We're six funky fresh video game developers called gonghana. We only make games that are radical and that all the kids will totally love. Our first game is "tobie." Peace. ;) @tobiegame on twitter
This week, I made Tobie randomly appear while the player is playing the game. I still need to set up the checks for when the player enters and exits a cutscenes so that tobie doesn't randomly appear when he's not supposed too. I also fixed a lot of bugs that were present in our executable version. I'm almost done with all the code I need to get done, and then I can shift gears and do the art! But before that, I need to finish the last two puzzles of the game.
This week:
Tobie can randomly appear
Bug fixes
Next week:
One or both of the last two puzzles
Probably more bug fixes
Trishia
This week I worked more on Sammie’s Requests. In one of the requests, Charlie is in it, and he made a lot more work than I expected him to be. I had trouble making it work properly. There was a point where Charlie was suppose to go to the next room, but ends up killing you when you get near the door. It is fixed though, so I can finish the rest of the requests. Still quite a bit of work, but it’ll be done! For the next couple of weeks, I’m unable to work on Tobie, because it is close to finals week and I got a lot of work to do.
This week:
Sammie Requests
Next:
WORK ON STUFF FOR FINALS
Ryan:
Hello so for this week I did some more playtesting and found a few more bugs, I also helped with implementing the tobie random spawn and chase mechanic into our maps. For the next few weeks though I’ll need to focus on finishing my finals, portfolio, and graduation.
This week:
Playtest
Spawn maps
Next:
Finals work
Kevin:
This week I worked more on the map in front of the mansion. I played around with a couple ideas for the sidewalk/patio leading up to the mansion, and we found one that allowed for the player to see the side gate on the side of the mansion. I also set it up a shortcut for the player to get to and from the side gate and front door without going back down to the bottom of the map. For next week my goal is to try and polish the map up and add more details.
This week:
Created multiple sketches for the front sidewalk/patio
So this week Ryan and I went through the Sammie’s Request script and thought of rewards you get for completing the request. Then I went to implement the first request. I was only able to do half of it because I need Arielle do script for the enemies line of sight. Until she finishes the script, I have to wait before I can continue.
What I worked on this week:
Sammie’s Request script/rewards
Implemented half of the first request
What I will work on this week:
Implement most or all of Sammie’s Request
More sidequest
Change Diary Entries location
Arielle
I finally implemented the lighting changes when Tobie chases you around the mansions. However, for whatever reason it seems that this causes the game to crash in executable versions, but works fine when playtesting within RPG Maker. I also fixed a couple more game breaking bugs, and caused a couple. I apparently don’t know how to read because I keep downloading and uploading maps to the wrong google drive folder. Oh when will I ever learn??
Next week I’ll working on getting Tobie to randomly spawn if the player is exploring the mansions for too long. I should probably look into a debugger that counts the seconds within the playtest environment. I’ll probably have Tobie spawn from room entrance locations to make Tobie’s appearance make sense.
This week:
Implemented Tobie lighting during chase
Fixed bugs
Cried about bugs
Created bugs
Next week:
Make Tobie appear randomly when exploring the mansion
Fix more bugs
Create more bugs
Cry about bugs
Kevin Chapman
So this week I finally started working on the map area for the front of the Mansion! We originally were going to have to have a map for the park area between the starting town and the mansion. However, for the sake of getting to work on the actual mansion sooner, we decided to scrap that area and have me work on the front mansion instead.
This week:
Started front of mansion map
Next week:
Continue working on map
Have a playable state of the map to import into rpgmaker
Ryan Magee
I playtested the Tobie alpha several times and found some game breaking bugs as well as some other issues. Aside from that I did some revisions to the main script and some more changes to the script for sammies side quest.
Started work on using the color script I made last week within rpg maker. I made a common event so I could use the script within any event and call it easily. I also found out how to call plugin commands within a script to make translating the the script I made with the Terrax Lighting script easier. While doing that I found out that it would just be easier to just put all the script calls I was making in the events into the color script instead to make it easier to use again in other events. With this I was able to create a function where you could light up certain objects based on the distance of the player relative to the object. It might be worth looking into how to smoothly transition between one hex color to the next for a more eye pleasing effect, because right now the effect is really sudden and jarring. Then I made it so that Tobie enters rooms at a certain speed depending on how close he was to you in the previous room. This way it gives the effect that Tobie is keeping a consistent distance when chasing the player. I managed to put this in in time for the alpha release of the game. It’s very late and I don’t know how many people read our updates, but we are all very tired as we write this.
What I worked on this week:
Used color calculating script to manipulate lighting of items based on player distance.
Made Tobie enter rooms depending on player distance.
Broke the game by copy pasting the wrong line of code multiple times.
Fixed the game and then cursed my past actions.
What I will do next week:
Use color calculating script to manipulate lighting of rooms depending on Tobie’s distance to the player (like I said I would do these past updates).
Trishia Sabado
So I fixed some bugs that I found, yelled at Arielle for not downloading my maps that I worked on so I had to redo them, and did some more playtesting. I also put an ending point for our alpha so we can upload it for people to playtest it. I think some more things, I don’t remember, it’s late and I’m tired.
What I worked this week:
Bug Fixes
Made events
Playtesting
End point for Alpha
What I will work for this week:
More bug fixes
More playtesting
Sidequest editing
Ryan Magee
Today I playtested the game and broke it a few more times. Mostly me being able to do thing out of order and being able to skip certain events as well. Other than that the game seems to be suffering from some inexplicable bugs but we’ll just have to wait and see what we can do about them. Other than that I did some research on when and where we will be able to put up our alpha build for Tobie.
What I worked on this week:
Playtesting
Looking into releasing our alpha build
What I will work on for this week:
More playtesting
Looking into implementing sound
Contacting some websites about putting up our alpha build
Kevin Chapman
So I was a lot more productive than the last two meetings and was able to get stuff done. I was finally able to finish the tutorial area by adding the the carts used to block off an area of the map and other small details. With the tutorial area done I moved onto the next map which is the map between the tutorial and the mansion. I spent the rest of the meeting working on thumbnail paintings of the map to try and nail down the mood and explore some assets that we could add into the map. We then decided on the ones we liked the most and now I have a direction for the next map.
What I worked on this week:
Added carts into the tutorial area
Added more polish to tutorial area
Made thumbnails for the next area map
What I will work on for next week:
Create the layout and foundations for the park map
Block out all the areas where we could place assets
Start polishing assets and creating new tile-sheets
This is the GongHana team bringing you another update on the game. Progress is a little slow this week because of Halloween, but we're steadily finishing our alpha build. Here's how everyone's been doing this week:
Trishia
Hey, this is Trishia Sabado and this week I did a bit more playtesting and some RPG events. I added an event in the 2nd floor to have Margaret say that she needed to hide. Another thing I did was to fix a bug that made the player skip a couple of scenes and eventually made the game unplayable. After I was done with that, I googled for a plugin to disable the mouse because it is not needed for our game.
What I have worked on for this week:
Playtest
Added event on 2nd floor
Added more events to two maps to fix the game from being unplayable
Searched for a plugin to disable mouse control
What I will work on next week:
More playtesting
Sidequest editing
Maybe implementing sidequest in game
Arielle
Last week, I started working on creating an effect where the room gets darker and darker as Tobie starts to get closer and closer to the player. This week, I created a script that would calculate the hex values between two hex numbers. It even has its own parameters so that you can change the number of divisions between the original two hex numbers within RPG Maker. Making the script took longer than expected, but I learned more about JavaScript while making this script. Mostly how to fix certain bugs when they occur. Next week I’ll try using the new script within RPG maker to create the subtle dimming effect as Tobie gets closer and closer to you.
This week:
Created script that calculates the values between two hex values.
Next week:
Finish the dimming effect within RPG Maker.
Kevin
So since last week I made a last minute decision to enter into a halloween art contest which took up more of my time than I originally intended. So I was not able to finish all the tasks that I set out to do for the game. I did however start placing shopping carts in tutorial area in blender using a model from blenderswap. Towards the end my computer did an automatic restart which made me lose some of the progress I have made. However that did allow me to think of a more efficient way to render the carts without overworking my computer.
So for next week I plan to:
Continue and finish rendering the carts and place them into the tutorial area
Export the map to be used in RPG Maker
Continue to explore ideas for the park map area
Ryan Magee
Hey this is Ryan, I did not attend this week’s meeting.
Hello, this is the GongHana team bringing you an update on our game, Tobie. We’re working hard on the alpha build and thought we should share our development process with those following our progress. Below we will introduce ourselves individually with our role and where we are in the game currently. Please enjoy and thank you for reading!
Arielle
Hello, my name is Arielle Kim and I handle the code and the character art for the game. All the character art you see in the blog and on our other social media sites is done by me. For the most part I'm currently devoting my time just to doing the programming for the game, this includes writing scripts and fixing bugs. Therefore there won't be more new character art for awhile until the game is at a state where most of the code is done.
For this week I uploaded all my files to the drive to have one nice master project file. It's too bad we don't know a reliable way to work on the same files. It might be worth it to try testing out git or something for this because it's getting to be a hassle and bugs are popping up because of all the messy file handling. The upload took a long time so I didn't get too much work done, but to be honest I was goofing off a lot. Hopefully I'll be able to work more throughout the week and during the next meeting to make up for it. I also started working on a new feature for when Tobie chases you, having the lights dim as he starts to approach closer and closer. For this feature to work reliably with the Terrax Lighting plugin we are using to control our lighting, I need to make another plugin to calculate colors in between the current hex light color of the room and black. Since all the rooms have different colors based on their location in the game creating a plugin that dynamically finds the colors made more sense than hard coding the colors within a RPG maker event. I was able to find some stuff online for figuring out how to that and should start coding it this week.
TL;DR
Done or worked on:
Uploaded new project file XI
Started new chase feature that manipulates how dark the map is
To work on this week:
Create script to calculate the hex values of colors between two colors.
Kevin
Hello my name is Kevin Chapman and I am the environment artist for the game. You can see the work I have done in the title screen, all of the maps, and most of the art assets that you as the player will interact with in the game. I am also working on all of the cut scenes collaboratively with our character artist, Arielle Kim. For the time being I am working on pumping out as many maps I can, so look forward to seeing my progress every week!
Today I had a little bit of a late start due to work, but I was able to get a little bit done:
I added the downed telephone pole to block off the top right street in the tutorial area
Alright that wasn't a lot but to make up for it, next week before the meeting, I will work on:
Blocking off the area in front of the grocery store with shopping carts, using blender to model and light the shopping carts
Explore assets to block off the area in front of the gas station
Gather references for the park area
Start making thumbnails for the park area
After doing that I should finally be done with the tutorial area and start working on more maps. I hope that the rest of the maps will not take too long since I already have a few tiles and assets that I can use. Plus I think I am pretty close to getting a system working for map and asset creation so I hope that that will also speed up the map making process.
Trishia
Hi, my name is Trishia Sabado and I am the project lead, the level designer, and story writer for Tobie. Most of my dedication went to the layout of the entire game, but I still worked quite a bit on the story. I have also worked on the majority of the RPG events. Right now I am playtesting the game and fixing/reporting any bugs I find.
I did a bit of playtesting to see how Charlie is performing while finding other bugs on the way. Things that I found on the way to Charlie are: Tobie not being smart when chasing you, a puzzle that suddenly became unsolvable, and the game crashes when entering a specific map. Turns out that my files were all messed up, so Arielle had to upload her files and I downloaded them which pretty much fixed the problems I had encountered. I also added a new event for the game.
What I have worked on this week:
Playtest Tobie
Made an event to prevent the player to leave the Dining Room without picking up a certain item
What I will work on next week;
More playtesting
Add an event to the 2nd floor
Ryan
Yo this is Ryan Magee, a level designer, Puzzle designer, and story writer for Tobie. I am in charge of most of the writing in Tobie and I designed all of the puzzles in the game. Due to the script being edited and the puzzles being finished I am also doing some general task for the team as well.
This week I’m focusing on the sounds in Tobie. Tobie will not be using bgm as a design choice, because of that the sounds that go into the game will be an important factor in setting the mood for the game. This week I was looking for sounds that could be used for the game and decided along with the team that our best options would be to just record them ourselves.
What was done this week:
Research sounds
Talked about design choices regarding our resources
Decided that we should record our own sounds
Task for next week:
Record placeholder sounds for Tobie
Look at getting the proper equipment for recording
Any other general things that need to be done
That's all for this week!
Thanks for reading and look forward to our progress next week!
Say, "Hello" to our main cast of characters!
Dave, the questionable choices dad.
Margaret, the straight man and really wants to go home.
And our star, TOBIE!!
