Norra Book, Norra Movie, Norra Game?

Books, movies (tv series, animation, live-action etc) and games are three mediums of storytelling with different levels of immersion and interaction, and they serve to reach different senses of the imagination.  They’re all pretty different from each other though, so mixing them up together can create some interesting results.

Visual Novels as a gaming genre are a bridge between novels and gaming, giving you something graphical to watch while you read with a degree of interactivity, whether it be about simply clicking through the dialogue boxes or making choices that redirect the story.  It evokes sense from both worlds so is great on paper.  However, catering to a lot of people is tricky when middlegrounds tend to wind up leaving people only half-impressed.  Most gamers want a more interactive experience when playing a game, and will find Visual Novels to just be too much like a movie or book.

But that doesn’t make them bad.  Just pretty niche.

This is on my mind from when I was playtesting SnowOwl’s Skinwalker, an atmospheric horror visual novel.  Now one thing that got discussed was the interactivity levels.  It contained a very brief fetch quest and beyond that it was just walking around from room to room.  The latest version (that will get released tomorrow as far as I’m aware) has removed the fetch quest and taken out some of the movement and it actually plays a lot better.

Having just a small section of “play” in the game wound up just making you think you’re going to be doing more than you will be, while the new keeps a firmer grasp on what it wants to be: that is, a Visual Novel.  Running around now is just a more interactive method of advancing the storytelling, while never actually requiring gameplay, so it works off as a better -and more suited- vibe.

So you have people get put off because there’s not enough gameplay and “might as well just read a book” and then heavy readers who get put off by too much gameplay getting in the way of all the exposition.  Both will complain that it’s “too much like” one or the other.  But the interesting thing, I find, is that it’s still neither.  Skinwalker is very visual for a “Visual Novel” and allows you to run around the map and talk to the people in between sections of static image and descriptive monologuing.  But what can I say; mixed mediums have my attention right now.

But all this has me pondering on what other combinations there can be, other storytelling methods with different atmospheres, settings and sense-mixing.

Scott Pilgrim Versus the World is a fucking excellent example of a movie mixed with a (comic) book.  It does a great job of mixing different expectations of sensory experiences within the medium.  Comic books with a panel depicting a high school bell ringing will have a big “RRRRIIIIIIIINNGG” plastered across the page to get the idea across that it’s a loud noise that can be heard everywhere.
Movies don’t need this since they can actually utilise audio, but there’s something to be said about having the “RIIIIIIIIIIIIII” fly across the screen anyway.  The one thing, that one noise, suddenly affects two senses instead of just one.
The movie puts a lot of effort into those small comic book/gaming touches that come off really nicely as a mixed medium.  It really does feel like you’re just getting to watch a live-action comic with audio; isn’t that the next obvious step after comic books?  To create the same storytelling experience while evoking more emotions and senses?

So!   Upon thinking about what a possible project could be for a short Visual Novel for me to try put together, I was thinking about mixed mediums in general.
Now, what came to mind were pantomimes.  They’re a very cinematic experience, all about watching the show, but there’s something more interactive and participatory about them, something that brings the audience in on the action.

So what better basis for a Visual Novel as a game, than pantomimes?  This way would give dialogue in the form of text, has animated characters running around, and has elements of interactivity and participation.  A good mix, no?

Well, I thought so.

So this project is a Visual Novel of sorts…a Visual Pantomime?  I don’t know…
Either way; the “game” is a Pantomime being played about by the characters of the game themselves.  And those game characters performing in the pantomime and playing as characters from another game!

FFVI, to be precise.  I figured if I was going to do a pantomime (and since they typically retell famous stories in their own unique way) that I’d want to base it on something I’m very familiar with, so I can write a script for it that not only covers the story, but can be trimmed down in very succinct scenes without sacrificing key elements from the story.
And I’m very familiar with FFVI.

So the project is almost entirely non-interactive, the player being anonymously sat in the audience chairs to watch the panto with the rest of the pixel audience.  There are one or two tiny elements of participation on the players part, but the rest of the flavour comes in the form of making it feel as panto-esque as possible.  I say that, because the panto is pretty important as a framing device, being that the player is supposed to be a part of it.
To this end, all the characters are “actors” who are dressed up as the FFVI characters and have low budget cardboard cutouts for set pieces, on top of a noisy audience.

Then again, this project is also likely to feel weird to anyone who’s never played FFVI before, since the story is very heavily summarised and cuts out most of the optional sections of the game, so relies a touch on foreknowledge.  I wanted to keep the dialogue short, so each scene of the panto is over in a couple of minutes.

But there you have it.

The end of my thought process.  This is my first attempt at a mixed medium: it’s not a book, not a movie and not a game, but you can still read, watch and play it!

Syma – Episode V

Syma

Syma is the spiritual successor to Scima Invasion Crew (SIC).  While SIC was fun to play about with the concept, after a while I started to feel like I was cramping it’s style by trying to cram too much extra stuff in when there was no plan for it in the original.  SIC was, after all, designed as a two-day-to-make game.

Syma is a reimagining of that concept in the form of a Hub-Based Missions system that allows me to glue on extra content whenever and wherever I feel like it, as I come up with it, without affecting the style or theme of the game.
Overall it contains most of the basic stuff that SIC had, but in a much neater and more refined way, as well as containing several new tilesets, classes, scripts and challenges!

I consider the game technically complete, as the core gameplay is all there and working: the missions, classes, skills, levels etc.  Everything fundamental is there and working, and from now on there’ll only be additions and updates.  Instead of try to just pointlessly define when it’s completed and never update it again, I’ve decided to declare it complete now, and update it MMO style every so often as I come up with new content in the guise of “Episodes”.
Not that there’s nothing in it already!  By now, it’s already in Episode V and includes hours of gameplay and over a dozen missions, and Episode VI includes more classes, side missions and more options overall.

Since I update it just as and when I feel there’s enough new content to justify an update, I don’t want to have to sit and reupload stuff to Mediafire every time then run around updating hyperlinks, so instead of focussing my attention on RMN, where I can just update the file freely and easily.  RMN also has more screenies than I have on this blog, as well as more in-depth information and better coverage of the features:

Syma on RMN!

Pixel Brady: Scima Invasion

Some screenies to go with this blether?

Scima Invasion, lazily titled by breeding Sci-Fi and fantasy magic into the system, is a short repeatable game based around a small crew of specialists who invade a rebel base to save the world or some such. Truthfully there’s not really much of a story!

Features, you ask?

• Sci-Fi & Magic! Handguns, grenades, combat specialists and magicians all wrapped up together in a mission to punch through an evil base!
• Simple maps, simple graphics, simple story. It’s a simple game with simple mechanics. Sounds boring maybe, but that’s part of the point; to just be able to dive right in and play with class combinations!
• No free recovery points or Inns to stay at. You need to rely entirely on your crew and any supplies you find. You begin with plenty of supplies but they start running out as the enemies get stronger! Conservation is key!
• No levels! Your crew is always stronger and better than any baddies you find (except bosses!) so your only worry is supply attrition; can you save all your best stuff for the bosses?
• Ten available classes to mix, match and combine into your crew. With eight common skills between everyone and four unique skills per class, there’s plenty of tactical differences between using each class.
• All skills have unique and varied damage calculations which are shown in the descriptions for you to accurately and tactically decide which skills are best used at any given time.
• Permanent death! Losing someone hurts your chances of completing the mission, but airlocks across the base allow you a chance to request backup from four other crew members waiting to aid you!
• Three different paths leading to the bases inexplicable core. Each path can be backtracked and taken (if you want) to give you different bosses and paths to take when trying different class combos.
• Unlockable Boss Rush Mode!  Fight every boss in the game in direct succession with no ammo refills, no backup calls and no breathing time between!

Oh, it was Details you wanted?
It’s a simple game based off a simple concept I wanted to try implementing. There’s literally more tutorial textboxes than there are dialogue/story, as that was never really a part of it. I liked the idea of seeing sci-fi and fantasy magic put together (which is something I rarely see) but wasn’t as interested in story as the concept itself.
It also helped with the skills, as I mixed together “tech points” (a victor script) and mp use. Between the ten classes who have their own skilltrees, everyone has a various mix of skills utilising both of them to different degrees. By then putting unique damage calcs to each skill that involved a mixture of stats, and then limiting ammo boxes and mp tonics, it forces you to tactically decide which skills to use when, so you always have some left over for the boss.

These classes include a Marine who uses firearms to attack. These weapons do very strict damage that’s modified only by an enemies defence. They target single enemies, while Grenadiers will use explosives that target everyone.
There’s also a Healer who uses magic that heals based both on their magic attack, but the targets own magic stats as well. Healers use magic to heal whole groups at once, while Medics use single target heal and buffs that (non-magically) deal strict amounts rather than stat based.

The rest of the game? The mapping is uninspired visually, although the game as a whole is mapped out in such a way that there are three separate routes to the boss (with backtracking possible) so I just spent more time actually planning routes than trying to prettify it. I kept one tileset throughout the whole game, but made an effort to change the basic visual look after every couple of bosses.

But besides that; you can save anywhere, death is a permanent feature so you have to conserve even peoples lives, but every so often you’ll find an airlock where you can request up to four more people to come and help you.
Most importantly is just the cute, chibi battle appearance! So harmless looking, but I think it goes well

Anyhoo, blether over.

The game was made in a couple of days so is the main reason it appears so simplistic or even sparse, but again; t’was more about putting the concept into practice than making a pretty game.  These types of games can always be remade if they work after this stage!

Will be out soon; just wanna finish playtesting it and polishing it up.

TDS’ Scriptmakin’ Skills – Fog of War

Small update before the main post: have come up with a newer look for the dungeons.  It keeps the 3/4 cross-section view, but now far better allows for deeper dungeon appearances, to prevent it just looking like some really long, weird shaped cave.

Anyhoo:

http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/2687-scripting-services/

So we realised that a key problem with the style of gameplay we’re going for with Colonist is that the entire dungeon can be viewed easily, without making it worthlessly massive, which kind of kills much of the exploration aspect of the game; you can already see which path has the good ore, so why even bother going down the other?

What we needed was Fog of War (a term well known to fans of Age of Empires, Dungeon Keeper etc) so that the dungeon is “blacked out” when you first enter; you’ve no idea what or where anything is, but as you explore you clear the fog (which will remain permanently cleared thereafter) and you can see.  This allows dungeons to be quite small (which is needed for Colonist) without just revealing all the secrets straight away; it also means that coming back for repeat runs (as will be expected of many caves) you’ll also immediately know where hasn’t been explored.

So, since there’s no such VXA script that I’ve ever seen or heard of, I got TDS involved, who promptly turned a problem into an interesting game gimmick.  For anyone needing scripting works, my recommendation falls to TDS, who is not only professional in his work, but to the point and even explains the script both before it’s written and commented on the script itself.  Fantastic stuff!

So now the game has back that dungeon cave excitement for exploration and in the doing so, have a nice unique feature for the game that not many others have.  Looking good so far, am excited to get the demo out!   Screenies will be up soon!