Astraverse

Astraverse coming to Steam Next Fest!

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Feb. 21 – 28

First thing’s first…

If you don’t already know, lately I’ve been hard at work on crowdfunding to make an enhanced re-release of my previous title, Tales of the Elements. This new Tales of the Elements (we’re calling it T.O.T.E.) is supposed to stand on it’s own without the need of listening to the albums that its original game was based off of. I decided to do this enhanced re-release it to port the game to mobile and give the project a second chance at reaching a larger audience so that it could help boost the community following for Astraverse. As much as I would like to not think of T.O.T.E. as a “stepping stone” for Astraverse, the ultimate goal here is to give Astraverse a much-needed boost. It’ll need the funding and without a community behind it–I’m afraid it’ll struggle.

Now, the Kickstarter for T.O.T.E. is finally coming to an end–just a couple days left so I HIGHLY recommend that anyone who’s interested in supporting Astraverse support the T.O.T.E. Kickstarter as well! T.O.T.E. is a dope JRPG that’s heavily based on Hip Hop and it’s culture. It’s a bit different but it does have a banging soundtrack just like Astraverse does!

Supporting T.O.T.E. is also supporting Astraverse as there is even development software that I’m using for T.O.T.E. that I’m also using for Astraverse. You can click on the image above or the gameplay image below to check out the Kickstarter!

Short clip from the new T.O.T.E.

So, what’s going on with Astraverse???

Honestly, development is taking a short break. But, I’ll be resuming development again in about a month or so to finally finish off the playable quest demo and the official reveal trailer that I have planned. The ques demo will be for 1-4 players and it will include the character creator from the character creator demo as well as one playable quest including some narrative events with a boss at the end of it. I want people who play the demo to get a good feel for the vision of the game. So, I’m trying to include every important feature to the game’s main gameplay loop.

4-player inventory management!

Steam Fest February 21-28

Valve reached out to me and invited me to showcase Astraverse for the Steam Fest that will be held in February! During this event, players on Steam will be able to try out the quest demo for Astraverse so you can count on this being a solid timeline for development on the quest demo for Astraverse. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s characters and experiences with the demo!

– LB

Astraverse Kickstarter Pre-launch Announcement (& Update 7/5/2021)!!!

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Follow Astraverse on Kickstarter!

Astraverse, my Phantasy Star-inspired beat’em up RPG, is coming to Kickstarter!

The Kickstarter Pre-launch page is here!

As a matter of fact, that’s the reason why I’m late with my update. Ha ha!

I meant to post a development update a week or so ago but I was extremely busy with working on the Kickstarter page and getting it ready for the pre-launch campaign.

As I was working on the Kickstarter page, my wife got started on illustrating the characters for the cover/key art for the game, too. She did the first 2 characters and I helped to provide a background and some polishing in order for us to put together an early cover/key art to represent the game until we have the full cover finished!

If you ask me, we could probably get away with this being the final cover art but we wanted the cover art to give representation for all of the races and classes in the game. So, you can expect to see more characters in the final artwork!

Also, as I was working on the Kickstarter, I decided to write out and schedule the full-time game development plan. Then, I used that to create a visual roadmap for the rest of the game’s development.

As I make development progress over time, that space ship there will move down the roadmap. (Not on this post but in later updates).

Over the last 3 years, I’ve made slow and steady progress which has led up to me being almost finished with the framework containing all of the game’s core systems. Learning from past mistakes, I’ve decided to build the game this way so that I could avoid feature-creeping and an excessive amount of bugs towards the last half of the development.

However, I wouldn’t say that I’m halfway there yet (or if I am, I would say that the second half is going to take the most work). Even though, I’m just going to be adding content into the game like enemies, areas, and loot as well as tweaking values like stats and AI here and there from here on out, there’s quite a bit to do in those areas. Still, I’m looking forward to it as this is more of the “designing and implementation” phase of the development that I’ve been working towards for the past few years.

Another thing I thought I’d share are some of the backer rewards that are planned for the Kickstarter!

You can’t tell me that none of this stuff is cool!

The Kickstarter will allow for Astraverse to come out in the best possible way! For example, some of the later backer tiers include rewards for backers to be added into the game, to be able to help write quests, to be able to design outfits and even weapons for characters!

So, the next challenge will be for me to finish the 4-player playable game demo before the launch date or at least DURING the beginning of the campaign. Please root for me as I’ve burnt up a considerable amount of time fixing and planning the Kickstarter.

Please check out the Kickstarter prelaunch page and support it if you can! Every little bit counts–even if it’s just $1 and that’s reflected in the Kickstarer as well as there is even $1 backer tier with a reward for it!

I look forward to working with you all on Kickstarter!

– LB

Progress Update 4/21/21

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I know I keep saying this over and over again (in different ways) but I’m inching ever closer to a playable demo of Astraverse.

This time, though, I feel like I say that with good reason. After programming the logic for the in-game shields, I’m beginning to reach the point where all of the core-player functions/features are complete.

And that was a small achievement in comparison to the following:

The Narrative Adventure system!!!

Yep! The Choose your own adventure events are also done and are COMPLETELY ready for the storytelling needs of the demo!

So I figured it would be a good time to explain how these were going to actually be implemented into the game.

Now, I know that graph up there looks like a hot mess (lol) but I promise that it’s an “organized mess,” ha ha! I can assure that it explains the gameplay flow/loop very well.

See, whenever a party is formed, they will either choose a quest that will bring them to a series of short stages that represent a planet (or more) or they will be able to choose to just go to a planet to adventure on.

In-between each stage/area, there will be an event that plays out just like the one above and the way each event plays out will have an effect on the path that’s taken during each adventure–meaning the subsequent stages will be different depending on the party’s decisions/experiences.

For example, say you’re in this stage below:

Imagine running into a choice-driven narrative event at the end of this forest

Once you (and whoever you’re teamed up with) reaches the end of the area one of those events will pop up. Depending on the circumstances, the event can either be random or part of an overarching narrative that’s part of the current adventure.

Just like that chart up there shows, the CYOA events will chain together the gameplay loop, making it feel more like a choice driven adventure with a story rather than just a series of side scrolling beat em up stages. Rather than feel like a linear progression, there will be branching paths and even story points that will give each player their own unique experience.

So, now that I have the narrative event system in place, what’s next? How close are we to an actual demo?

Here’s what’s left to put in the game before we can see a playable demo:

  • more loot (at least 5 – 10 per weapon type/armor)
  • equipment shops with randomized loot
  • at least 2 more basic monster types
  • 2 or 3 more backgrounds
  • the first boss
  • party defeat system
  • the demo’s questline
  • the 2nd, 3rd and 4th player

That’s literally it! And while it seems like a long list of errands, it’s not as bad as it looks as some of those things such as the loot, backgrounds and other players are already partially implemented and just need to be finalized so that they are functioning properly and playable.

Also, because of the method of programming I’ve used up to this point, once the demo is playable, more content will be made much faster as the core systems of the game will already be functioning and it will just be a matter of taking player feedback and polishing stuff up!

Challenges and Opportunity

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So, now that the move is over, I’m dealing with a serious case of jet lag. Over the course of the past week, I haven’t had much time to devote to developing Astraverse. This is all understandable but the real downside is that I’ve burned up my only free week before working a new, full-time job by just sleeping and waking up at odd times.

The good news is that I have a little help on the programming side of things now. The coder that helped me with some things on my last project is in on the project now so there should be some decent progress made even if I’m working full-time.

Originally, I honestly wanted to have things ready to showcase the demo and push it out to seek funding for the project so that we could work on it full-time. However, I underestimated the time that would be needed to complete the character creator and I honestly don’t think I have what it takes to run a successful crowdfunding campaign or “profitable-looking” project pitch.

Usually, I’d be pretty upset about such a huge and disappointing change in my plans but I don’t really see it as much more than a simple setback that may set up the foundation for a beneficial opportunity.

Instead of seeking some sort of funding for the development of the game from a publisher or some sort of crowdfunding platform, I can put my own money into the project where it’s practical and without worrying about having food on the table. This way, if I need to crowdfund at all, it will be to pay for stuff like paying the extra programmer(s) or paying a professional artist to redo the game’s artwork.

Of course, work will take away from the time I can devote to development but that’s where Astraverse’s game development method comes into play:

At some point, the development will shift from system and feature programming to just pure content creation. A simple way to put this is that the basic framework for the game will be done first–parent assets for weapon types, class types, enemy types, equipment types, area types, item types, etc. being programmed first–and then new stuff will be simply added as modified versions of the parent assets (but presented with different art, stats, layouts etc.). This means that once that initial part of development is cleared, a good 50% (or more) of the development will require much less time and effort to cover.

I heard somewhere that this type of development was called “sandboxing.” I think it’s a great way to handle development for games that focus less on “evolving gameplay” and more on equipment and level grinding (like in a lot of rpgs)–especially when a large amount of content is needed.

Anyway, I’m currently lacking reliable internet at the moment but hopefully in the next week or so, I’ll have something fixed up at the house so that I can post up some more music or videos.

– LB

Quick update: Moving

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First off, I have to apologize for not having a regular update here posted on-time.

 

My wife and I are moving this week so I haven’t been able to work on Astraverse in a couple of days. We’re almost ready to fly out on Friday so I’ll have some time to work on it before we move.

 

I did, however, work on some animations that needed adjustment and made some new animations for the male characters–hand-to-hand combat ones. I don’t have the time to post them just yet but they’ll definitely be in the demo for the game!

 

The goal this week is to finish up the character creator and then post up an update on it before we leave on Friday.

 

– LB

 

 

 

I Finished the GDD for Astraverse!

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I’m pretty proud of getting the GDD (game design document) finished.
It’s only about 88 pages long but the way I would describe the document is like it being an entire “blueprint” for the game. Put simply, I could literally give the GDD to another developer and they’d know exactly how to design the game in the way that I envisioned it (on a technical and gameplay level at least). Of course, they probably wouldn’t have the passion for the project like I do and they probably wouldn’t be able to nail the same exact “vibe” or “feel” that I would when designing BUT everything’s practically in that GDD.

 

So for this post, I decided to include a section of the GDD which talks about the basic game design concepts of the game:

 

Game Design Concepts

 

A Non-MMO, MMO Experience –

The main concept of Astraverse is to have a highly replayable multiplayer loot and level grind Role-Playing Game in a similar style and setting to Phantasy Star Online that can be fully experienced without an online or MMO server. A popular example of this would be most games in the Monster Hunter series. Almost all of the Monster Hunter games do not rely on MMO servers at all but they feel and play like MMO’s with highly replayable gameplay and a heavy emphasis on multiplayer co-op.

 

Character Creation –

The character creation should have enough depth to feel like a player’s character is a reflection of themselves or at least feel like their own unique and personal character. Just like in PSO, PSU, PSO2 and the spin-offs of said games, the character creation should be an immersive feature, not an afterthought.

 

Stages –

The stages in the game should be randomly generated enough to artificially expand the size of the game world and simulate the experience of exploring entire planets without the use of open-world gameplay. Phantasy Star Online’s randomly generated areas and the original Phantasy Star games’ planetary traveling systems and overworld are both excellent artificial world expanding features that can be easily combined to make a new system that’s simple but effective enough to gain this result.

 

Player-Generated Experiences –

The gameplay should make possible unique “player-generated” experiences/stories through harmonized gameplay systems. For example, a player losing all of his or her health shouldn’t be the end of a game experience. That user experience can be made more unique by giving players a more difficult and higher-stakes situation to deal with as a result of a player’s loss. Games like Dark Souls and Shovel Knight actually handles this quite well.  Other examples of user-generated experiences is the moogle letter delivery system from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and the open-ended quest system of Divinity Original Sin 2.

 

Single Player –

The single player campaign should have a uniquely captivating story that compliments the gameplay without taking away the focus from it. Also, single player mode should also be at least “hinted” at being connected with the multiplayer experience–for example, the story shouldn’t give the player a unique/exclusive position in the game world (like being the “hero” of the galaxy) but should instead make reference to the player’s traits that make him/her unique. A story character, for example, may even say things like “I know some other rookie Seekers like you” — in effect, making reference to the existence of other players playing Astraverse.

 

Immersive Game Setting –

The setting should be a science-fiction fantasy world without the existence of magic. Most of everything, including basic systems, should have some sort of explanation through the game world’s presentation and lore. An outstanding example of this can be found in Phantasy Star 2 in which a player’s saved data file is directly referenced within the game world as the player’s “memories” and are stored in a “data center” whenever a player saves his or her game.

 

Multiplayer Graphical User Interface –

Menus, shops and anything else that is displayed with the GUI should not hinder the experience of other players but should enhance it. Shops should be accessible by all players at once without the need of splitting the screen or forcing players to shop separately. Player hub information and menus should be restricted to parts of the screen that do not take away from the experience of other players during same-screen co-op.

 

Artstyle and Music –

The art style should feel like a mixture of the look and feel of Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star 4 with references to retro Science-fiction artwork and the hand painted or hand drawn nature of Vanillaware’s art style.

The music should sound a lot like Phantasy Star Online’s music but also blended with my own style of trip-hop music.

Link to one of my instrumental albums (as an example): https://lastbenevolence.bandcamp.com/album/pinakamaganda

 

 

I decided to throw that example link there at the end for those who were not familiar with the kind of music I created.

 

– LB

 

 

Development Progress 12/30/18

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Okay, so this time I decided to take some footage from a couple of weeks ago to showcase some things that I’ve gotten done for the month of December:

I enjoyed putting this video together more than I thought I would and it took a lot less time than I anticipated as well so I’m thinking it would be a good idea to make more videos for future dev progress updates.

There was a lot of progress made this month even though the project’s not exactly where I’d like it to be right now.

Besides what’s shown in the video, here’s a quick breakdown of what all I’ve gotten done this month:

  1. All male and female custom player character hairstyles, skins, attachments, outfits, and faces ready for the demo.
  2. The design for the gameplay Hud UI.
  3. A few buldings for environments.
  4. The design for the character creation GUI.
  5. At least one digitally painted weapon type for each class.
  6. The GDD 90% completed (almost 80 pages)!
  7. The new title logo.
  8. The calm and battle tracks for the final stage in the game.
  9. The cannon attack animation for female characters.
  10. The female ADOL idle animation.
  11. Documentated abilities (for a new “trait” system) and Section ID names.

Some of these things took more than just this month alone to work on like the GDD and the composite character stuff for custom player characters.

It was pretty awesome how PSO included the afro as a hairstyle for custom characters despite it not being my personal preference. It felt iconic at the time to have an MMORPG include something like that so Astraverse is bringing it back!
It was pretty cool how PSO had the afro in it despite it being a hairstyle I personally didn’t prefer.  It felt iconic to have an MMORPG include something like that.

As for the game’s character creator, I didn’t finish it as soon as I hoped. A storm hit my area causing a power outage for several hours yesterday, so I wasn’t able to work on the game, unfortunately.

But, that’s okay. Game development is usually a very long and involved process so unexpected setbacks and delays shouldn’t come as a surprise. Besides, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a “perfect” development process for any game up until now.

In my honest opinion, the closest one to being “perfect” in recent memory would’ve been the development of Divinity Original Sin 2 but even Larian Studios experienced a power outage on the game’s launch day.

Any delays here right now are minor compared to that. But, as long as I’m getting at least one thing done (whether big or small) once a day, I’m making progress and I think that’s really the important thing.

– LB

Setbacks and “Throw-away” BGM

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The funny thing about game development (and pretty much any sort of creative project) is that there are almost always things that get cut from the final version.

Even though it’s quite early in Astraverse’s development, I’ve already chosen a couple of tracks to cut from the project–at least for now.

Now, a lot of people would probably disagree with me on this but there are a few reasons why I’ve cut some music stuff so early. For one thing–I’ve already composed about 60% – 70% of the entire soundtrack–Another main reason I’m making decisions on what goes and what stays is that my external hard drive just stopped working out of nowhere so I lost all of the project files for Astraverse’s music (along with all of the project files for the music I’ve produced, composed, recorded and released since 2010).

Fortunately, I had already saved every track that I had composed for Astraverse so far on to my local drive and a cloud drive. However, this means that I either have to re-do every track from scratch (if I ever wanted to change anything in them) or just treat them all as “final” versions.

This isn’t too much of a problem since I’ve spent a lot of time on the music already and I feel the tracks sound exactly the way I want them to. But there are a few tracks here and there that weren’t mixed well and a couple of them that I wasn’t sure I wanted to bring into the final game.

The following track was originally intended to be the BGM for the final area in the game (The Enemy Encounter version starts at 3:50).

There’s no need to worry about spoilers as this track’s been already replaced with something that I recently composed some time after my external hard drive failed.

And if you think it sounds good already–don’t worry, the new track is WAY better.

On the other hand, I MIGHT be able to find some use for this one somewhere in the game. But, there’s no plan for it now–I only need 12 environment tracks for the different places/planets that players will visit and those are already finished. I’m not worried about it right now.

 

This week, I’ve been dealing with this stupid bug while trying to import my animations into the game engine that I’m using and it’s taken about half the week to deal with the problem. Funny part was how simple it was to fix the issue. Even though the game engine’s compile window wasn’t explaining anything at all, it turned out to be that the names I was using for some files inside of the animation program were too long. After stressing out for about a couple of days, I ended up trying to rename everything and it finally worked!

Normally, I’d say this was a waste of time, but in reality, I learned something useful about importing my animations into the game engine that’ll save me the trouble for later on. Once I have some money to put into the project, I’m going to invest in a better animation program that will hopefully be more compatible with the game engine that I’m using (and hopefully will result in less issues like this week’s).

 

To be honest, this setback hit my schedule kinda hard and even though I’ve pretty much hit the ground running again with the game’s development ever since I fixed the problem, I don’t think I’ll be able to wrap up the character creator just yet.

But, there’s still this weekend so we’ll see what I can get done.

In the meantime, I’ll try to have something “special” prepared just in case I’m not able to follow through with that character creator by my next post.

 

– LB

Races of the Ze’re System

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Yep, that’s right–we have more lore in this post but a small update, too.

In Astraverse, there are 3 races: Humans, ADOLs and Neomans.

Male ADOL.png

ADOLs were the first race to be created by humans. The name ADOL is an acronym which stands for “Artifical Design(s) Of Life.” To put it simply, they’re androids–but in Ze’re, if a person calls them an “android” it’s like a negative racial term. ADOLs excel in physical strength but they are the weakest when it comes to using “Formulas” (which is Astraverse’s science-fiction equivalent to most RPGs’ “magic”). Unlike most robots in science-fiction stories, Adols are very human-like in that they can understand and feel emotions.

Female Neoman Adept2.PNG

Neomans are the youngest of the 3 races and they are made up of human DNA enfused with a form of energy called “plasma”–the same energy that is technologically altered to create “Formulas.” Because of this genetic alteration, Neomans have a much stronger connection to plasma allowing them to create stronger formulas. A side-effect of plasma mutation is a weaker body, so Neomans have less endurance and strength than the other 2 races.

 

Human Male

Humans are (obviously) the default/regular/normal/typical/average race with balancedabilities and appearances. Pretty much nothing notable here besides their back story. The humans of Astraverse’s story created the other 2 races and because of that, they tend to think they are better than the other 2 races.

 

 

 

 

I will make posts that showcases the ADOLs and Neomans as individual races.

Here’s a small update:

I’ve been working on a lot of GUI-related stuff this week. I kind of underestimated the need for that which is funny because the game is an RPG. I think this is because my last game was developed in the RPG Maker engine so I didn’t really need to worry much about UI stuff outside of customizing system and dialogue windows.

Here’s what a character’s basic gameplay hud will look like:

Astraverse gameplay UI final (blank example).png

The 4 hexagons at the bottom represent the “button palette”. This is where weapons, skills and items will be equipped. There are 4 more button palette slots available for when a player holds down the “R” trigger/button and also 4 more for when they’re holding down the “L” trigger/button. Altogether, there are 12 different button palette slots available.

I’m choosing to place this hub at the upper left corner of the screen for the first player and for other players–at the other 3 corners of the screen. I wanted to reduce as much UI clutter as possible on the screen because I want the environments to be very visible and the gameplay to feel as immersive as possible.

This week, I’m planning to finally finish up the character creation as I got a bit “sidetracked” with this hub stuff. Hopefully by the time I next post here, I’ll have a video showcasing it!

– LB

 

The Planets of Ze’re

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I think it’s a good time to start talking a bit about the setting of Astraverse.

Some of these things I may have briefly mentioned before but in this post, the goal is to go into a bit more detail.

 

Astraverse takes place in Ze’re, a fictional star system that contains 5 inhabitable planets: Jeavis, Ashara, Autovia, Croatis and Hautune.

I took some obvious inspiration from the Algol star system that was in the original Phantasy Star games on the Sega Genesis. I liked the idea of having more than one planet in the game to travel to and experience.

smallPlanet Jeavis

Jeavis

Jeavis is a hot planet and it’s closer than the other planets to the Ze’re system’s star. It has a red atmosphere and a red sky. It’s also covered in deserts. There will be a ring of astroids surrounding this planet which will be visible in the sky from the planet’s surface.

 

Ashara (left) & Autovia (right)

Ashara and Autovia are planets that share the same axis and they rotate around each other during their cycle around the star, Ze’re (this is probably not scientifically possible but I have read about the possibilities of 2 planets sharing an axis and that’s where this idea came from). They both have very similar atmospheres that are very “Earth-like.”

Ashara is a planet that’s filled with a lot of green. I like to call it a “paradise planet” so there’s going to be lots of trees, grassy fields, flowers–stuff like that.

Autovia, on the other hand, will be filled with cities. As a matter of fact, the entire planet will be a gigantic city. This is where most of the people in the Ze’re system will be taking up their residence. There’s this AI that built that were able to quickly build the planet-wide city on Autovia using a technology that can be seen across the sky of Autovia.

 

smallPlanet Croatis

Croatis

Croatis is a planet mostly covered in oceans. Not much is known about this planet from the beginning of the game’s story and because of that, I rather let it remain a mystery until people can actually experience the story and see for themselves!

 

smallnew Hautune

Hautune

Hautune is our “cold” planet. It’s covered in ice and snow and the cool thing about it is that it has a purple atmosphere–so the sky appears purple when seen from it’s surface.

 

I’m planning to add the Construction Tech to Autovia and the ring of astroids around Jeavis eventually, though. Should either show up in the demo of the game or the full game!

 

– LB