Posts from November & December 2024

22/12/2024 -- Soundtrack and Story Progress

Hello, and happy holidays! I've got two major milestones to share today.

Chapter 1 Complete!

Firstly, chapter 1 of SBH is now (mostly) complete! All cutscenes have been fully scripted, animated and coded, and all gameplay segments and relevant maps are playable. The only chapter-specific work left to be is drawing a few overworld maps that are currently exclusive to the very start of the game, which I'm putting off doing on the off-chance they end up being used again later and need to be redesigned.

Next up is Chapter 2, obviously, which is where the 'real' game starts, and the overworld and mechanics become fully available. It's going to involve a lot more work than the mostly linear first chapter, which is intimidating, but I'm very excited to finally get into making the real meat of the game.

It also means I might be able to start messing around with coding minigames and side content relatively soon, which I've been looking forward to. I've obviously prioritized making the actual game so far (despite a shadowy temptation to begin making the fishing mechanics early), and I'll likely continue to do that until relatively late in development--but I think coding the occasional minigame as I go along might be a nice way to break up the flow of development.

Soundtrack Progress

My biggest time sink over the past two weeks, though, has been making a start on composing the game's soundtrack! After months of spritework and cutscene code, I thought it might be a nice change of pace.

I've done tiny amounts of composing for the game in the past, but my original plan was to save most of the soundtrack until very late in development, as I'm not experienced at all with music and thought all the time and work required was not really worth the investment until everything else was finished. Thinking on it more, though, I realized that I was setting myself up to be miserable if I was going to be composing the *entire* soundtrack in one big lump, and that giving myself time to practice and learn alongside the rest of development would probably lead to better music overall.

...And so over the past fortnight I've refreshed myself on basic music theory and gotten back to it! Starting with a few early game cutscene tracks, the default battle theme, and a default boss battle theme.

They're not super impressive, but as someone who's never really had any musical training, I'm pretty happy with them. I've been kind of surprised how easy it can be to make things that sound okay once you know the very basics of chords, keys, scales and rhythm.

While I would love to have a great soundtrack, something that 'does the job' is the best I want to hope for at this stage in my musical career. Thankfully a nice thing about making music compared to my usual asset creation is that it's really easy to go back and make small changes, as well as recycle ideas that don't pan out for whatever reason. Making a battle theme that had the right 'mood' took so much trial and error that I accidentally created three spare melodies I can use for future songs!

Something I am especially excited (and anxious) to begin working on, are unique battle themes for each major boss fight, which I've had ideas in my head for for ages. I've always found the idea of trying capturing a character's personality in their theme music to be an incredibly fun and interesting one--the OSTs of the Guilty Gear and No More Heroes games in particular have been pretty inspirational for me in that regard. Hopefully I can do my imagination justice, haha.

How I'd source the soundtrack has been my biggest question with the project for a while now, so it feels great to finally be sorting it out. I'll post more music demos as I make them, and, once Livio's boss theme is done, I might go back and update the 6-24 Combat Demo to replace all the placeholder tracks. They've been haunting me for a while...

Conclusion and Personal Note

Chances are that this is going to be the last blog post of the year, so thank you for reading!

2024 has probably been the most productive year I've had for SBH, with the launch of the website, release of the demo, and a lot of other smaller things like making the maps and dialogue portraits. If I continue at the pace I'm going, I might actually be able to have Act 1 + Act 2 finished and released by this time next year--though don't hold me to that.

My 2025 is shaping up to be a potentially very big year, in which I'll be moving out of my current house and potentially changing jobs... but I'm sure I'll still make time to work on the game even during that, haha.

My current job has me working in a mall, which has unfortunately sucked a lot of the joy out of the holiday season because it makes my work busier and harder. Though, I have managed to scrape a little bit of it back this year by buying a Retroid Pocket as a gift to myself, which is a small handheld console designed for game emulation; sort of like a budget Steamdeck. I haven't used a portable console extensively since owning a 3DS as a tween, and the ability to play PS2 games on one has been sort of blowing my mind, even if a few don't run great. My favorite game I've tried on it so far has been 'Eternal Ring'. : )

Hopefully you all can find ways to enjoy the holidays and the new year as well. Until then, thanks for reading, and see you in 2025!

- HSTopaz

24/11/2024 -- Miscellaneous November Wrap-up

Hello! It's already the 24th...! The month has felt very fast for me...

My work on SBH over the past few weeks has been more of the same for the most part--a lot of menial spritework and cutscene code--so this is probably going to be a short post covering a few random noteworthy topics.

Story Progress

I've managed to make significant progress on the first chapter's cutscenes and battles, so here are a few screenshots and a clip from that:

It feels a little like I'm trying to animate an action movie in RPG Maker sometimes, but I'm happy with how they look so far. :)

Downtown Map

I've also managed to confront and create a gameplay-friendly draft of the 'Downtown' area mentioned in the previous post. Here's the before and after:

It's mostly generic placeholder buildings at the moment, barring the ones with unique designs, but I'll eventually get around to replacing them with more interesting and colorfully designed ones. I'd prefer to wait until I have some more of the game's sandbox-y side content implemented and fleshed out before I start doing that so I can design buildings that accommodate certain sidestories or minigames.

Animation Debug Tool

I also made myself another small, janky debug tool--this time for testing out different cutscene and battle animations in-game!

Most animations in SBH work on a simple 'event' system that triggers certain 'events' like sound effects or pauses at certain frames of animation. Previously whenever I'd want to tinker with animations it'd involve recompiling the entire game every time to adjust for changes in the event code, which was very annoying. This debug mode, however, just lets me load animation code as plain text from the clipboard, and converts it into the correct format to be used as code, allowing me to test out minor changes very quickly during runtime.

It probably isn't that exciting to anyone except me, but it's been a massive improvement to my workflow.

Conclusion

That's about all for now. I've been talking a lot more about graphic design than game design lately. Hopefully I'll have something more exciting to show off in the next post...

If you want to read more, I've also finally made a character page for Leon, which you can check out here.

Thanks for reading! | - HSTopaz