video games

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

Dev Progress Update 3/24/21

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As some are probably aware, I have full-time work that eats up enough time to choke out potential progress to Astraverse’s development.

However, thanks to some help that I’m getting from my supervisor, I’ve been able to work more on Astraverse-related stuff during downtime–that’s how I was able to rebuild the site and go back to providing updates as well as reestablish the Discord channel.

Anyway, today I continued to work on the narrative event system that will play a big role in the gameplay structure and flow as well as the story. I haven’t explained this yet but that’s because the last update was about 3 years ago and, well, things have changed a bit since then. Not TOO much. Astraverse is largely the same game but it’s overall concept and narrative approach has grown since then.

Behold! Astraverse’s Narrative System

Back in 2019, during E3, they announced that Phantasy Star Online 2 was coming to the US. Now, this made me think about the future of Astraverse. Astraverse was originally supposed to “fill” the void that Phantasy Star behind in the past decade but in it’s own way. So I thought to myself–“If PSO2 is coming out, should I continue working on Astraverse? And if I do, is it just going to forever be in the shadow of PSO2?”

Well, the answer is that it doesn’t have to be. Astraverse can be it’s own game even if it’s heavily inspired by Phantasy Star. So, I brainstormed on ways to make it stand out. Honestly, I think I was overthinking it–there are many games out there that are heavily inspired by the devs’ favorites and that doesn’t usually take way from those games but in some ways it adds to them.

But, I still wanted to explore ideas that would add to the experience and at the same time create an entirely new experience.

That’s when I came up with the narrative adventure system. Basically, it works like a choose-your-own-adventure game but with the real-time side-scrolling beat ’em up gameplay in-between narrative events.

Basically, a player will read flavor text and dialogue that will include descriptive scenarios that the player can imagine–like in a tabletop RPG. Then there will be dialogue options or choices that the player will choose from to progress through these events which may or may not alter the path the player takes while adventuring on a planet.

In between areas of a planet’s “stage,” players will encounter these events. And they will work for up to 4 players, with each player taking turns to interact with scenarios.

Another example of the narrative system

This not only allows for the game to become much more immersive with it’s storytelling but it also lifts a bit of the burden that would come with other styles of storytelling such as fully-voiced or non-voiced cutscenes. It also helps the game to stand out. On top of that, it makes it far more reasonable to implement “user-generated” experiences such as a party’s ship crash-landing on a planet or a quest popping up out of nowhere due to certain conditions being fulfilled through previous quests. This also allows for me to explore more options such as unique decisions/options in quests that depend on certain stats.

Anyway, I’ve been working on that lately as I’ve completed most of the other in-game systems and I’m getting closer to being able to build a playable demo. Once I’m done with the narrative system this week, I’ll be trying to test it out and then I’ll be moving into working on building out the gameplay loop of a typical session in Astraverse. Stay tuned for more of the finalized info on the game and more updates as I’ll be pumping out more soon.

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

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

Character Creation & Stuff

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Ever since my wife and I came up with a decent number of outfits and hairstyles for the characters in the game, I decided to focus my efforts into finishing up the character creator.

Here’s the song I composed for the character creation:

The funny thing about making a character creator is that it’s not really hard to design. But, it can get pretty complex to implement once you start adding more possibilities for the characters that are created.

For example, a lot of games (especially in 2D) tend to have a simple editor where you can change your character’s class, palette colors and his/her name.

Not with Astraverse.

Because the game is 2D, I could’ve probably gotten away with a simple class, name and palette editor but I wanted to make it feel more like a personal experience so here are some things that are ready and being implemented in the character creator (and what’s already possible so far):

Custom Hairstyles

Custom Hair colors

Custom Eyes/eye colors

Custom skin colors

Custom colors for make-up (girls only)

Custom outfits

Of course, there’s more–like race-specific stuff such as skin types for the Android race (we’re calling them ADOLs–I can do a lore post later on). But that’s the stuff that’s mostly for every race.

Anyway, the toughest part (in my opinion) has been setting up the character creation menu. It’s funny how things that sound simple in theory are harder to program than things that sound complex. The character creator is just a menu but after programming it, I’m starting to see why a lot of games don’t bother with the feature.

Here’s what the menu should look like in-game (hopefully by the end of next week):

character creation class menu example

Once the character creator is finished, I’ll also have the character saving system ready to go, too (as they will need to both be implemented at the same time). Then, I’ll move on to the character data selection screen and then to fixing up some UI-related stuff.

 

For you guys who are following, thanks a lot for the support! Right now, I’m experimenting on when’s the best time to post here. So, at least, for the first few weeks, expect some changes in the time I post updates and stuff.

And if anybody is into the idea of a 2D (offline) Phantasy Star Online inspired co-op experience–subscribe here to stay updated on Astraverse’s development!

– LB

Should’ve Started This Before But Here Goes…

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I’m not really sure of what the best opening start to a blog is….

I figured I’d just go ahead and say that instead of pretending like I have all the answers or know completely what I’m doing. 

I’m starting this blog because I’m currently working on a serious game project inspired by my favorite video game “Phantasy Star Online” and I’d like to not only give a proper way for others to track the game’s progress but also (and mainly, to be honest) to gain the project some sort of following so I can put some food on the table while I’m at it.

I’m Daniel (DJ is what my friends call me) and I’m a part-time music artist (Last BeNeVoLeNcE–I’m actually “googleable”)  and, of course, a game developer. 

As you can tell by the title in the heading logo of the site, the game I’m working on is called “Astraverse” and it’s set to be a 2D game co-op RPG that’s A LOT LIKE PHANTASY STAR ONLINE.

I’d even go as far as to say that it’s a “PSO-like” (I get this from the “Souls-like” & “Rogue-like” terms) or a “PSO-clone” but it’s still going to be quite different. For one thing, it’s a 2D game–which already comes with a set of differences. But, it’s basically my own 2D twist on the gameplay from the legendary fantasy sci-fi title that some of us know and love. 

Anyway, I’d like to keep these blog posts as short as I possibly can so that it’s easier to follow (some will probably be long to cover more in-depth topics). I’ll cover the current progress of the project in another post and I’ll do maybe another post or 2 that’ll go further in explaining why I decided to work on this game and how it will be the same and/or different from PSO. 

Thanks for coming–don’t forget to subscribe at the bottom the page if you haven’t already!

LB