Croissant Moon Games

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Date a Dino has been released!

Finally! After 7 long weeks of anticipation, we’ve published our game! You can play it in your browser, for FREE, right here: https://croissantmoongames.itch.io/date-a-dino

Unfortunately, we had to cut the Velociraptor and Pterodactyl from the game due to time constraints. On the plus side, this means that we were able to polish up the T.Rex route and now it’s better than ever! Improved dialogue and narration and additional choices have been added. Also, we finally implemented music into the game! Date a Dino’s soundtrack features 4 lovely pieces by Will: the museum theme, the bowling alley theme, the ice cream shop theme and the arcade theme. 

The development process has been grueling, but we made it out alive. Hopefully you can do the same in our game. We hope you enjoy Date a Dino!

- Aaron, Will, Rosie & Erin

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Deadline Approaching!

October 3rd, 2019

Welcome back! 

As the week comes close to its end, we are even closer to the deadline for our game!  With this comes a lot of last-minute touches and ideas to pull the game together.

After formal testing last week, we had a lot of feedback to review and then improve upon.  We completed 2 formal tests and found mainly there was a lot of room for improvement in our dialogue.  

1. Our dialogue told the player how to feel, instead of giving the player the tools and storyline to develop feelings on their own.

To fix this I took out all dialogue that stated things like “You’re feeling nervous...” or “The T-Rex is embarrassed...” and replaced it with dialogue that sets the scene and shows the player what is happening.

2. We were missing character development through the narrative.

Our players we unable to feel any emotional connection to the game because the narrative didn’t go into enough detail about the dinosaur.  A lot of our dialogue didn’t show any of the T-Rex’s personality.  To fix this we worked on adding more text that was less direct to the choices of the game, but it built up more of a story of who the dinosaur was. 

3. Our dialogue needed to be more interactive.

The classic question of how to keep your players interested in playing the entire game was definitely something we needed to put more time into thinking about. To make our game more interactive I added more user input options - and then used those responses all over the game, split up our scenes so that the user had to click to get more text, and added more choice options through the scenes. 

Twine Layout for Date-A-Dino

As you can see in the picture above, our scenes became a lot more complex with the additional options and inputs.

Enter favorite ice cream flavor screenshot

In this screenshot, you can see one of the added user input choices, “What is your favorite ice cream flavor?”  

Our games structure and narrative have definitely improved so now we are just working to put the final pieces together and working to create the best user experience of our abilities.  More updates to come!

-Rosie M

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Refining the Game

Progress on Date a Dino has been trucking along! We’ve received a bunch of feedback from our formal testing phase, and now we’re working hard on implementing that feedback. One of the changes I’ve made is adding an outline to the text, so it is more readable in front of the varying backgrounds in the game. We are also overhauling the narration and dialogue in the game, in order to add more flavor and personality to the date. Another thing we’re working on is combining the T.Rex images with the background images, so that the T.Rex will always be centered, and the text will be in front of him so you don’t have to scroll down to read it. The location of the T.Rex can make the game look awkward at times, as you can see here:

And the last thing we’re working on is implementing custom music into the game, which has proved to be difficult so far. We have a little more than a week left to finish the game, so hopefully we can work out the kinks by then!

-Aaron Waldman

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Visit Original Link

Test upload of a song planned for Date a Dino

[ta-dah-games-blog]

Art Update!

What’s up, gamers? Ta-Dah! Games! is back again with another dev update!

A lot of our recent posts have focused on the story and programming aspects of Growforth, so today I thought I’d update you guys on the artistic side of things.

Personally, I’m still pretty new when it comes to digital art, so creating the backgrounds has taken a lot of time. However, as I’m getting used to the process, I’m moving quicker and learning new techniques. First, I usually start by sketching on paper some of the key elements of whatever background I’m creating. For example, in the cave scene, this would include the crystals on the wall and the stalagmites/stalactites. I’m much more comfortable drawing on paper, so this step makes it easier for me to then have a reference to look at when I’m trying to replicate it digitally.

Here’s a sketch planning out the design of some of the mushroom trees in their scene.

Next, I open up Clip Studio Paint and start sketching the outline of the background, usually beginning with the player’s path and building around that. In certain areas, such as forests, it’s VERY important to make use of the layering tool. This makes it much easier to erase certain parts of objects far in the back while keeping the objects in front intact. It also allows me to select certain parts of a layer and move it around to see how it fits in different areas. Layering is also very useful for the next step… painting!

A WIP sketch of the mushroom forest. The basic outlines are there and painting has begun. Further sketching for trees in the way back is done later.

When painting, I start at the front and work my way back. In the beginning, I first focus on trying to get the right base color for whatever is being painted. Once that base color is filled in, I start messing around with textures, gradients and shadows. This usually takes quite a while, considering I have little previous experience doing so, so it’s very much trial and error. 

After the key elements are colored, I switch to the ground and the background of the background, for lack of a better word. At this point I usually start with a base color for the background and outline parts of trees from there. This may sound a bit backwards, but it’s much easier for me to know when there’s no white space left, and saves me from drawing an endless amount of trees. Then, I add a layer to the very bottom of all my layers and fill it entirely with a base color that’s used to make all the colors more uniform and further ensure I have no white space left. In the cave scene, for example, this color would be a dark gray. 

Once everything is outlined and colored, I clean up the outlines and save the background, but it’s not done yet! I then make a copy of the background and add a blur effect to it. This blurred background is used in place of the original whenever something appears on screen, such as an object or a character, making them stand out more. 

Here’s an example of both final backgrounds for the bridge scene.

As someone who entered game development as primarily a programmer, getting the chance to improve my art skills is both incredibly awesome and quite a challenge. However, I really enjoy this process and look forward to further improving my skills in future games!

- Clarissa McCarthy

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Hello from the Art Person!

Wow it’s been a little bit since I last did an art update huh? Well, I’ve got a lot of stuff to show so let’s jump right into it!

First we have our T-Rex outlined and ready to go in the game!

There he is! He’s a little off center because we are currently working through some in game formatting issues that require me to move him around a bit. However, I think h looks very cute. He’s currently just filled in with white so he stands out against the background. Hopefully I’ll get to coloring him soon!

But our dear T-Rex friend isn’t happy all the time, he be grumpy sometimes:

Or VERY ANGRY:

Don’t worry though, I made sure to make him extremely happy as well:

Along with our dino friend, I’ve drawn up some lovely backgrounds!

Here’s the museum:

And here’s the bowling alley:

Finally, the ice cream shop: 

With the backgrounds, I tried to go for a kind of doodley, not too polished style, to keep things light and fun. The beige background color is for contrasting with our dinosaur character art. Any who remember my original concept sketches will notice a new face in the ice cream shop. his name is Dave and he has big dreams but right now he has to work real hard to pay off his college debts. I’m sure he’ll serve you and your dino date of choice the best ice cream this side of Pangaea. 

That’s all for now, but I got more art coming soon!

-Erin Marczewski

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Visit Original Link

[croissantmoongames-blog]

More Progress

Over the last week we’ve been taking a close look at what we already have in place for our game, Date a Dino.  We have implemented a full branch of the storyline, the T-Rex path, but we still have some more things to do with it before we can say that it is complete as a path.

On that note, we did formal testing this week! We presented our game to two testers, and asked for feedback - and feedback we got.

Firstly, we are working on issues regarding the presentation of text.  Our dialogue thus far has been mostly blocks of dialogue, which was a problem - a big block of dialogue isn’t the most appealing thing, so we are taking steps to improve it.  We’re planning to implement a dialogue box with a button for progressing through text, but we haven’t settled on the design for it yet.  

(the current text layout)

Now, on to something different.

Music! We’ve made some more progress on the game’s soundtrack!  As of writing this post, the background music for the museum has been completed.  It was composed to be simple, loopable, and above all, pleasant to listen to.  It was created under these three premises because it is, after all, background music - not foreground music.  It’s there to enhance the gameplay, not divert attention from it.  A simple song won’t distract the player, a loopable song can be repeated (near) seamlessly, and a pleasant song is, well, pleasant.

So, here’s what you can expect to hear when you play! (See the audio post directly after this one to hear the Museum OST!)

-Will White

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Alpha Testing and Writing Improvements

September 19, 2019

Welcome back to our blog!

With in the past week, we’ve made a lot of cool improvements to “Date-a-Dino” and we're finally starting to see it come together!

Over this past weekend, we completed our alpha testing.  With the art concepts, music concepts, and basic dialogue all loaded into our twine project we had enough of a “game” to let others tell us what they thought. 

This is a picture of our first playtester working her way through the game

In total, we administered 4 alpha tests.  They went well. Mostly.

All of our playtesters were entertained by the idea of our game, I mean with the idea of a talking dinosaur how could you not be? But our initial delivery was a little weak, especially with the writing. 

We found that we had written the narrative in a way where it told the player how they were supposed to be feeling, rather than creating an experience for the player where they could determine their actual emotions.  Along with this, we had a lot of the dinosaurs dialogue that also expressed his emotions, and I think it would be more interesting if the players could see the dinosaurs emotions instead. 

On top of that, we are going to try to make our users experience more interactive. Almost all of our playtesters chose the “enter name: “ option when they were presented with it.  I think that adding more options where the user can input their choice instead of the user just selected a choice would keep the player interested in the game.  We also are going to improve the wording of the pre-determined choices so that they are more descriptive to the player.

I have also begun working on the UI designs because right now this is our very basic UI:

Here you can see the “What’s your name?” player input screen.

...and it could definitely use some updates to make the visual experience more exciting.

As this article states, a good UI does two things:

It does what the user thinks it will do; and

It gives the user feedback so they know what it did.

For our game, this means we not only need to update the visual UI, but also the design of our choice options for the passages they follow. There were times our playtesters felt as if they didn’t agree with all of the presented choices, and therefore were pressured into just selecting the one that sounded best.  For a visual novel, we want our players to feel as if they are determining the outcome of the novel themselves, not just selecting choices because it's all they can do.

Moving forward we are going to have to work on implementing all of the different aspects of this project together so they fit seamlessly.

Stay tuned for more, we are getting excited as the release date is getting closer each day!

-Rosie 

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Alpha Version!

We now have an alpha version of Date a Dino! Right now there’s only the T-Rex path, but we plan on implementing the Pterodactyl and Raptor paths soon. In Twine, the T-Rex path looks like this:

Twine has been surprisingly easy to learn. I was able to implement the various choices throughout the date pretty quickly. I also figured out how to save the dinosaur’s mood as a variable and make each of the choices affect that variable, and then I used an if statement to make that variable affect the ending. We got a few people to playtest the game, and got some valuable feedback, like to make the choices affect the dinosaur’s dialogue earlier on, and to add more narration between choices. Most of the writing and all of the art are placeholders for now, but I’m already starting to get a picture of what the game will look like in the end. Here’s a screenshot of the start of the game:

As you can see, the text is very simple right now. I’m planning to add a box around the text to make it stand out more from the background, and I’m also planning to have the dinosaur’s portrait appear over the various backgrounds in the game. I’m looking forward to adding to and improving on the game in the coming weeks!

-Aaron Waldman

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Environmental Concepts!

Hello! here are the sketches I made for the background environments that our little dino dating sim will take place in. 

Here’s the first sketches of the museum (top) and the bowling alley (bottom:

The museum is supposed to be our opening scene, to establish that this game is all about dinosaurs. So, I put in a little T-Rex fossil on display. I drew inspiration from my trips to the Museum of Natural History when I was younger. I especially remember the big T-Rex in the middle of one of the fossil rooms, which is why I picked it to put in this background art.

The bowling alley is one of our “dating” scenes. The whole game actually really takes place in a sort of bowling alley complex, and this is for the scenes where you and your dino date actually do some bowling. Turns out bowling lanes are harder to draw than I thought they would be. the perspective is tricky, and it’s pretty difficult to give the gutters any depth at all. A lot more perspective was involved than I thought there would be.

Here are the sketches for the ice cream/food stand (top) and the arcade scenes (bottom):

The top image is for our ice cream scene. It’s based on those food vendors one would find in a rec center. The kind where they serve hot dogs and mozzarella sticks and have this old soft serve machine that looks like it’s 100 yours old. i might add a little dinosaur employee behind the counter later, but I have yet to decide what species it would be. I also need to come up with things for the menus to say. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with enough clever puns to fill them. 

The arcade scene includes games from the stores of different routes available to the player in the game. The claw machine is from the T-Rex route. It might be hard to tell in this rough sketch, but the machine will be filled with cute little dino plushies. The racing game is from the Velociraptor route. I modeled it after all those “Xtreme Racing Simulator” games that seem to take up their own corner in pretty much every arcade. This one though, will obviously have a dinosaur themed twist. The arcade cabinet on the left isn’t actually from any of the routes, but I wanted to add it to give it that retro arcade feel. The game itself is Bubble Bobble, a classic game that just so happens to star 2 bubble blowing dinosaurs. The name labels on each of the games will each be more vibrant, but for now I stuck with just coming up with names. 

Hopefully I’ll be able to translate these into real game backgrounds soon!

- Erin Marczewski

[croissantmoongames-blog]

Progress!

We’ve officially begun working on making the thing!

Over the last week we’ve begun to flesh out the storyline for Date-a-Dino, and have begun developing the game in twine - and we’ve begun to think about what you might hear in the game.

Using FL Studio 20, we’ve begun to work on rough concepts for music that might play in the game, as well as sound effects!  Ideally, we’ll have unique music for each segment of the story.

Additionally, we’ve created a rough GDD (game design document), to help us keep track of our ideas!  The GDD will help us with organizing our game, and will keep us from straying too far from our initial idea of the game.  

Things have been progressing smoothly so far, so we hope for the best in continuing our work!

-Will

[croissantmoongames-blog]

First Concept Art!

The first character concepts for Date a Dino are finished! 

To start off, here’s our lovely T-Rex:

We discussed making him be the more sensitive type to contrast with being a big scary dinosaur. I decided to show that my kind of making him a nerd-ish type with some low-key bad fashion sense. Drawing this guy was interesting, as I learned that T-Rex anatomy is actually kind of strange. It provided a fun challenge though. The little toy you see at the bottom is a prop that might pop up later in his route. 

Second is our local cool-guy, the Velociraptor:

This guy is our popular jock archetype, complete with varsity jacket. Velociraptors were vicious creatures, and quite smart too, so I tried to give him a kind of sly, slightly unnerving vibe to him. I also gave him feathers! Recently, many have started speculating that many dinosaurs were in fact feathered, thanks to their connection to modern birds. I wanted to create a sort of fusion of the old and new look for the species, so he’s mostly scaly with some feathers here and there. 

Lastly is our pterodactyl:

He’s our emo archetype. It was surprisingly difficult to give a pterodactyl a dark edgy haircut, but eventually I settled on this look. He has a bit of a resting “ugh” face, but that’s just because the rest of the world just doesn’t understand him. It’s not a phase, it’s who he is. Although he might not like to admit it, he isn’t completely dead inside, and has a sweeter part of him (pictured in the bottom left).  

That’s all for now, but look forward to more art in the future!!

- Erin Marczewski

[croissantmoongames-blog]

We’re Making a Game!

Hey Everyone!

We have some very exciting news... we’re making a game!

This game “Date-a-Dino” is being developed by Croissant Moon Games.

Croissant Moon Games is a new studio created by four WPI students, meet our team:

 Erin Marczewski ‘23, Aaron Waldman ‘23, Rosie McGovern ‘22, and William White ‘22.

Our goal is to make a game that will bring the player a sense of surprise and delight.  The idea we have is to create a simulator for the adventure of accidentally dating a dinosaur.  This game, which is more of a visual novel, is going to be developed through Twine.  

We started off by creating an outline for the story. 

The player is going to be entering a museum and then having its first encounter with a Dinosaur.  Initially, the dino is not going to seem super friendly.  From there the player is going to go on a series of dates with the dinosaur, where they will have to make choices along the way.  The choices will impact the tone of the date, ultimately determining the outcome of the date.

We have started paper playtesting.  

So far, our ideas have proven to be very linear.  We are working to reconstruct our game so that the choices will send the player through more loops and will be less predictable.  

-Rosie