MORLEQUARIAT: The Final Chronicle of the House of Plifk

[morlequariat]

Morlequariat playtest stream with Kaia Soule

The vtuber Kaia Soule is streaming a playthrough of the latest Morlequariat demo right now! She's a variety streamer who personifies the idea of "contagious laughter" and she's been a big part of what inspired me to start streaming my development process, so stop by!

Watch this video on Twitch Live

[morlequariat]

Sporadic devlog, 2023-02-13

Can't very well call these weekly any more, given how often I forget to write them. But I should still post updates about the game when I have them!

I've been working lately on improving the game's opening cutscene, adding more variety in character animations and putting more personality in the wording. It's a lot closer to my original vision now, although there's always more improvements that can be made. This is now the first thing you see upon starting up a new save file:

I've also been making even more improvements to the tilesets, changing the old wall tiles to be more versatile and adding more decorative tiles for detailing and adding more texture to things.

Not entirely sure what the next release is going to be. Depending on what gets done and when, I might put out a new version just with these improvements this month, or I might wait until the Chapter 1 Mid-Boss fight is finished.

Also, this past saturday was the third anniversary of the game's first demo release! Which was at the time an incredibly bare-bones tech demo. It's hard to believe just how far everything has come, even if what's left to do does seem insurmountable sometimes.

[morlequariat]

Morlequariat lore stream!

Doing a livestream on Twitch where I'm going over a "List of Console RPG Cliches" and answering general questions about the game's lore. Come say hi!

Watch this video on Twitch Live

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2023-01-16

Alpha 4.2.3 is out today! That's it. That's the devlog.

Morlequariat Alpha by mithrilnova

A tactical-puzzle JRPG

Well, okay, I can say a few more things. Since the last update was a content-focused one, today's is more about polishing. So now there's things like attack animations and the ability to access the settings menu from the title screen.

I've been intentionally taking a step back from Morlequariat lately for a variety of reasons; there's other stuff going on in my life right now and I don't want to stretch myself too thin. Like I've mentioned before, I'm hoping to focus a little more on my other game, but I am hoping that the first chapter of the game (including the fights against the mid-boss and the final boss of the first chapter) will be done by the end of the year.

[kawaoneechan]

Why I don't like Unity

There's three reasons, basically, besides my personal inability to get any custom character assets into Unity, Unreal, or Godot.

Let me tell you below the readmore.

Reason #1: it managed to fucking bluescreen my system just trying to start.

How do you fuck that up? I download an installer and run it. This gives me a launcher. From there, I'm supposed to install the actual product I wanted to begin with. That's bad enough, to be honest. But then the fucking launcher managed to break so badly, I had my first BSOD in several months. With all I do to my poor laptops, I so very rarely got crashes like that it honestly threw me the fuck off.

If the launcher is gonna play like that, forget about installing the actual product.

Reason #2: CPU pegging up the ass.

On my previous laptop, attempting to run basically any Unity-based game would peg the CPU, all cores, until the poor thing ran so hot within mere minutes, it'd commit preventative sudoku. Maybe if I was lucky, I'd get a chance to set all the things to "lowest", and that might let me, I dunno, play long enough to get through the goddamn tutorial?

And I'm not even talking about state-of-the-art 3D games, but simple 2D games with low-resolution pixel art. Why would those run a dual-core at 200% until it fucking kills itself? Makes no sense.

Now, Phil Fortier of Icefall Games is an acquaintance of mine via SCI shenanigans, and when he released Snow Spirit (soon to be rereleased as part of Chronicles of Cascadia), I lamented to him about how his use of Unity would mean I couldn't run any of his stuff. So Phil looked into it and found a Big Fucking Thing to optimize. This basically makes Phil's SCI games the only things made in Unity that I can personally trust won't Do That.

Reason #3: About those 2D games...

I'm gonna dip into my Twitter archives for a bit and repost some stuff for this part.

*wavy flashback effect*

This is Angel Jump, a simple little arcade jumping game that's available on itch.io:

It's delightfully low resolution and has like four seconds of audio all added up. Can't be more than a few MB, depending on which sane development framework they used, right?

33 MB, actually. Because Unity. Let's see how it breaks down:

Unity main exe: 623 KB

Main game assets file: 1.19 MB together

A folder full of support DLLs like terrain and cloth: 7.17 MB, 90% or more of them never called because this is a 2D pixel-art game.

Unity's default resources: 3.41 MB. Mind that of these, only the splash logo is actually used because Angel Jump was made in the free edition.

Mono embedded runtime: 2.61 MB, and each game gets its own copy, much like how Electron apps each have their own copies of Chromium.

And another 17 MB for the Unity Player.

All in all, 33 MB of files for a game like that. Why? Because Unity is a bloated crapsack, I'd conclude from a cursory study like that. Let's compare that to some other games.

This is Elevator Girl, which is not on itch.io.

It has a lot of different animations and three fairly long background music tracks. It's only one file, 18.7 MB. I'm willing to bet most of that is the BGM, but I can't confirm it because it's just the one file.

And just for some historical perspective, the entire Crystal Caves trilogy is 1.31 MB, including some chaff. Commander Keen 4 on its own is 740 KB. Now, Keen and Elevator Girl both have OPL soundtracks, but the latter's is probably streamed.

Noxico is only 1.25 MB to download as a .7z file. Its only optimization that I myself actively apply is that I crunch the PNG files. The rest is text, and since the game uses a .zip file by another name as a game data source... yeah. That's a cheap win.

Now, back to Angel Jump. I went through the game's own resources to see what size it could conceivably have if it was not made in Unity. 54 textures, ten of them actually used. Tiny font stored in a weird way, possibly for distance field trickery which has no business in a 2D pixel game if you ask me. 921 KB of WAV files, high-quality bleepity-bloops, two of them jingles. 4.22 KB of PNG files, crunched like Noxico, for all but the creator's logo and the font. 973 KB for a copy of SDL, and I'd estimate at worst two MB for the main EXE.

The entire Angel Jump game could be no more than 4 MB and a half-dozen files, It's actually 33.2 MB, 92 files.

There's a more general computer programming issue that this reliance on Unity for even the simplest, smallest games seems to spring from: the bigger and better the computers get, the more lazy the developers get. Only have like four MHz, 640 KB of RAM and, what, 720 KB of diskette space, and no guarantee of an HDD? Better make the most of it, developers! But now the pressure's off and there's no more reason to exert any effort into keeping small games actually small.

*sigh*

[morlequariat]

This is one of the many reasons why I make my own engines rather than use an off-the-shelf one. Currently, the most recent Windows release of Morlequariat takes up 29.4 MB total, and two thirds of that is 20 minutes worth of OGG files for the soundtrack. About four megabytes are DLLs used by the multimedia framework that my custom engine is built on, two and a half are the sound effects (currently uncompressed WAVs), and about one megabyte each for graphics, map files, and the executable itself.

I should really switch over to using a tracker instead of storing the music as audio files.

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2022-01-02

With the new year starting, I'm going to try to get back into the habit of posting devlogs every monday.

Morlequariat is going slowly right now. There's various reasons for this: my job being a little more demanding, trying to buy a house, working on my other game (more on that later!), and general burnout. However, I'm going to try to get an update out this month that fixes a lot of bugs and replaces a lot of placeholder content, so that next month I can have the first major boss fight working. I am intentionally taking half a step back from Morlequariat right now, but I'm sure that soon enough I will get back into it.

Meanwhile, the other game I mentioned is still going strong. No word yet on how I want to title it, but I'm looking at putting an open beta on Itch in a few months and maybe even a full Steam release by the end of the year. Since it's not really narrative-focused, its precision-platforming challenges are much easier to design than Morlequariat's tactical combat encounters, and its overall scope is much smaller, it's proceeding very quickly compared to Morlequariat.

Hopefully there will be at least one release within this month and the next. Also, happy new year!

[morlequariat]

Weekly devstream at https://www.twitch.tv/epiglottalaxolotl happening now! Currently trying to figure out attack animations.

[morlequariat]

Alpha 4.2.2 is out!

Well, I said it would release at the end of august, and I was wrong. But! It's out now!

This is primarily a content update, adding new areas all around the lake, up until (but not including) the first major plot-relevant boss fight.

(The structure of the game is that there will be four chapters, each with a major boss fight at the end and a major boss fight in the middle. So tonight's update ends with the pre-fight cutscene for the chapter 1 mid-boss.)

Morlequariat Alpha by mithrilnova

A tactical-puzzle JRPG

Go check it out! I'd love to hear people's thoughts, especially on the game's narrative.

[morlequariat]

Weekly(?) devlog, 2022-10-27

Been very busy lately, with my job and other real-life stuff but also with trying to rush out this update before the end of the month. Still not sure what day it will be, but any day now.

So if you really want to see how the development is going, you should go watch my twitch channel right now, where I'm putting the finishing touches on the update!

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2022-10-14

"Weekly" no longer means "at a regularly scheduled time that happens 24 x 7 hours apart". Instead, it means "I'll try to do one within every seven-day period but there's no guarantee which day it'll happen". It's a surprise! (By which I mean that I keep forgetting to do these until later in the week.)

Yesterday's devstream was mostly focused around improving some art assets and fixing bugs that were impacting one specific room. Apparently, if you used a push attack to push a character against the current of running water for multiple spaces at a time, each space they moved against the current would trigger a delayed push effect that would move them back downstream. However, once they got to the end of where they were being pushed, the current there would move them downstream again, so that they'd trigger the push effect of each water tile twice (both coming and going), resulting in them ending up significantly farther downstream than where they started.

In other words: I somehow managed to make an accurate simulation of how a spring works in a game that literally doesn't have physics.

Anyway, besides that amusing bug, the game is shaping up well, slowly but steadily. I don't want to make another estimate on a release date for Alpha 4.2.2, but it's going to be very soon. All that's left is three or four level designs and one art asset that has proven very annoying to draw so far, and maybe some audio assets if I have extra time. I'm looking forward to getting this one pushed out, because this is the update where I'm going to start trying to collaborate with other content creators to do live broadcasts of playtesting. If you're a game streamer and you're interested in this, please let me know and I'd love to set something up!

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2022-10-06

Well, I keep forgetting to post the "monday" devlogs, so I guess this one will also double as the thursday livestream announcement. (Go check out EpiglottalAxolotl on twitch.tv! If I've scheduled this post correctly, I should be starting a development stream within a few minutes of it going live.)

Anyway, I haven't gotten anything done this week because Terraria updated.

That said, during last week's devstream I crossed off most or all of the remaining low-hanging fruit in terms of engine code and changes to existing rooms. So now all that's left to do before the Alpha.4.2.2 release is:

Fix some annoying deep-magic engine code that sometimes allows players to move around during a cutscene

Draw the interior tileset that will be used for caves full of puzzles

Draw overworld sprites for a couple new enemies and NPCs

Finish one new music track and three new sound effects

Map out approximately four new rooms, two of which need combat encounters

Draw inventory sprites for two new items

...okay, that's actually a lot more work than I thought. We'll see when I actually finish it; it'll be this month for sure.

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2022-09-26

I think I'm finally closing in on 4.2.2 being ready to release, after the many months of not-getting-much-done since 4.2.1 came out. The tentative release date is this sunday (october 1), although there's a chance it'll take a few days more than that. I spent a lot of time this past weekend figuring out just what all needs to be done for the update, and while there's a lot of art assets I still need to make, I don't think that it's beyond the realm of possibility to finish everything this week. This week's thursday dev stream is probably going to run long, just like last week's did.

Speaking of things that happened on last week's dev stream: there's now animations for flowing water! This is going to be an important puzzle element moving forwards.

[morlequariat]

Weekly devstream is live on Twitch

Drawing some pixels and stuff https://www.twitch.tv/epiglottalaxolotl

[prokopetz]

The central paradox of independent game development is that Programmer Art sucks, and Programmer User Interface Design is incomprehensible, but Programmer Music will consistently blow your tits clean off.

[morlequariat]

I'd like to hope that the Programmer Music in Morlequariat lives up to the precedent.

I'd like to hope that the Programmer Art in Morlequariat is at least a little ahead of the curve, although I know I still have a ways to improve.

The Programmer UI Design in Morlequariat may, however, be a lost cause.

[morlequariat]

Weekly devlog, 2022-09-19

Making steady progress towards a 4.2.2 release. Still going a little slower than I thought (for example, I spent half of this past thursday's stream fixing bugs with the enemy script system), and there's a lot of bugs to be patched and content to be made, so there's a chance that the update will get pushed back to october (the original plan was to release it in late august).

Anyway, I'm proud of how this cave texture came out. Looking over the list of things that are still left to do, there's a lot, but nothing insurmountable and all of it is things that I've done equivalents of before.

[medli20]

Making long-form webcomics is like

[morlequariat]

Any long-form narrative, actually; I feel this constantly about my game.

[sci-makes-stuff]

Eshin of @morlequariat

[morlequariat]

Check out this great portrait of Eshin by Sciman101!