SEPTEMBER DEVLOG - THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY
Oh boy, It is finally time for us to start putting our progress and thoughts about our game on paper for the people of the internet to see. It has been a few months since we started working on our game project and we have a bunch of progress to share with everyone!
You might be wondering, what is this? Who are you? Where lies the fabric of reality? But don’t you worry, answers are coming right back at you.
We are a small team of five unique individuals working on a game we yet don’t know the name of, therefore we are currently calling it Project: RIPLEY.
This project has been going on since the middle of summer, where we gathered all together for the first time over a call on discord, discussing everything involving the process of the game.
Now we are a squad of best friends calling ourselves… Wait for it….
… IMPERIAL PEACH STUDIOS.
First we want to fill you in on the teams history, why are we doing this and who are we? Before we started with Project Ripley, we had been working on a game called Softa Med Oss; The last assignment. That was a game made by girlpower, more specific, it was made by Jenny, Kate & Josefin. It was made as our last assignment in the gymnasium, a big project for a small amount of time (especially since we didn’t have any programming skills in our team). But we finished it, after many sleepless nights and endless hours of YouTube-tutorials. The game managed to win Best Diversity Effort at Swedish Game Awards 2017 and Best 2D-Graphic Design at LBS Game Awards 2017. Starting from October, Softa Med Oss; The last assignment will also be displayed at the Technical Museum in Stockholm at the exhibition called Play Beyond Play.
After all the success with Softa Med Oss, we decided to move on. Put the game behind us and start something new. A new project, new studio, new game and with it comes new crew-members. Christos and Simon. Programmer and musician.
Project Ripley is currently a top-down, pixel art, survival game. Focused on our main character Kie, a normal young-adult who finds herself in the middle of the apocalypse and is in need of finding a safespace and answers to what is going on.
What happens when an everyday-non-superhero woman wakes up in what seems to be the end of the world? I want to survive, I will survive.
You will have to experience the world through Kie, make her decisions as she tries to find the safety at the bunkers. Will she be able to protect herself from the terrors she encounter?
Different parts of the devlog will be written by different people in the studio. But who is writing this part you may ask yourself? Is it a bird? A plane? No, It’s Josefin!
Let me introduce myself! I am responsible for the tiny, not so important detail, the game writing, also the chosen one to handle our social medias and official memer (may or may not be self titled).
Devlogs of our progress will come up last day of every month. Hope you will enjoy it as much as we do!
Hello everyone! My name is Christos Kalanidis and I am as mentioned in the beginning the second newest member of this team. I am head of the programming and my job is to make sure that everything in the game works as intended, an example of that might be that the player actually shoots when you press the fire button, or that the enemies detect you when they see you! I am responsible for a big portion of the game, and even though it might seem to much for one person, I will work extra hard to make the experience as best as it possible can be!
Now that the introduction is out of the way, I wanted to talk a little about the player. But why the player first? Well a very good question! The player is the most important part of a game, if the player doesn't work, the game doesn't work.
I want to mention that all of this is work in progress, so anything you might see here might change in the future. But it is still good practice to show you what we have done up till now. In that way we can keep everyone up to date and we can also get some feedback on what we are creating!
(Note that many of the mechanics I am going to show, don't have the final animations and art. We are very early in the development so our main goal is to create these mechanics with pre-art so we can test these mechanics and see if it is something that we want in our game).
Let’s finally get into the details with this question!
What can our Player currently do?
As any 2D Top Down game, we can move horizontally and vertically.
Our game of course is a game where you have to be careful so you won't make to much noise when you walk, so instead of having to run and make all that noise you can sneak, unfortunetlly it just looks like a slow run for now.
The player can also dash in any of the directions.
Melee combat will be a big part of the game but right now we are focusing on getting the gun play to feel great!
Here is what we have done so far with the gunplay
Prepare for Trouble! Make it Double! Animating in the speed of light. Drawing now and through the night. Jenny! Kate! The Art Team, that’s right! With our silly introduction out of the way we in the Art Team would like to introduce to you, what we have been working on for the visual elements of the game! This early in the process we have been quite busy with all the pre art animations which is now almost completed.
We don't want to bore you too much with goofy looking pre-art, that will most definitely be changed out soon enough for some better looking graphics. And instead we would want to present our main character Kie, as how she will actually look in the game.
Kie is an Asian-American woman and around 21 years of age. Her hair is black, short and she styles it in a slick back. She is wearing a striped fuchsia colored button up shirt which is in fact not buttoned up all the way. Over this she is sporting a good pair of worned dungarees. The shoes however is your average comfortable gray sneakers. For her accessories she is showing of her impressive collection of mismatching socks. For this outfit she is wearing her go to combo of one bright orange sock matched with one white and yellow striped sock. The orange on her feet perfectly matches her sturdy go to travel backpack, which for the record is no coincidence.
The art style we decided to focuses on is a pixel art with low to medium level of details. To make our characters and items stand out in the game we use black outlines. In game we will have a more muted color palette (as shown on the picture above image). The plan right now is that the colors will be more saturated as closer to a light source the player is. Which we plan to show in a future devlog.
As in every creative process the finished product was not our first attempt. Above us are some few early concepts when it came to visualising our main character, which we thought you might find some enjoyment from. The Art Team is over and out. See you in next months update, now we will pass the torch to sound and music.
Hello and welcome to my humble section of the devlog, my name is *drum roll please*, Simon and I am working as the composer and sound designer for Project: RIPLEY. As of now I don’t have much to add to this devlog more than that I am currently composing the foundations for the soundtrack. But when I get into the sound design of the project you peeps will have some fun gifs to watch at least.
Last but not least i will leave you with two sneak peaks from two of the songs I am working on!
Sadly, this is the end of this months devlog! We hope you are as excited for the game as we are and will keep following us on the journey to the finished product.
Stay tuned for Octobers devlog!
