• Livestreamed while I drew ocean tiles for the game.
• Worked on the camera movement now that we’re in a new aspect ratio.
• Finished my Coast mockup.
• Finished most of my Field and Ruins mockup.

Not much going on until December. By then I’ll have most of my other time-sink commitments out of the way. :)

I had a fairly long, involved blog post typed up, but I don’t think it’s ready yet. It involves some discussion of The Waking Cloak’s theme, and 1) the story isn’t yet finalized and so neither is the theme, and 2) I want to get it right since it’s on some heavier topics. I may publish the post when things are more finalized when it would make more sense.

So I’m left without a post, and I suppose I’ll have to update you lot on the behind-the-scenes stuffs as to why I haven’t gotten more done.

First, I want to say with as much emphasis as possible: I will still continue to work on the game. I’m way too passionate about this project. It’s so much fun, and it’s a fantastic way to spend lunch breaks or evenings at home. The community’s response to this has been incredibly encouraging as well.

But basically, I won’t have much time to work on The Waking Cloak until December. Then we’ll get back to normal. Here’s why:

• My day job is about 10 hours/day, plus it’s crunch time on our project.
• My evening job doing a web development contract for September/October.
• My wonderful wife is holding down three jobs now that the school season has started (she’s a teacher and a coach), so I’m taking care of the house/pets/groceries/etc.
• The second draft of Starfall (my sci-fi/fantasy novel). Thankfully, I just finished that draft, but I’ve still got draft 2.5 to work on for my writers group.
• NaNoWriMo for November, which means planning in October. A while back, I made a commitment to do NaNoWriMo every year when feasible, and I’m pretty excited about the project too.

I don’t think all development on The Waking Cloak will cease until December (I can barely keep my hands off it), but these other commitments come first. 

I will still send out newsletters twice a month, since you guys are the best. They’ll probably be a little shorter, but they’ll grow back to their usual size once December comes around.

Thanks, everyone, for your support and interest in the game. You are very appreciated. :) I’ll poke my head up every now and then, but I’ll see you guys again for real in December.

I’m a developer because I like to solve puzzles.

While I’m in the thick of it, I hate the problem. It’s overwhelming, impassable, irritating. Then, when I have a breakthrough, when all the pieces of that puzzle fall into place, I feel unstoppable.

I was never any good at sports. I’m clumsy, terrible at small talk, not very observant and tend to be a little gullible and slow to pick up on humor. I will likely never feel the rush of making a touchdown or get excited to go to a meet-and-greet (that’s a thing… right?). But dang it if I don’t feel the life pulsing through my veins when I finally find the solution to a problem.

Nerd time:

So I’m mimicking the Game Boy Color, which has a resolution of 160x144. The Zelda titles on GameBoy have 16x16 pixel tiles and sprites–in other words, the screen is 10 tiles wide and 9 (minus one for the HUD, leaving 8) tiles high.

But this is tiny, especially on our computer screens (and even on a smartphone). Obviously, we don’t want to play in such a small window, so we scale up.

Here’s the issue: it’s really hard to scale up pixel graphics. I can multiply everything by 5, thus getting a 720px-high window, and everything looks cool. But if we want to scale up to a 1080px-high screen (currently the most common), we have to multiply that original resolution by 7.5… meaning some pixels will be bigger than others.

This happens whenever you try to multiply by a non-whole number with pixels. Here’s what it looks like at x1 (normal) and x1.5 (freaky):

To avoid this, I needed a whole number that all the common monitor sizes (720, 1080, 1440) were divisible by. 360 divides into all of these! Hooray! So I immediately began taking my x5 scale assets and dividing them in half so I could have a beautiful 360px-high window that could be scaled up.

And that’s when I encountered the second issue: I’m an idiot.

16x16 tiles and sprites multiplied by 5 (what I had originally) and then divided by 2 leaves us with 40x40 tiles. I am, essentially, multiplying 16 by 2.5. In other words, It’s the same issue as trying to scale 144 up to 1080: some “pixels” are bigger than others.

Annoyed, I worked on other functionality, and I was generally pretty productive. It kept gnawing at the back of my mind though: how will I display the game without making it blurry or distorted? And how would I display the game without giant black bars on either side of the screen?

The answer came a week or so later, and it was one that I didn’t quite want at first because it wasn’t “authentic” or some such hipster thing. Also it would be a fair bit of work.

I would change the game.

Well. I would change the game’s resolution anyway.

This was a pretty big decision, but it had to be made early lest I be forced to do even more work later. So after some math (math is hard, you guys) I determined essentially that the game screen would be twice as wide (20 tiles) and a little taller (10 tiles, plus a 20px-high GUI). 320x180. A 16:9 aspect ratio, which is the most common monitor size.

I was a little nervous about abandoning the screen ratio of the Game Boy, but you know what? It looks kinda cool. And the other retro kids are doing it–just look at Shovel Knight.

And in a stroke of beautiful luck, 320x180 scales perfectly to 720p, 1080p, 1440p, and 4k in 16:9. Puzzle pieces falling together.

The State of the UnionThe Waking Cloak:

• Added “state machines” which help with code design, organization, etc. The player has a “Walk” state, a “Stand” state, a “Using Item” state, and so on.
• Started combo system for attacks and item usage.
  
• Updated the resolution to 1) avoid black bars and 2) scale the game to any monitor size without pixel distortion (read the blog!!).
  
• Along with that, updated all my assets to their original size of 16x16.
• Worked on sub-pixel movement logic so that the small assets won’t be all jerky when they move around. Still working on this.
• Finished fifth mockup: The Roots of the Lotus Tree.
• Worked on sixth mockup: a coast with some… mysterious things. This was my first mockup in the new resolution, and so I also worked on a new HUD.
• Worked more on worldbuilding, backstory, and plot. Fun stuff!

Note: I’ll put my weekly report at the end of every post, unless I find another format I like better.

I’ve spent a lot of time seeking the core of what I love in games.

Of course, we all do this. We naturally seek out games we enjoy. There’s nothing unusual about this, but since I’m developing a game now, I wanted to dig deeper. Could I make something that contained the very essence of what I love about gaming?

So I went back to my childhood. I imagined myself curled up on the couch with a hand-me-down SNES controller, or riding in the back of the car while staring at the screen of my pink Game Boy Color, or poring over maps and notes I made to puzzle out Myst and Riven. I looked at my favorite games that sparked my imagination all the way up to present day: Wind Waker, Riven, Morrowind, Oracle of Ages, Dark Souls, Dragon Warrior Monsters 2, and so on. What made these games so compelling to me? What did they have that other games didn’t?

The big one was discovery. Exploration. Sailing across a vast ocean to find an island not in my map. Finding a secret cave entrance. Delving into a forest that no one else had ever stepped foot in. Even getting to the next level just so I could see how it looked! I wanted to be part of a world, to explore and learn and live in a new place. Riven and Morrowind’s weird, alien architecture pulled me in, begging me to explore. Dark Souls had countless shortcuts to stumble upon. Wind Waker is one of my favorite games, while Skyward Sword was harder for me to get into–both are well-made, but one had a huge world to discover, while the other was segmented and often retrod.

So I wanted a world to explore with plenty of secrets. Exploration and discovery would make a great foundation for The Waking Cloak. But there had to be more than just that. I dug deeper.

I wanted a sense of longing. Ocarina of Time ached with the poignant loss of innocence and childhood. Riven had raw emptiness in a place that was once populated and living. Dragon Warrior Monsters 2’s simple music was like a dream just beyond my grasp.

To contrast with that, there needed to be color and fun and goofiness. I didn’t want to be all serious all the time.

I learned I liked the underdog, the protagonist who is always underestimated. When stronger or smarter or more powerful people might appear to be the hero… instead it’s this kid, the only one left standing in front of the big bad after everyone else has run away. Scared and armed only with courage.

The Game Boy Color was my first “console,” and to me it emotionally represents a lot of these elements. I’ve always liked pixel graphics because of where it allows my imagination to go. And I like old things–the feeling of picking up something with a deep history.

There’s a lot more I discovered, but that’s the gist of it. The next step was to gather all of these elements and translate them into the game. You can already visibly see some of the influences in the bright green of the grass or the weird roots of the swamp houses. Behind the scenes, I’ve been working hard at making a deeply interconnected map like you’d see in Dark Souls with plenty of secrets. These decisions have also informed the player character as a young, quiet boy who is overshadowed. They’ve driven the strangeness of the story (what if stars weren’t huge, exploding balls of gas? What if they were something more fantastical?) and the mechanics of the titular waking cloak itself–the contrast of night and day, of terrifying darkness and hopeful light.

And so I found myself with that core in my hands. It pulsed with life, and I was excited to build something new with it.

If you want to discuss more, hit me up on twitter! Check out this neat video, which really pushed me to define precisely what I wanted from my fantasy. And If you found this post interesting, please feel free to share it.

Want to see any game development topics discussed? Want more pictures? Suggestions or comments? Reply to this post or hit me up at my Ask Me Anything page!

And finally, I owe you some updates. Here’s what I worked on this week

• Updated camerawork for 60fps.
  
• Figured out how room placement should work so we don’t get stuck in trees and stuff.
  
• Smoothed out room transitions so the player doesn’t teleport and the camera doesn’t wildly flail about.
  
• Got animated objects and tiles working in the game. Flowers!
  
• Began working on adding attack animations and hitboxes as the beginning of the combat implementation.
  
• Worked on my fourth mockup, this one for the barrows area of the game. You can see it in a few days!
  
• Streamed a game development session and cut together the highlights for your viewing pleasure.