I feel a little strange bringing this up, but whatever.  It made me chuckle a bit.

Here’s a game for you to try out.  It’s a moody little puzzle game about a lonely protagonist who can make copies of himself (by pressing the space bar).  He can stand on his copies, and his copies can stand on him.  He talks to himself throughout the game, which is shown as text overlays that appear over the level art.  The music featured is an original song, focusing on lonely sounding piano work, with some synth thrown in for good measure.  When he is limited in the number of copies he can make, the number left is shown as a number in the top left corner.  His chief personal motivation ends up being a girl.  The goal for each stage is to get to the square shaped exit.  Sometimes there are platforms that only copies can pass through, and sometimes there are platforms that only the original character can pass through.  The ground is a dull brown with grass on top.  Each level is exactly the size of the screen, so there is no scrolling.

Now, here’s the kicker.  I’m not talking about The Company of Myself.  I’m talking about Little Thing.

Play Little Thing

Anyone else feeling a little deja vu?

I figure I’ve held off long enough, and since no one really knows about me anyway, there’s not a whole lot of point in keeping secrets.  Here’s how Grief works.

Grief is about the psychologist from the end of Company.  His name is Henry.  Near the beginning of the game, he finds out that he is dying of a newly discovered illness.  The rest of the game is split up into chapters that are based on the five stages of grief.  These are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.  The player unlocks abilities that coincide with the current stage.

There are four characters in Grief.  Henry is the lead.  His daughter, Liz, is the most directly affected by Henry’s illness, though she doesn’t understand it, since Henry doesn’t want to admit to her that he is dying.  Dr. Parson shows up periodically to study Henry’s illness, though it’s clear that he has no intention of finding a cure.  He is only interested in making a name for himself.  Finally, the grim reaper shows up periodically to help Henry understand and manage his fate.  The grim reaper is interpreted differently than the average “black cloak and sickle” that we’re all accustomed to.  In Grief, Grim looks like an average person (In fact, in this case, he looks like Henry).  He’s generally laid back and calm; possibly indifferent.  He’s not trying to show off and terrify people.  Intimidating because of his position, maybe, but not because of his demeanor.

If you take a look at the current version (the tab near the top of the page, under the title), you can test out the first version of the gun that Henry acquires at the beginning of Anger.  For those who are interested, the bullets are physically simulated–They have mass and all that.  In certain cases, it’s possible to bounce one off of something and hit something else.

I’ve also been looking around for voice actors and a character artist.  I’ll let everyone know once I’ve got a team on lock down.

So, Grief was originally supposed to be a game that featured pretty big levels that contained lots of little challenges that you could approach in any order.  I like the idea, but I don’t think it’d quite work out in the end–It doesn’t have enough focus.  I think I’m going to instead aim for an approach more similar to Company–Small levels that feature one main challenge per level.  It’s much easier for me to control, design-wise, so I think I can create a tighter overall product like this.  As a side effect, smaller levels means less stress on the physics engine, which means better performance on slower machines.  Box2D is incredibly fast, but even so, better performance is better performance.

There are still more design problems to solve, but I’m getting much closer to having a full view of things.  The story is reaching some awesome places as well.  This is going to be good.

Since I still don’t have a title for it yet, I’m going to be referring to the new game as Grief for the time being.  I wish that Grief would work as a final title, because it does have a bit of zing to it, but it’s completely un-Google-friendly.  Way too common of a word for a Flash game that relies so heavily on the viral nature of the internet.

So, Grief.  The story is coming along very nicely–I’ve got some good ideas cooking.  It’ll turn out good.  I still approve of Company’s ending, but it’s a little too out of left field for me to be completely satisfied.  A really good twist ending should come from somewhere that makes sense, while still being surprising.  I don’t know whether or not Grief will have a twist ending.  It’s possible.  We’ll have to wait and see.

I did some more work on the engine and editor.  They’re both coming along gorgeously.  The editor is going to be capable of some pretty cool shit by the time it’s done.  The engine has some basic postprocessing stuff worked in now, too–This is possible because I’m using my own bitmap renderer instead of using Flash’s standard stuff.  At this point there are two effects.  The first is a desaturation filter, which just takes out all the color in the image.  The second is gloom, which is like the opposite of bloom.  Bloom makes bright light sort of spill out into shapes around it.  Gloom does the same thing with dark areas.  Much more fitting to the tone of the game.

More editor work for now, and we’re getting ready to start working with the game’s visual style.  Should be an interesting process, for sure.

So, a few updates.

First off, I don’t know whether or not the text game will get finished–I’ve got more important things to work on, since that was just a “for fun” sort of project.  I still have no intention of actually competing in JayIsGames’ casual game design competition, because as I said before, if I submitted my game, it’d get disqualified.  We’ll see what kind of time I have to work on it.  It’s still a possibility.

Second, and more importantly, I finally started writing code for the next “big” project, which is a semi-sequel to Company.  The theme of the game is grief, but I don’t want to give too much info on how it factors in quite yet.  I can handle talking about more vague stuff, though, so here’s a few quickies:

It’s a story based platformer that is heavy on exploration and discovery.  You play as a character from Company, but not Jack, the original protagonist.  That only leaves two other options, since Company doesn’t have a whole of characters.  The game is set in the same universe, but it stands alone, so you wouldn’t need to have played the original to understand what’s going on.  I’m using Box2D to give the game some physics, but I don’t really want to call it a “physics based platformer,” since the focus isn’t on the physics.  There’s a strong trend right now, especially in Flash games, to base an entire game on physics (usually with Box2D because it’s so damn fast).  It works, and these games can definitely be fun, but I’m starting to get a little sick of it.  Maybe that’s just me.

I’ve got pretty big plans for it, so I’m gonna have to be getting help from more people than I’ve ever had before–The game needs lots of music, at least three voice actors, and probably two artists (one for static things like the level art, and one for characters and animations).  I’m pretty set on music and one of the artists, but the rest is up in the air for now.

This game is going to require an absurdly powerful level editor, and like Company, I probably won’t be able to release it with the game.  It’d just be too hard to make it userfriendly.  I might put it up on my site though, once it matures a bit, just so you guys can check it out and fiddle with it.