studio inc.omplete

We are studio inc.omplete, a group of indie game devs out of Troy, NY!

[studioincomplete]

Let's get this started!

Hello and welcome!! We are studio inc.omplete, a group of indie game devs out of Troy, NY. We're currently working on our game Night of the Delivering Dead, a game about a necromancer who graduates with no practical experience in horde management turns to food delivery to practice fine mortem skills and chip into their student loans. After accepting an order from Death’s Delights, the player will have to use their hand of spells, summons, and other necromantricks to successfully locate and deliver multiple orders to their destinations before the food grows cold, avoiding obstacles and weird looks in the process. We’ll be sharing devlogs and bits of progress here as we move through development. The first of those will come soon, but this post is more going to be an introduction to all of us, the dev team behind the game! In order of who sent Ivy their bio for this first:

Ivy!

Ivy (they/she) is our writer who consistently manages to write stories that are better than she thinks she thinks they are. When she’s not being forced to do marketing she works on both analog and digital games to tell the queer stories that she wants to see in the world.

Ghost!

Ghost (it/he) is our neighborhood cryptic and gets extremely invested in its interests, one of which is illustrating!! It also did all of our fantastic character portraits! You can find more of its work on DeviantArt and Bluesky.

Brendan!

Brendan (he/him) is a programmer and designer who has only ideas that make the rest of the team go ‘oh no’. He works in analog and digital games to chase down whatever absurd idea he’s found that week and they’re all cool actually, and very serious and not silly.

Emmet!

Emmet (he/him) is the Studio Inc.omplete vibe curator. When he's not busy doing that, he is a programmer and designer who loves getting under the hood of a system and making sure nothing Brendan designed is tremendously broken.

Mira!

Mira (any pronouns) is our lead programmer, and as such has to wrangle Brendan and Emmet together and make sure things work. He’s currently playing FFXIV and is a big fan of narrative games, especially ones that have diegetic narrative mechanics. 

Ari!

Ari (she/her) is the team’s resident 3D artist and Blender enthusiast. She is very passionate about environmental art and the stories it can convey. In her free time you can find her playing various FPS games or the Sims :) 

We’re a group of recent graduates from RPI with a passion for making neat, story driven games that use whatever cool system Emmet or Brendan come up with that week. Mira helps keep them focused on the programming work while Ivy brainstorms worlds to put their systems in. Ari then fills those worlds with 3d models and Ghost makes the character portraits and other 2d art to let you interact with it. Our biggest goal is to make games that make you say “hey, that’s neat!” Whether that be an interesting little story, a weird mechanic, or a silly premise, we want our games to be filled with moments that make you want to see more. 

That’s about all we have for now! Like I said, we’ll be posting our first dev log soon, so follow and keep an eye out! Thank you for checking us out!

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Devlog 4- Post RGS and Art Stuff!

Welcome back to another Studio Inc.omplete devlog! I’m Ivy, lead writer and de facto head of marketing for Night of the Delivering Dead. This past weekend we went to the Rensselaer Games Showcase, an event held by RPI’s Game Dev Club to show off student games. We had an updated demo with fog of war up for playtesting, and we were able to get a ton of really useful feedback. We had a few bugs that we’ll need to work out, but we’ll get that posted for you to play as soon as it's in a slightly more playable state. While we were there, we were also looking for art feedback. We’re still trying to iron out a few decisions, primarily whether we keep using the pixel shader or not and what art style we go with for the card art. You can find that survey here, any feedback you have for us is welcome!

After this we won’t have another major event until March when we’ll be going to PAX East and (maybe) GDC, so we’ll be shifting into hard production mode over the next few months. We may be a bit quieter on devlogs while we’re heavily working on stuff. But, with all that being said, I’ll turn it over to artists to share what they've been working on!

Hey all, it’s Ghost, the lead 2D artist, coming at you with an update on the progress we’ve been making on our visual style. Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending a lot of my time focusing on how we can make every aspect of the game mesh well visually. It’s easy enough to design individual elements and call it a day, but it’s a separate beast trying to connect those elements.

To that end I dedicated time to making a style sheet! For our team, it was important to figure out the color palette we wanted the game to mostly follow, as well as decide on line weight, shading, all the various things that I should keep in mind when I work. This was a huge help in solidifying the foundation for our visual identity, and it’s a reference I’ll use up until the very end. If something seems to be deviating from the style we’ve set, the first thing we should ask is if there’s a good reason for it to do so. If not, then we can correct it and that way nothing feels clashing to look at!

The other thing I’ve begun to work on is our cards that you’ll use to control your various undead summons! You’ve amassed quite the repertoire of spells during your time in college, but it’s hard recalling them from memory, so it’s a good thing you’ve written them all down in your notebook! It also means being reminded of all your doodles, messages, and scribbles you made while bored in class.. Unfortunately it seems that we’ve misplaced the pages these sketches are supposed to go on, but we can still show them off for now. Hopefully we’ll be able to find them in the future.

Hey! This is Ari, the 3D Artist for the game :) So far I have been working on some rough models to populate our map, and also working on a blockout for our character. All of these models have been made in Blender, and we’re using a shader in Unity to give them their pixel look.

The vibes for the map so far are spooky suburbia, so I have created some standard houses and other buildings that are most like things you would see in a normal town (along with a giant pumpkin tile, which is VERY realistic). Going forward I am going to be working more on the character models, reworking the current models we have, adding more types of houses/buildings, and creating smaller details like trees and other vegetation. That’s all we have for now, stay tuned for more!

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We will be at the Rensselaer Games Showcase tomorrow from 10-2! Stop by the McNeil Room in the RPI Union and check out our new demo!

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Devlog 2- 1upstate Recap

[Image created by 1UpState with a promotional image we provided]

What’s up gamers, welcome back to Studio Inc.omplete’s Devlogs. I’m Brendan, the project lead on Night of the Delivering Dead. We recently went to a new convention - 1UpState - that took place in Albany, NY. It was our first time showing off the game, and really it was the first time anyone outside of 3.5 of our team members got to actually understand what the gameplay would look like. A huge shout out to the organizers that made everything possible, the Level Upstate program for helping us get to the event, and all the people who attended to make the event as awesome an experience as it ended up being!

Despite some hotel fiascos and some train fiascos, and a little bit more hotel/train fiascos, we all had a great time and we learned a lot. We really appreciate everyone who stopped by, chatted with us, and gave us feedback. I’d like to personally apologize to everyone who struggled to play cards because I was the one who implemented that, and it was much less user friendly than I had anticipated, and I appreciate you pushing through it and seeing what the game had to offer.

[ABC10 News article about 1UpState]

As I mentioned, this was the first time we were properly showing off the game, and it was just a tech demo to help communicate the core identity of the game: exploring a map really fast and using zombies to do it. Despite this, people were very enthusiastic about the game’s concept and the entire team felt reassured by the support.

In addition to all the lovely feedback and support, one person’s message has stuck with me. They introduced themselves as a ‘huge Romero fan,’ which I, correctly, assumed was in reference to the movie we utilized for our title. I kind of smiled and nodded as we continued to chat about the game, but about 5 minutes passed until I realized I have never watched Night of the Living Dead, or any Romero films for that matter. In fact, no one on my team has seen the movie, except Ivy, who is editing this. So a special shout out to the person who reminded me that we needed to add some easter eggs to the game, since it would not have happened otherwise and I suspect a lot of people would have been at least a little disappointed.

That’s all we have for now, but next time we’ll have a closer look at our artists and the work they’ve been doing. See y’all again soon!

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Devlog 1- Ghoul to meet you!

Hello and welcome!! We are studio inc.omplete, a group of indie game devs out of Troy, NY. We're currently working on our game Night of the Delivering Dead, a game about a necromancer who graduates with no practical experience in horde management turns to food delivery to practice fine mortem skills and chip into their student loans. After accepting an order from Death’s Delights, the player will have to use their hand of spells, summons, and other necromantricks to successfully locate and deliver multiple orders to their destinations before the food grows cold, avoiding obstacles and weird looks in the process. We'd like to give you a look at some of the narrative and worldbuilding we have so far, with more coming soon!

Night of the Delivering Dead takes place in the fictional city of Levi, an old town with a supernatural history. While most people these days don’t believe in magic and think it’s all old superstition, Levi is a town filled with magic hidden in plain sight. The town is home to Balzathar’s School for the Departed and Unearthed, the biggest necromancy university in the country disguised as a mortician’s school. As such, the city has a higher than average population of necromancers, werewolves, and other supernatural beings, even if they have to hide in the public eye. 

Our main character Ita is a recent graduate of BSDU who’s struggled to find a job out of college. Everywhere they look is only hiring mid-senior level staff, and no one seems willing to give someone fresh out of school a chance. This is when their roommate Keith reminds them of the idea he had a while ago to do delivery with Devil’s Delight, the food delivery service of choice in the city, with necromancy to help deliver as many orders as possible. He had tried it for a while but eventually stopped enjoying the side hustle. But Ita plans to use it as a way to get some horde control experience on their resume. Will they succeed? Will they find the job they’re looking for? Or will they even like it? We know the answer to all these questions, but you’ll all have to wait a bit to find out!

Wrapping Up

This is all we have to show you for now, but we’ll be coming out with another devlog soon! Next time we’ll be talking about art! Thank you very much for reading, and follow our newsletter on our website to find out when we post new devlogs!