All right, we put up the info and the Patrons have voted. Now we know what we’re going to be working on for the next few months. Let’s get to the results.

God damn it.

So we somehow wound up with a tie for first place. I then proceeded to do what every project lead does when there’s a tie and flip a coin. It was tails. Christine wins. Congratulations, Christine.

The next chapter of Pandemonium: The Adventure will be Chapter 5!

What the hell is wrong with you people?

Why can’t you just give me a straight answer here? Why does everything have to be a tie? So I flipped another coin. Goat wins. Sanya’s beloved pet is Zeke the Goat.

Okay, so here we got a straight answer. When Chapter 2 begins development, Raptor and Snow Bunny girl will definitely be on the list, with Penguin as a ‘possible’ if we have spare time.

Diving Spiders really stole the lead on Chapter 3. It’s a very big chapter, so I don’t know how many extra monsters will make it in. I’ll leave it to Chicken’s discretion if we have spare time.

No surprise here, Lamia swept this one. I was kind of surprised to see Fennec Fox take second though.

And, well, you know.

So, looks like Dark Matter Girl and Eldritch Dream Girl are a 100% lock. I think Steam Droid will make it in as well, as Chapter 5 had the fewest required monsters. Unagi may or may not, as they perform the same role as the Raiju does, but it sure would be cool to have some swimming through coolant tanks or something.

So, development of Chapter 5 begins immediately. I will be sending off assignments to the artists post-haste and will be getting to work on the mapping and scriptwork ASAP.

 

I’ve been doing some balance testing with the team and some folks that I trust from previous projects. The original balance was pretty awful, all things considered, but so far everyone is really liking the balance changes I’ve been working on.

If you’re coming into this from Prototype 2, here’s a rough idea of what’s different:

1. There’s a lot more enemies.
2. Enemies are generally weaker.
3. Mei and Florentina get a lot more from level-ups.
4. Mei and Florentina level up a lot faster.
5. There are more mechanics added (Powerful Blows, new abilities, loot drops, upgrades) that add a lot of variety to the battles.
6. There are more enemy types available. There are also higher tiers of enemies (Cultists of Rank 2 now exist).
7. There are three bosses in the game now. Each one requires a particular strategy to beat: You probably won’t be able to brute-force the fight!
8. There are more support items to use to heal yourself and buff yourself during combat.
9. Combat flows a lot faster and smoother (animation timers were reduced, health-bar animations are paced better, etc).
10. Most of the display bugs from combat are gone.
11. Enemy positions were shuffled around so you likely won’t run into super-tough enemies unless you’re really not paying attention.

Hoo-wee, that’s a lot isn’t it?

I also have been tracking roughly how long it takes various players to get to various stages. Urimas, who likes to kill things but doesn’t read most of the flavor text, says it took him 2 hours to reach the Quantir Mansion (following the game’s advertised path), while Scarrfish, who tends to read more flavor text and explore more, had just met up with Florentina at the 2 hour mark.

If you’re just playing the main storyline, you’ll probably take about 3 hours to finish Chapter 1.

If you’re looking to see all the content, I’d estimate it’s 6-8 hours to finish everything, depending on how good you are at combat and avoiding enemies (and how fast you can read).

Pretty darn good for an indie game, right?

Argue about this post on the forums!

Support the project on Patreon so the artists stop being lazy shits!

The Nonsense Resumes!

 

Comrades! This is the second in our periodic series on game design. Today we focus on maps and how they can help make your game better. We’ll also be talking about the design pitfalls indie developers fall into once they realize they have a game but no good mappers.

If you want to see the first part in this series, on Dialogue Design, just click on this strangely coloured text.

Continue reading “Design With a Grain of Salt: Maps!” →

What is this nonsense?

So in this periodic series, we’ll be discussing the nature of game design in a freeform fashion. There are no rules! Taff the po-lice!

I’ll be doing these posts periodically to let the public know what goes through my head when I’m designing things. A lot of you are budding designers, or want to get into the field. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe I’ll learn something. Maybe we’ll all just stay dumb. Let’s find out together!

Continue reading “Design With a Grain of Salt: Dialogue” →

Comrades, last week I asked the patrons to fill out a brief survey on Prototype 2. The survey is anonymous so I don’t know who, exactly, filled it out, but big thanks to the ones who did! Let’s look at those results.

Q1: Do you like Mei’s personality?
Yes: 100%
No: 0%

Now this really brightens my day. Mei is meant to be a likeable protagonist and everyone polled liked her.

Q2: Do you like Florentina’s personality?
Yes: 50%
No: 25%
Didn’t encounter her: 25%

This is about what I had expected. Florentina is a rather brusque character at the best of times. She’ll probably grow on you as the game goes on.

Q3: Which of these characters would you want to see more of?
The Prisoner: 75%
Nadia: 50%
Mei: 25%
Florentina: 25%
Breanne: 25%
Rochea: 25%
Blythe: 0%

Note: This was a “Select all that apply” question, hence not summing to 100%.
I was quite surprised at how much the public liked the Prisoner character. Due to time constraints, we didn’t have time to make unique sprites and portraits for her. The Prisoner character is named Aquillia and you’ll be seeing more of her in Chapter 3 and 6. Due to demand, she will be in Prototype 3 as well, with unique sprites and dialogue.
Nadia was also popular, oddly (YOU THINK IT’S THE PUNS, MAYBE?), so I’ve put in a few more scenes with her. I also worked her into the Werecat TF scene but only if you’ve met her and Florentina beforehand.

Blythe was unpopular. Fortunately he’s a very minor character, so that’s okay. Everyone else on the list has gotten at least some extra scenes or dialogue due to popular demand. Your vote matters!

Q4: Which was your favourite cutscene?
Mei’s Alraune TF: 25%
Mei’s Slime TF: 25%
Alraune/Bee H-Scene: 25%
Meeting Karina after Mei becomes a bee: 25%

Okay, wasn’t expecting this. The scenes with sexy content getting votes made perfect sense, but the scene where Mei meets up with Karina after the bee transformation? Well, okay then.
The general verdict is that H-scenes and TF scenes are popular, as expected. I don’t know how I’m going to write more scenes like the Karina one, but I’ll try my best.
If you voted for the Karina scene, feel free to message me. I need to know what you liked about it, so I can do more of that in the future.

Q5: If you could pick one thing to see more of, which would it be?
More H-Scenes! I love porn! #1 Porn! : 50%
More enemies, more variety of enemies: 50%

Another stunning upset, only half of respondents wanted more H-scenes. The rest of them wanted more combat variety.
You guys know this is an ecchi game, right?
Jokes aside, I’ll see what I can do about more enemies. Due to budget constraints, we can’t do a TF for every enemy we add but we can tie them in to the other enemies. Maybe there are more monstrous things serving the cultists? Maybe there are other ghost forms besides the upcoming maid version?

Q6: On a completely unbiased scale out of 10, what would you rate this game?
Average was 6.25

A 6.25!? Considering how massively incomplete and broken the game is as of Prototype 2, a 6.25 is pretty darn impressive. I was expecting a 3, to be honest. Nothing warms a developer’s heart quite like people actually liking their work.

So that’s the survey for prototype 2.
Everyone who responded to the survey is going to get more of what they asked for. If you were a 5$ patron and didn’t fill the survey out, make sure you do so next time, because that one will be even more important – it’ll determine which chapter we develop next!

For everyone who read this far, there’ll be a bit more news on Prototype 3 on the Development Update this week. Otherwise, feel free to argue about this on the forums.

Happy Birthday, Pandemonium!

That’s right, House of Pandemonium turns one year old today. The first release of the game was uploaded on January 16th, 2016 at 30 minutes to midnight, so this counts as its birthday. In fact, development actually began on October 13th, 2015 as a throwaway idea I had. Who would have thought it’d go this far?

The first release of HoP:Remastered got a staggering 3203 downloads, a feat unrivaled by all the other versions. The next-nearest was release 0.95a (2177) and 1.00a (2172), with 0.60a (2048) being the only other release over 2000 downloads. Version 1.80a does not count since I’m pretty sure a lot of people accidentally downloaded the OSX versions and then downloaded the windows version.

Since then, there have been a paltry 37 commits to the bitbucket (I didn’t back up my code very much during early development) and the project is currently at 324 C++ files containing 7102 lines of code and 2865 lines of comments – a 2.5 ratio which is pretty impressive considering the standards of most coders.

In terms of script files, we have 697 scripts weighing 38 MB in sheer ASCII text. Some of that is duplicates due to Corrupter Mode, but that’s still a boatload of lua.

The engine I built the game on, named the Starlight Engine, received its first repository upload in April of 2014 and had begun development sometime in 2013 (though the raw baseline is even older, probably dating back to 2011). I’ve made a lot of improvements, particularly to the low-level rendering engine, due to feedback from the community and my own diligent research. It’s all thanks to this game!

Over its first year of development, we went from a game that looks like this:

with clunky, slow-rendering text, an inability to use anything but the most basic of items, slow gameplay, and weird rendering artifacts, to this:

with animated icons and damage, a robust UI and options system, faster-than-ever logic speeds, a complex and powerful scripting base, OSX Sierra support, and a from-scratch 3D renderer. This is not to forget the entire new game mode, addition of components missing from the original or dummied out, and the new addition of Enhanced Mode which will be coming out in 2017.

Plans for the Future

So that’s what happened during the first year of development, what about the second?

Well, I’m going to be launching a Patreon in February to fund further additions to the game’s content. There will be new monsters and possibly new characters (no promises on that front, adding characters takes a loooooot of art) for Classic and Corrupter Mode, as well as the development of the all-new Adventure Mode.

Exactly when these various features will be released depends on you, the public. When the Patreon launches, the amount of funding we get will determine how many artists I can hire. We already have fan-favourite and alleged superhero Rune MFB on board, but I have 3 character artists, an environment artist, and a spriter I’ve managed to rope into working on the project – assuming the funding comes through, that is.

If all goes well, Adventure Mode will be seeing its first releases sometime in March or (worst case) April. Corrupter Mode is about 80% done and should be completed before February, though I will still be patching it and improving the UI or gameplay based on community suggestions. The 2.00 release will signify feature-complete states for both 3D Mode and Corrupter Mode, but not necessarily bug-free states for the same.

Where to from here?

You should go look at release 1.90a’s post and go get that version if you haven’t already. You should also definitely go to the forums and start giving me ideas for Patreon rewards and bug reports if you’re in the playtesting mood.

As usual, I’ll see you every Monday for further updates. Your support over the last year is what kept me going in addition to the food, water, and unrelenting, brutal violence that is what drives every Canadian forward.

Thanks, and I look forward to writing the 2018 two-year post in 365 days assuming we’re not all living in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario.

‘Til next time!

Argue about this post on the forums.