2021 - my, where has the time gone...
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 11:56:35 PM
This has been quite an insane year for everyone. I hope everyone is safe and well. I know many of you have been waiting on the next update. As I've conveyed in previous updates, I tend to keep KS reserved for much larger scale updates, whereas I use social media for smaller ones. This will be the former, and I'll try to be thorough for those of you who are deeply interested in the progress and process! Before I do, here's what's happening at a quick glance for those that don't want to read too deeply.
QUICK UPDATE: What is happening with the game?
What Have We Been Up To In The Past Few Months:
1) A new system for saving and loading game files was conceptualized and developed in collaboration with Infinite NES Lives. This will also make communication of that save data with modern platforms possible.
2) The placeholder bestiary has been revised and completed, both in terms of graphics and updated mechanics.
3) After beta testing in our studio in 2020 (just prior to covid), it was determined we needed to re-work some of the player mechanics mostly related to the 2.5d functionality and music playing modes. We conceptualized and developed a better way of interacting with flying/bouncing objects that is a bit less punishing, and optional on screen guides for playing music (which is your spell casting mechanism in this game).
4) After running out of ROM space at halfway through the NPC dialog, I tinkered a lot with the narrative, went back in, and had to rewrite much of the verbiage, as well as structure the game intro very differently (a lot less lead in to the story). The challenge was to make it feel as grand of an adventure while significantly cutting the amount of dialog. This also led to slight changes to the map.
5) In optimizing our music and sfx, we were able to cram a bit more musical content into the game. A handful of new songs were composed and created. There may still be room for one or two more.
6) In finding ways to optimize, we found that we were wasting a huge amount of data on redundant NPC objects - they functioned the same, but simply looked different from area to area. We built a way to overwrite the graphics based on area, so the NPCs function the same, but they can look appropriate for the area without requiring unique objects.
What Is In Progress Right Now:
1) Getting the boss fights fun and fair. This is tricky, because the mechanics for most bosses fall outside of the general game's mechanics. There is an entire programming bank that is reserved for extraneous boss fight logic, which gives us a lot of freedom to make these unique or interesting. But it also easily breaks or has edge case anomalies, since a lot of times it doesn't conform to how the rest of the game operates.
2) Properly populating the world. Most of the world is populated with its correct monsters, but there are places where strange things can occur, like monsters with random spawn locations spawning in unreachable places, where their defeat is necessary to continue, or monsters behaviors being problematic in combination, or edge case bugs with certain AI interacting with certain tile types. So now that we can play through most of the map, it's about refining it to mitigate as many of those situations as we can.
3) Optimize the narrative so that there is just enough color to the world, but all the functionality required to progress.
What Is Left:
When that is done, what will be left is just finishing touches and refinements based on beta tester feedback, and testing all the edge cases we can.
The LONGER Update, with deeper details, rich media, links, and personal anecdotes:
Since many of you are friends and family, and others of you have become like friends and family over the last few years, let's start with some insight into what's been going on in the life of the creator parallel to development, as it all connects and influences the outcomes. There has been so much life since the last update of this project that it's hard to know where to begin. Just like for all of you, I'm sure, Covid had a huge impact on me.
Beta Testing Mystic Searches in NESmaker Studios
Just before the world collapsed under Covid, we had our first real Mystic Searches play testing. It was the weekend of the Global Game Jam. We had fellow game developers in for a development sprint. They were the first team to really get to visit our new studios. We had just completed the classroom and the 80s basement set, and it was a perfect opportunity to show it all off! We got some great feedback, and began moving forward on some of the gameplay issues, while fleshing out the lore and plotting out concepts to replace some of the placeholder objects and assets.
Then came Covid.
It started with a pleasant sort of inconvenience. The week of the big covid uptick, my parents were on a cruise ship. When they left port, there were these murmurs of this Covid-19 thing. By the time they returned, the world had gone apocalyptic. My mother kept a daily travel journal. It reads like a slow burn Stephen King novel! They were forced to dock in Tampa, an hour from our home, and placed in mandatory quarantine. We took them in. With them both aging, and my father a potentially vulnerable cancer survivor, I placed them under house arrest in our home for a few months. It was quite ironic to turn the tables and say to my father "Look, while you're living under my roof....". Their new semi-permanent bedroom was, of course, my home studio area which, under normal circumstances, has been my NES development domain. Fortunately, I still had the NESmaker studios, and most of my work could be done from a laptop anyway, but it crippled my ability to be as productive at the house (don't forget about the toddler running around!).
But then came the lockdowns, and the move to remote everything.
As someone who was responsible for video and interactive content at a college, my day job workload about quadrupled as soon as the world pressed into a new paradigm of all-virtual instruction. The good news was that my job was still in high demand, which was a striking positive in such uncertain times, but the problem is that it became much more demanding than I was prepared for. I was not only creating endless content for my own department and the courses I was teaching, but I was also tasked with creating endless content for the rest of the institution. And many of you who have children will empathize - I had to juggle the complications of a dramatically heightened workload while entertaining a toddler whose daycare was temporarily shuttered, while also entertaining semi-permanent house guests. All NES development activities were pushed to energy-drink-fueled, after-midnight, bleary-eyed coding sessions at the dining room table.
And then, yet another unexpected surprise...
Just as we settled into the new lockdown protocols, that's when my wife discovered that she was pregnant with our second child.
We were equal parts ecstatic and horrified. This was still in the beginning phases of Covid. You remember - bodies being carried out of NY hospitals in morgue trucks, the death toll climbing and economy tanking, and no toilet paper to be found anywhere. In that complicated time, amidst the uncertainties and assurances that the world was blowing things out of proportion, good friend of this project Tim Calandra, who operated the movie theater where The New 8-bit Heroes film had its big premiere, was the first covid related death within my sphere. It got real, fast.
My wife then had some major bleeding. But of course at the time, the hospitals were mostly on reserve for Covid, and there was the big question of whether or not it would be safe for her or the baby to even go to a hospital. Fortunately, she was ok. The baby was ok. But it was quite a scare during an already frightening and stressful time.
Settling into the chaos
As the semester wrapped up and things began to settle into a manageable state (oh, and toilet paper was once again occasionally available), I wanted to make sure that backers knew that despite all of the chaos, we continued to work on Mystic Searches, and demonstrate the progress. That's when I shared this first look, for those who may have missed it.
Updating Our Tools For New Needs
Based on the feedback that we got from early testing, we needed to optimize and reorganize some of the code base. For one thing, we realized there would be no way to cram all of the dialog for the narrative into a single data bank as we'd originally planned and programmed for. Another big concern was that we needed to expose more capability for our monsters to have the versatility of AI that we were looking for. We needed some arbitrary data space that could be utilized by different screens that could be interpreted based on a screen's needs (for instance a byte could be used to determine which tile could animate on one screen, but for a screen without tile animation, could be utilized to determine the fetch bank for NPC dialog). We wanted a system that had more granular screen data when desired, so that for certain special screens, we could choose to observe 8x8 pixel tiles rather than the usual 16x16 metatiles (despite a cost of 4x the amount of memory). Those are just a few examples. Sometimes, these tiny updates require major changes. They require conceptualization and programming to both the GUI front end for our tool and the ASM code that the NES games actually use.
A look under the hood and at the process: This is an image of a proposed change to the tool and how it would functionally change output. These changes usually stem from an immediate need, then we conceptualize how to most logically and easily port the updated protocol into the tool, followed by how the data is then packaged when the game compiles. In most cases, while Josh is making changes to the GUI, I am programming a sample by hand for what the tool will spit out, and then making that by-hand version work with what will be the eventual output that Josh's new tool version will produce. This output file will overwrite my by-hand version, and so the new data will overwrite my manual data, allowing for changes made in the tool to affect the game. This is how NESmaker development and Mystic Searches development are inextricably linked.
There is no downtime.
Because these updates lead to unavoidable pauses to what might be considered direct development, Austin and I found many ways to continue to refine the lore, explore the game's universe, and create tangential content to realize the world of Mystic Searches in an even deeper way. Just because we literally can not always be actively working on Mystic Searches's NES game, that doesn't mean we're not actively working on Mystic Searches.
The Comic
Austin is a phenomenal illustrator. Often, though, he is in a holding pattern waiting for instruction as we work on code issues. One thing that we developed during downtime is the first issue of a Mystic Searches comic. This isn't gratuitous, though. Working on this actually helped us truncate verbiage and streamline plot points. We plotted out an entire series, which helped us outline key points in the narrative with a hierarchy of importance. This is helping tremendously with reworking the npc dialog. The first issue of the comic is finished and ready for print! However we've both agreed that we wouldn't release the first or even work any more on the second until the Mystic Searches NES game is being prepped for production.
The Novel
Having to carve and trim the narrative so strictly left me disappointed. But I realized there was no reason that extended narrative with high focus on tone couldn't be achieved through the printed page. When I find pockets of time, which isn't often, I've been trying to explore the world in prose. If you've been following the project on social media, you've probably already seen this. Here is a fun, moody dramatic read of the prologue for the novelization I've been working on for this. This is best enjoyed when relaxing in a dark room through headphones.
Mystic Echoes
There has always been a component of this project that was supposed to involve a modern game. At first, the game was a re-telling of the same world with modern graphics. Then, the idea evolved into being a sort of dystopian view of an alternate future in this game world. During our covid brainstorms, linked to the b-story found in this first comic, we realized how fun and compelling a game that story may make, and also how it may be able to tether to the NES game, filling in some of the stuff that we had to get rid of.
Knowing that our own energies were stretched with Mystic Searches updates, we brought on a team for a few months to help us mock up some of the concepts for that as a proof of concept. What form it will ultimately take, I'm not sure, but we can confirm that when Mystic Searches is completed, there will be a Mystic Echoes, and as intended, it will be a really cool companion piece to Mystic Searches rather than a sequel. Here's a first look at our team playing with basic aesthetics and concepts.
Celebrating Our Community
To no one's surprise at this point, we have made our development tools available to the public. What was once our in-house Mystic Searches Screen Tool And Game Engine has transformed into a much more broad NESmaker, released into the wild and currently used by thousands of users around the world. It was never our intention to create development tools beyond what we needed for Mystic Searches. Our first "development tool" was a horrifying Frankensteinian GameMaker app that allowed us to spit out collision data. But as some of you may recall, when we started showing the film and the game (which would become Mystic Origins), people were most interested in the tools we used in order to make the game. So rather than horde the proverbial magic, we gave everyone access to those same tools and licensed our code base for use for those that wanted to make their own games. The community that has grown up around this project has been one of the coolest we've ever been a part of, and they are doing such amazing things with our development environment. Things we never even would have thought of.
For those of you who really like behind the scenes look at development of this game, I encourage you to join the NESmakers Facebook group even if you're not a user of the software. That is where we share a lot of our smaller technical updates, which are often directly connected to the NESmaker tool. Incidentally, it is also where you will find nonsense like below, and thousands of other new NES games in development as a result of all that has transpired with this project!
Austin and I found ourselves wanting to observe Covid restrictions best we could while utilizing our cool, newly built 80s basement set. So we came up with a ridiculous concept involving a time-machine arcade cabinet, greenscreening his holographic head onto the couch next to me, and playing new NES games on real hardware on a real vintage CRT.
We harkened back to our love for riff shows like Mystery Science Theater, and slammed out a low budget, short run web series called A-Riff-In-Time, culminating in our annual awards show that celebrated the best games, as voted on by professional judges, either in the game development field or attached to retro gaming in some way. Time travel, cyborg dogs, huge holographic heads, clones, and lots of new 8-bit NES games. You can watch the entire ridiculous web series here.
The Newest 8-bit Hero
Just after filming the principal photography on the Byte-Off Awards show, we welcomed Mairin Jeanne into the world. It was not exactly an easy pregnancy. The umbilical cord was wrapped twice around her neck and she was breach. My wife had to have a c-section, and had massive hemorrhaging the next day. It was a very trying couple of days, which fortunately had a happy ending. But this took me off the grid through the holidays. While I love this project, this community, and all of you who continue to support what we're trying to do, family will always come first. I took about 6 weeks to take care of my wife and our newborn daughter, and celebrate the holidays with the family. I am happy to report that mom and baby are doing fine, and Mairin's big brother is her fiercest protector!
During that six weeks, while armed with a bottle in one hand, I continued to conceptualize updates to Mystic Searches. During that down time, one thing I was working on was descriptors for the bestiary. I did some by-hand calculations about the approximate number of monsters, their size, their states, number of animations they could have. I then started to think out space in tilesets, and even did some graph paper mockups of how I could tetris their tiles. Along side that, I worked out specific mechanics I wanted to find in the various areas, and some loose descriptors of potential monsters. These would replace the existing objects that were only ever meant to be placeholders for testing various mechanics.
Replacing The Placeholders
At the same time, one of my students who had truly impressed me during the fall semester approached me about wanting some pre-visualization / concept art work. It was perfect timing, and we set to work replacing or refining the bestiary. Here are a few of my favorite examples of her concepts.
Season of Change
As we began to exit the other side of the Covid tunnel (we're not out of it yet, but businesses are opening back up, a vaccine is present, my wife gave birth and everyone is happy, healthy, and back to school/work), Austin was accepted into a grad program in Toronto. While he is still an active part of this project, this last push for the project will experience a diminished creative energy that we have enjoyed from our collaborative treehouse of a studio here in Florida.
Then not long after Austin left for Toronto, I was offered a new, very cool position at a company up in New England, almost 1500 miles from here. After a decade at Ringling College, I left to pursue this new opportunity. Currently, I am working for that company remotely, but will be moving the entire operation up that way as soon as we find suitable housing.
So with that, the bookmarks to Covid were the opening and closing of NESmaker's cool Sarasota studios. We intended for many more of you to get to see it, and to broadcast a lot more content from here this past year, but unfortunately circumstances did not allow for it. But now that Austin is in Toronto and I'm getting ready to pack it all up, for a better look at what it was like here developing Mystic Searches, NESmaker, and all of the other cool related stuff that we worked on here:
To sum up the last year or so...we opened the studio, play tested the game, covid locked down the world, we welcomed a baby into the world, Austin moved to Canada, I quit my job and started another, we're closing the studio, and I'm about to move 1500 miles away. It's...been quite a year!
What does Mystic Searches look like right now?
The best way to show off the current state of Mystic Searches is to show the most recent update video, which shows off the game's awesome bestiary (or at least some of it). The reason this is a great look at the game in its current state is that it shows off 8 of the game's locations, 8 different songs, a ton of its mechanics, a lot of the AI, and about 25 monsters! It also gives a cool look at environment concept sketches and monster sketches alongside their in-game pixel art. For an idea of scope, this represents about half of the monsters, half of the music, and doesn't even show any of the underground locations for the game.
That catches you guys up on what has been going on with the development for Mystic Searches and all of the things tangentially related to it. I feel that it is important to continue to offer my gratitude for all of you who have been patient with the development of this project. I want it to be in your hands as much as you want it to be in your hands, and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not working on it in some capacity. I hope seeing the most recent update gets you even more excited to play it when it is completed.