Artisan: Going Home Again by Unseen Kingdom
Community Forums/Showcase/Artisan: Going Home Again by Unseen Kingdom
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| *EDIT* An error with the crafting/tile swap mini game has been repaired. If you experienced that error from a previous download, please uninstall and re-install our latest build below. If after that you continue to experience any errors, please let us know! Thank you~ ---------------------------------------------------------- So this is a demo of my studio's first game! Woo! We're still working on getting a website online, but I couldn't wait to share this with someone! XD It's called Artisan: Going Home Again and it's a life simulator/visual novel hybrid. Here's some pics:  And a link to the demo, if you'd like to try it yourself: Artisan: Going Home Again I'll add a link to the website as soon as it's ready. Thanks for reading this, and take care! |
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| Hello. Congratulations. Could you add a couple of screenshots from the game and a small description of what it is about to your post? |
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| Oh! Sure, no problem! Hold on... All right! all the info's on the top post. Sorry for the wait. ^_^ |
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| What was this made in? |
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| @Chapman7 Our game? It was made in Blitz Max with the Grey Alien framework. |
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| Wow, that looks awesome! Extremely good job on this! Very well done! Simply Amazing! |
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| Awww! Thank you! ^_^ I imagine myself sending you buttercream cupcakes as a show of gratitude for your encouraging words! |
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| Looks nice -- good luck with it! |
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| Thank you! |
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| I like the toon look (color setup, line strength), that male char with long hair is not of my type but hmm maybe I am not having the right gender to decide such a thing. Looks like a typical "Asian game" (nicely done backgrounds + clean character art) ... grats to the artist. No words about "gameplay" (not tested) - also no idea how "variating" the game is (amount of scenes, story varieties). Good luck with your sales. bye Ron |
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| Cute game. I like the "manga" style. The music are nice too. That kind of game is obvioulsy targeting girls. Did you envisaged a Facebook port ? |
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| Since there's been so much talk about the art, I thought I'd ask my sister (the artist) if she'd like to say anything to all of you. She did, and the following is her response to your comments: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- @GaryV Aww, thanks so much! You're nothing but sweetness^_^ @xlsior Thank you! All the best for your endeavors too. @Derron Wow, good eye Ron! I did production art restoration before we started on this game, so my technique tends to have an animation ("toon") leaning in it. It's cool that you were able to pin that. The game has over a dozen endings and 800 individual dialog files. I'm not sure where that fits in your rating, but I can say it took me more than two years to write and illustrate. I believe one ending can take about 3-5 hours to play through. My sister would know more about that though. I'm sorry if my character art isn't to your liking. My own hair is really long, so I tend to think of hair Justin's length (Justin is the boy in the first screen cap) as being pretty short. If I draw it much shorter, I usually end up feeling sad for the character. So I avoid it^^ You might like Allen or Mr. Miller though! They're both as neatly trimmed as one can get and still be fun to draw. Hmm. Maybe we need to include more about the characters in future posts, huh? I was so focused on gameplay, (Hence Justin explaining a gameplay element to the player screen cap) that I didn't think about those first impressions character graphics can make. That might be a really good idea! Thanks for the feedback^_^ @Pingus Thank you! I'm glad you like my style, and that the music fits nicely. I really wanted to make a fun game with sweet characters and a compelling story. I'm very glad if other girls like it too! I hope boys don't feel like I was trying to exclude them though. I hope lots of people will play it and smile! As for Facebook... that's probably more up my sister's alley. We don't have any immediate plans for going cross platform with this, since it's not something Blitz Max can do, as far as I know. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And I'm back! Regarding the two topics she pointed back to me: 1.) You might be able to get some endings in 2 hours if you know what you're doing, but I'd say 3 to 5 hours is a good estimate for an average run-through. 2.) I'm not real knowledgeable on how to develop games for Facebook admittedly, but if there was a strong show of interest for it, I would certainly want to learn more. Thanks again for listening! |
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| Congrats for having such a skilled sister Mine just is skilled in playing games ;D @time to produce images I know how long a pixel art image in a moderate resolution (~ 760x380 are mine) takes ... and this is nothing happening at one evening. If you have some kind of devblog ... showing off how the art "evolved", please drop the link in this thread - am always interested in such things. @long hair: Do not worry, I thin it fits to the targeted audience (I think you are not targetting people prefering military games or bloody 1st person shooters). Maybe next time spend that poor guy a belly button :p. @trimmed hair I know that "teachers" (the name "Mr. Miller" sounds like a teacher) more often have that short hair cut instead the "rebellious" long hair. It is like that famous "bright greyish" stripe in the hair of older black people. @story endings The problem of graphic/interactive novels in my personal point of view is the following: replayability. If I know the "main aspects" of a story, the different routes must have their branching at important points of the route. These decisions must be "heavy" ones ... eg. trying to save ones live - or the live of another person. All decisions must lead to something "changing" ... or sometimes, change nothing at all (this must be presented in a way players recognize it in that moment - .oO("you cannot change this") ). Another "nice twist" is to play from different POVs ... so eg. run into that accident the "other character" did not avoid ...this even gets more interesting if the "decisions" of the past games are taken into consideration. This way is a preferable one if you want to tell a more complex story which exposes its character details when playing from different "POVs" (now you understand why that character was so sad that day that he did not watch the streets when crossing). @presentation It is a developers forum, so character introduction is not that important I think. We are more interested in "Features" and way more interested in "How it sales" and "How it is done" (frameworks used, development time - and even step by step screenshots of how the art is done are nice to sees (especially for me :D)) bye Ron |
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| Wow, Derron, yours is a fun brain to pick! Here's my sister, with her thoughts on your post: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @Developers blog Hmm... That's a neat idea. It didn't occur to me that in production art is something people might like to see. Maybe I can try something like that for our next game? You have to be careful with spoilers though. So you do pixel art too? That's really neat! Is there someplace I can go see your work? @Something's missing... Lol, a belly button? OK, if it'll make you feel better, it's no trouble to add one^^. I'm really surprised, it never occurred to me that would be something someone might miss. It's minimal though, so I don't think it will draw a lot of attention to his midriff. Which is good, I never wanted that to be the point of his character. An open hoodie gives the look of a carefree spirit, I think. It makes sense for him, as a sidewalk artist. But the heat that reflects off a sidewalk in summer is SO intense. A hoodie with a lot of layers underneath would be way too warm. @ Something like a teacher. Mr. Miller is a retired ship's engineer who runs a certain store in town. He's something like a surrogate father to Allen, so he definitely has the role of a mentor. He's a bit gruff, but puts a lot of value in the gentility he does posses. His hair is an even medium grey with a short beard, and no mustache. @Your point of view... Ah yes, POV is definitely something I prefer. To me, having multiple endings in a story with dramatic changes is hard, because at some point, you must consider one ending to be true, and the others false. If the hero becomes a villain in one ending, the hero is in prison in a second ending, and in a third ending the hero is the ruler of the whole kingdom... what is the hero when you make a sequel? What are the lives of the supporting characters? What is the state of their world? So I wrote Artisan to have all the endings shed a small light on what would be the greater whole of their world. All of the characters are linked to each-other, whether or not they know you. The more endings you clear, the more you get to know about the things that happened to them before you met, and have some inkling as to what your and their futures will be. @Not intended for shooting game fans. Not unless they also like a good interactive story game now and then too. (I know a few who play both. They're always welcome!) Artisan is very much a slice-of-life story. Many games deal with large, dramatic tales of evil entities squelching the will of all except YOU -- the defiant hero! I can see where those are exciting! I've played more than a few, and they're lots of fun! But I wanted to make a game where the adversary was... change. Not evil, but a natural part of life. How do you confront it? Do you overcome? Do you grow to accept it? Does it take you apart, or make you stronger? Or both? Mostly though, I just wanted a tale of hope, perseverance, and friendship, that will make people smile and give them courage to face the things they want to change themselves. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Isn't she a saint? :-D Thanks for reading! |
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| @ pixel art The backgrounds and ingame sprites of our game at www.tvgigant.de are actually hand pixeled... on some I had to cheat using wood textures or small digital resized pictures as this would be to tedious to reach the desired "result" and after some days of moving your mouse cursor around ... you get tired of looking on the same screen again and again while your users want to test out game features instead of seeing an improved office room. But as pixels and handdrawing is something needing too much time (especially as "reusage" of objects is not possible in all cases and image resolution is another problem) I tend to do everything in 3D as soon as we released our "1.0" But in no way I reach the skill of your sister, I am more the programmer "enforced" to do some arts as nobody else is willed (or... I have to admit ... do not achieve the "minimum" of skill I somehow want for our game - I do not like all those cheap and ugly android <1$ games - and ours is free/open source). @story sometimes there is no need to have whole story endings changed ... sometimes story twists will merge at the end - sometimes you just see the whole story ending from another pov (other screens) so each story ending tells another part of this special ending. Going back to this "accident" example: one character has to decide whether to drive against a wall, injuring theirself - or to drive on the boardwalk risking persons. Now they might injure another person. If you then play this story again, you play this person, read about his portion of the whole plot ... and then ... bang, get suddenly hit by a car, black screen, waking up in the hospital, live goes on. This whole accident must not have a consequence ... it might just show the player: all your actions have effects, desired or undesired. In a storyplot containing many persons/groups such situations are then the spots in the story where everything "comes together" (or different characters meet first time... or do not meet and therefor meet in another situation while otherways they already would know and behave slightly different). I understand the way you both think about stories: there is no need to have always the "normal dude" evolving into a hero fighting the worlds maddest villains. Sometimes that "small" things are nice too. And finally: it is YOUR story and your soul you pressed into - you have to feel comfortable with it - and you have to be able to think about "sequels". @Mr Miller and the belly button Ok, so an engineers "typical hair" isn't the longest, yepp, as female scientists tend to have glasses :p. There is no need to add a belly button - I just wanted to mention that people look at different aspects of things - and mine was the missing belly button (as a "detail" - like the button on the throusers). But hmm .. think we derailed that "showcase" thread a bit, sorry :D Keep us informed about further progress or "sale stories" (also things people in a "dev forum" like to read - at least I do). bye Ron |
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| Miss Blitz, Is it a demo with limited resources ? Some screens seems locked. I wanted to play the craft game but it leds to an error (a file missing in incbin), you probably already know, seems quite obvious bug. Btw it's pretty hard to play that craft game without at least a 'fixed' tile ;-) I like the memory, are there more (more complicated, different tiles) in the full game ? I play on my tablet, unfortunatly blitzmax do not handle the touchscreen by default and for example, playing the memory require to double-tap each tile which is less fun and time consuming. For JM4 I had to adjust the gameplay for touchscreen device. I guess that the market of such devices is still very small but all devellopers, especially casual devellopers may have to think about it. |
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| Hi Pingus, sorry for the delay! @Missing incbin file Okay, that has just been corrected and the new demo reuploaded. Honestly, I have no idea how I missed that bug! o_O Thank you for pointing it out. @Memory difficulty modes I'm afraid that, other than randomizing card positions each match, and a shorter time limit if you try to play the game with low health, the sketching/memory game doesn't change that much. As your level raises, the number of and quality of your rewards increases, if that's any consolation. -_- The crafting game gets new boards as you level, though, with more complicated images and bigger rewards. @Adjusting for the tablet market Hmm... That's good advice. I really wouldn't know where to start making Artisan tablet-ready with what I have currently, but I'll definitely plan for it on future projects! Thanks so much! |
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| Miss Blitz, I found usefull code for detecting touch devices there: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=102229 |
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| I totally have to try this out. Thank you! |
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