The game’s development was a roller coaster, but we’re definitely happy with the final result. Now, it’s going to be time for all of us to reflect and write our personal portfolios. It’s been a pleasure. I highly recommend playing the game.
Here is a surprising trivia: Making alpha and beta are an extremely busy time, in fact so busy, one might not have time to update the blog. This happened here. The game is RELEASED now, but before talking about that, I feel it’s best to recap the work we did on the alpha and beta.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the game jargon, “Alpha” means feature complete – nothing new should be coded in at this stage, all the assets that we’d use should be on the game, although they can be placeholder assets. “Beta” means content complete – everything in the game should be final. After beta, there should only be bug fixes.
Alpha
Here’s the gameplay video of the alpha:
For alpha, the programmers were rather busy as we needed to get every feature in. The artists had the task list from before and were following along to it – as alpha is not content complete, the artists had a bit more leeway.
Perhaps the biggest change in alpha was that the QTE was redesigned by Antonio to be more of a rhythm game, where you’d have to hit the skulls in time when the skull would hit the outline instead of impaling the skulls with the sword. Decision to redesign the entire QTE in alpha was certainly risky, but it turned out well in the end.
We also made the menu prettier.
Antonio added some VFX to the game as well. (As seen below)
In addition, we added an ending cut scene that triggers automatically when you walk to Karl after defeating him. The artwork for this cut scene was created by Shiyuan. The scene was coded in by Mick and written by Milla.
Also. We got all these setting sliders to work!
The tutorial scene placeholder text was replaced with the actual script for the game as written by Milla.
We also added neighbourhood parallax with many rows of houses.
We also added options for cutting the dialogue shorter, as proposed by Rachel and implemented by Milla – this was due to lot of the play testers finding the dialogue too long when they just wanted to play the fight.
Besides this, a lot of the animation and art assets got integrated into the game, as well as all audio placeholders.
Beta
There’s no gameplay video for beta. Look for the next blog post with the release!
Anyway, as for beta, Antonio designed the QTE mappings to have a difficulty curve and more difficulty in general, as we had had a lot of feedback on the QTE being too easy.
We integrated remaining final audio, art and animations. The QTE sounds were redesigned by Dave.
Milla proofread the writing and Dave double checked it.
We added trees in the background layer of parallax. Mairi drew the trees and Alessandro implemented them. We also added some grass assets also drawn by Mairi to break up the straight line of the neighbourhood grass a little bit.
Shiyuan made a layered version of the final cut scene, and Mick added some small animation to it and fire particles.
Aside from this, we made a lot of small quality-of-life improvements: There’s ”Press L to toggle” text on the revenge list now at all times, the list starts from the beginning instead of the middle, the tutorial slides are smaller so you can see all of them right at the start, and the settings button was repositioned so that it made more sense.
That’s all for alpha and Beta! Look for the release blog post…
Welcome to following the development of The Revenge List!
This week we set up a specific task list with deadlines for all disciplines, with Milla talking to everyone individually and constructing the list based on this. It helped us stay in focus and prioritise, now that the next sprint is last of production.
We cut out the following content:
Voiceacting
Astrid bossfight
Lair kitchen and hallway
We finally added audio to the game.
We made some slight changes to Lilith’s character design — we removed her blush, made her slightly angrier looking and moved her arm.
We ended up adding a tutorial section with Lilith’s lair room, and a microwave fight that reuses the Karl attacks. We also figured out how the game will end.
We added all the Karl scene dialogue into the game.
Audio
Dave was on audio, and added
Background music
Boss fight music both for dodge phase and the QTEs
Main menu music
SFX
For the background and boss fight music, we used the tracks ”We Have to Do Something” and ”Ghost Surf Rock” from this album:
For QTE and main menu, we used the track ”Midnight Hour” made by Dave’s brother.
For SFX, we used both freesound.org and sound effects we had recorded before.
Tutorial scene
Antonio set up and coded the entire tutorial scene, where you learn about the game’s systems, find your revenge list, and fight a microwave. He also fixed a number of bugs in main mechanics — I can’t even remember them all for the purposes of this blog post, but the game is now much more stable.
Fun fact, at first, the microwave was a gnome.
Dialogue + QTE translations
This sprint, Mick put on the dialogues — with choices!
He also integrated art, and made transitions for QTEs, where the transition back to dodging is different based on whether the player failed or succeeded in the QTE.
Environment art
This sprint, Mairi made the sketch assets of Lilith’s lair — as well as the ready assets for the floor and the wallpaper. And the ready asset for Lilith’s house from the outside! Mairi also shaded some of the neighbourhood assets, such as gnomes.
Animations
This sprint Rachel finished all of Lilith’s sketch animations… and did the finished animation for idle and for walking!
Lilith sprite changes + dog!
Shiyuan’s work!
Miscellaneous
Alessandro made some particle fire, electricity, and things that microwave throws at the player (more electricity).
He also added some blurred houses to the background of the game for depth.
He also made a placeholder menu.
Play party
A new playparty, a new balloon.
Game on!
As before, it was fun to play everyone else’s game’s – and get feedback on ours.
The general consensus was that people liked the gameplay, were glad to be able to hit gnomes, combat felt good, and dialogue was funny, but there was too much of it. Music was well-liked. There was a lot going on at once, there was feedback to pace it out more.
That concludes the 4th sprint from us. See you again in 2 weeks!
Welcome to following the development of The Revenge List!
This sprint, we build the official first playable of the game.
We also went to full production, talked and iterated art direction, and honed the scene before building the said build.
We also had a ”play party” in our university, where other people played our game and gave feedback, and we got to play everyone else’s games.
The play party
We had this balloon to guide players to us and lure them into playing our game.
People seemed to like the game a lot (all aspects were complimented, the mechanics were fun, art was gorgeous and people enjoyed the dialogue) – and we also got a lot of useful feedback. The feedback was mostly about finetuning the mechanics, some confusion over what the players should do – and most pressingly, everyone wanted to kick the gnomes. (Watch the gameplay video and you’ll know what this means.) We also acquired some really good insight into why Lilith’s character might come off as misogynistic due to her sexiness, which I’ll explore more later in this post.
The art direction
At the beginning of the sprint, the art was gorgeous but seemed it was from different games. So Alessandro put together mock up screenshots of the game to start experimenting with the art more.
Shiyuan then iterated on the screenshots to bring them together better.
The colour change and new shading looked good, so we went with it. This is Mairi’s work in shading the house asset.
On other art-related note, Rachel worked hard to incorporate some feedback we had had of the idle animation and the attack animation before hand. Here’s some of the mockups:
And lastly, Shiyuan made health bar UI assets based on Alessandro’s convept work.
Changes to Lilith’s design based on feedback?
From the start of the development, we’ve had some feedback that Lilith’s design is misogynistic, since she’s quite sexy for no apparent reason.
It was hard for us to see why, until one of the play testers pointed out several small things to us that led to us understanding better where this feedback was coming from.
Based on this feedback, Antonio demonstrated the issues better here.
These are all much more concrete things that we can work from – we discussed it, and next sprint we can start making some changes into her design to make her more powerful instead of just sexy for the sake of it.
Full production
We moved into full production, which meant moving into Jira.
We also planned the next two sprints on top of this one, and Milla started putting the initial tasks of them into Jira.
A lot happened, so I’ll jump right to it. Below is the video of this week’s progress.
This week’s main goal as proposed by Milla was to get a playable build of one of the fights in game to get better idea of both the scope and how the game would flow in the end.
By the end of the week, we had the scene fully functional in Unity, as well as some screen-shake game feel. We encountered some last-minute problems with building, so we didn’t have a build – but we got a lead on the problems and are quite confident in having a build by the next sprint.
In this blog post, I’ll first talk about some events throughout these two weeks, and then display the work itself.
How the game looks like as of now…
I would not want to be caught under this rain of steaks.
Gameplay gifs of slightly older version
All this is thanks to our programmers hard work, with Antonio mostly on the fight itself, Mick on art integration (later also Alessandro and Milla), UI and miscellaneous, and Dave on dialogue system. Here’s some behind the scenes footage:
The audio room, the music, the auditions
Early sprint, we paid a visit to the audio room in our campus to record SFX under the pro guidance of Dave, our main sound designer.
The recording was a lot of fun.
In addition to this, we had some music sent by Dave’s brother, who is a song writer. We will be discussing the possible iterations on the song next sprint, but for now it does sound awesome and fits the QTE’s bps. What we’ll have to consider is whether it perfectly fits the suburban tone, and copyright issues.
And, since it’s likely we’ll have voice-acting in the game, we had some auditions! Milla has been asking people from Operatic Society to audition for the characters, and Antonio from our team already auditioned both for Lilith and Karl. The audition sheets contained some dialogue.
The art
There was a lot of new art so buckle up.
As the goal was to get enough sketches for working prototype, that is what artists worked on for the week. They also exceeded this goal, and started working on finished assets as well.
Here’s some of the sketch environment art work by Mairi:
And here’s some gifs of animations in game, by Rachel:
Here’s sketches of the sprites to use in dialogue, drawn by Shiyuan:
And here we have some finished sprites (Shiyuan) /environment (Mairi) / UI (Alessandro) art:
The writing
We had the scene where player fights Karl written by Milla.
Slight spoilers… Here’s a sneak peak of Lilith’s (main character) villain monologue:
”It’s weird I’ve not already killed you, really. Your crimes are numerous. The eggs… The dog… Stealing away my girl… And let’s not even get started on just who you are as a person, which is crime in and on itself. No body should be like you.”
Lilith the Queen of Darkness to her neighbour, Karl Svensson
The production
We’re moving to production… next week! This week, we had a step by step asset list:
And an initial sprint by sprint implementation plan…
The first sprint of development is officially here!
We had the concept in place, so, after talking about the development and the concept with out tutor, the aim for our first sprint was to explore the expression of the concept and find the fun in it.
The ”catalyst” in ”Catalyst Games” was not in vain: The development started rapidly. By this first week, we had the first prototype with talking, interaction, collisions working in 2.5D space, movement and jumping working in 2.5D space with sliders to adjust it, and the attacking qtes started, so we can ”find the fun” in it. We also have concept art, mock up animations of the protagonist moving, as well as the outline of the story.
By the end of the sprint, we have the rhythm game working, style guide and more.
Mechanics
Mick, Antonio and Dave were hard at work, set up their workflow on Github and the Unity version, and got to it. We had moving around in 2.5D space as well as well as the QTEs seen below made by Antonio, Mick made dialogue system basing it off old dialogue code by Milla and made collisions in 2.5D space work/trigger events, and Dave worked on the 2D fighting.
We also decided on rhythm games similar to Undyne Battle in Undertale. Below is footage of the gameplay prototypes (click to see them in full size).
Art
The artists went full sprint to work on the concept for our main antagonist/protagonist, which in story works was named ”Lilith the Queen of Darkness” (or Misery, or Evil, depends on the day, really). Below you can see concept art by Shiyuan, concept art for posing and animation concepts by Rachel:
While making the story, Milla and Alessandro put together a reference sheet for the NPCs/Enemies, from which Shiyuan drew concept art of these characters.
Mairi worked to produce concept art of the protagonist’s house, as well as the house of the neighbours’ of the protagonist.
And here’s some UI concept art by Alessandro:
On the second week, the artists put together a style guide. Here’s some concept art exploration by Rachel and Mairi, after the style guide had been produced.
Audio
Dave started working on the SFX. We had rough asset list for it. We also started the process off booking a room to record audio in.
Story
But that is spoilers! It’s what Milla and Alessandro did, anyway.
We have a structure for the game, the scenes, the bosses… and the actual revenge list, which is below. See if you can match people in the concept art of the other characters above.