enemy. Ah, and Radus is not able to fight. So the player will have to find a way to do not die. For the moment I have about 6 or 7 enemies in mind. I shoud draw them properly and maybe animate a few of them tomorrow. Follow the blog to have more details tomorrow!

Ah events! Under this goes two categories: unique events that immerges the player into this strange world AND platformer events, like jumping and other dexterity demanding things. This last categorie is the most hard: I try to avoid linear and basic platforming but the game shoud still be a game, so I must ipmlement these things. I have not really thought about that for the moment.