As I talked about last time, shelving Wilderness was hard. But, I was fortunate enough to come up with a new idea that was able to salvage a lot of the guts of Wilderness to get me started well ahead of zero.
So, today, I’m happy to introduce you to Last Call at the Bleakwatch Inn.
Sure, the town of Bleakwatch has an unpleasant name, but it’s a town with an unpleasant job: make sure the Ultimate Evil sealed in the nearby tower stays sealed there, forever.
As you might expect, they’ve gone and botched it. Now Evil is back at full power, and has declared that the entire town and everyone in it will be destroyed come sunrise.
While most people have fled, a few stalwart souls remain at the inn, downing one last drink for courage before they march into the tower and try and put Evil back where it belongs before daybreak.
At its core, Last Call is a series of small tactical encounters tackled by a team of up to four unique characters. The game is structured as a roguelite, with both in-run progression as you improve your characters and skills, and a meta progression as you unlock new options for future runs.
The bulk of the game takes place in the encounters, which I’m focusing on building into a fast, but tactical experience. Player units and enemies face on opposing hex grids, with a variety of options for movement and targeting based on their (or their opponents’) positions. The battles are turn-based, broken into rounds, with the opportunity at the start of each round to see exactly how and when enemies will act, giving you time to plan your own turns to survive and win.
It’s got some of the positional elements of Darkest Dungeon, mixed with the knowledge-based planning of Into the Breach. My hope is that each encounter will be satisfying from a decision-making standpoint without devolving into an analysis slog.
Along the way through the Tower, you’ll upgrade their characters and gain new skills, or improve existing ones. You can also select skills that will persist into the next run, giving you a leg up and a chance to craft each unit into something that fits your playstyle. Additionally, you might rescue some captives of the Ultimate Evil, unlocking them for future runs as well and expanding your options.
While that’s a very high level view of things, over the course of these devlogs I’ll dive into a lot more detail about the various systems, balancing, planning, and the inevitable trials and tribulations of putting it all together.
In this entry, though, I want to talk about something a little different: placeholder art.
Hitting a Pixel Wall
It may not sound like a particularly exciting topic, but in the early stages it can be a very important one. It’s also a highly personal one - I know everybody has their own preferences and approach, which is why I can only talk about my own perspective and experiences with it.
A lot of people will tell you to not even think about art until you’ve finished your prototype, and this is sound advice. For some people, that means having nothing more than basic geometric shapes representing everything in your game while you hammer away at mechanics and code.
I’ve tried that approach, and for something like the initial stages of Station Zeta, it was fine. Having a block jumping around other blocks was great for figuring out how those blocks should feel.
But for myself, I hit a stage pretty quickly where I need something more. I’m a very visual person, and I’m also a lover of story - if what I’m seeing on screen doesn’t somewhat match up with the story I’m telling myself in my head, I get frustrated.
This can be a problem!
Given that I mostly work in pixel art, I found myself spending far too much time in Wilderness trying to make placeholder art that was, well, good. Instead of just having a few simple silhouettes to stand in for battle avatars, I was finding myself redoing them over and over again just to have something I knew wasn’t even final art.
When I switched gears to Last Call, I realized I was doing the same thing again. As the sole dev on this, I knew this was not a practical way forward. But I also knew I would demoralize myself if I wasn’t working with something that jived with the pictures in my head.
Then it hit me: I spend a lot of time sketching out game ideas in notebooks, everything from mechanics to stories to character designs. With all this stuff already on paper, why didn’t I just draw my placeholder art?
So that’s what I did. With my pen tablet and Krita, I realized I could crank out little sketches of my placeholder art exponentially faster than anything I was doing in Aseprite, and I felt a lot better about it. Sure, they are messy little drawings, but fit what I’ve already pictured and with a much faster production time. And, personally, I find them kind of charming in such a rough state.
Making that break, and accepting that placeholders just needed to be placeholders, has massively improved both my productivity on Last Call, not to mention my mood.
Again, I know this isn’t the answer for everyone. The point is find what works for you in a way that will help you move forward to the important bits. Don’t let perfect placeholders be the enemy of good. Heck, don’t let good placeholders be the enemy of just ok placeholders. In the end, you can spend that energy on making your prototype the best it can be, then worrying about more permanent art later. If you need to think outside your normal flow, try it - switch from pixel art to hand drawn, or even vice-versa! Find some free asset packs that are close enough to work for what you need. There are a lot of options if you let yourself take them.
Next time: Diving into the player units, archetypes, and the joy of spreadsheets.
P.S. And don't forget, Station Zeta is out now!
Run, jump, shoot, and think your way to safety in this retro-inspired 2D puzzle-platformer. Station Zeta is out of control, and you'll have to deal with crazed robots, terribly designed station machinery, and blatant safety hazards as you try to make your escape across over 35 levels.
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<a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/2950320/Station_Zeta/">Station Zeta on Steam</</a>
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