#thief's apprentice

[rukafais]

I honestly don‘t think my art is scrunchy enough to capture the exact vibe of this game’s characters but I did my best to resist my inherent urge to refine it in any way, haha

Fleetfooted Housebreaker belongs to @piermanwalter​ , from her game project Thief’s Apprentice.

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice is basically Mario is Missing, except the streets are teeming with Medieval zombie cyborgs instead of barren and lifeless real world cities, you and your brothers are also Medieval zombie cyborgs, you steal precious artefacts instead of returning them, and the atmosphere is crass and deranged instead of bland edutainment. 

I feel like Mario is Missing makes some very good game design decisions, but it all gets buried under even worse decisions. My goal is to salvage what few good things they did.

Mario is Missing is infamous for being gruelling and confusing despite being an hour long, but I think it’s because they have too successfully conveyed a sense of scale with very little. This is only a problem and agonising to play because there is next to nothing to do in the identical streets. 

At crossroads, Luigi has the option to go down another street, whereupon he zooms into the foreground or the horizon until he reduces into 10 pixels. This never fails to delight me.

With the freedom to travel unrestricted over the entire giant map, one could argue that Mario is Missing is the first open world game. Using just a 2D overworld map and some unconnected streets, Mario is Missing achieves the illusion of massive creepily-empty boring as hell cities.

In effort to make Thief’s Apprentice as shitty and evil as possible so it can actually exist in a reasonable timeframe and workload while still having a recognisable identity, I will take inspiration from one of the most iconically shittiest games.

I can make a handful of detailed and interesting streets and connect them with cutscenes of the bros disappearing into the distance, then cutscenes or maybe extremely simple playable sections of them walking down generic alleys, then reappearing in another place. 

Here’s the most important change: NPCs can leave their street and go to other places just like you. This should stop limited locations from feeling too samey, since the same NPC may behave differently in different locations, special conversations or interactions happen when combinations of NPCs are in the same location, and crowd behaviors and demographics change depending on game events. 

Aside from that, there’s nothing redeemable from Mario is Missing and I have extracted all valuable game design insight from it.

[piermanwalter]

An experiment to see how ass Thief’s Apprentice graphics can be while still getting the point across. There’s no lighting. There’s only one brick texture you should already be familiar with. There’s only one mosaic texture. As many things as possible are flat PNGs that rotate to face the camera.

Building Inspectors have been sent to survey the mosaic building even though there’s nothing seriously wrong with it. Tax Collector has chosen to hang out with skeleton prostitutes at the sober and austere marble building and loudly complain about bad romance novels. 

Praying to the fountain statue that is definitely behind the pillar is so important that Short Priest put herself at risk to do so, and is hiding from Hockey Children in the mosaic building’s arches. This courtyard is in between three towers, the sky invisible except for a little triangle seen when looking straight up. Plants are overgrown, surrounding the fountain. 

Hockey Children are swinging their sticks. Harsh Reaper is swinging her scythe. 

Only the nicest, fanciest floors are perfectly flat. Hockey Children are permitted to play on nice fancy floors even though they attack anyone shorter than them. Not even Tax Collector can be assed to deal with them, even while important figures like Short Priest are being threatened.

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: Temple of the Veiled Goddess

Since revenants don’t see using light, Light Magic is something beyond the comprehension of most of them. To maintain Veilheim’s numerous statues of the Veiled Goddess, whose original rites and religious canon were forgotten and is now used as secular magic storage and public utilities, Priests of the Veiled Goddess can be seen being very busy doing seemingly nothing. All priests dress like their patron deity, but not everyone who dresses like a deity is a priest.

Statues of the Veiled Goddess are used as street lights, space heaters, indoor lighting, fire starters, and whatever else requires controlled light. The Priests claim that most of their prayer goes towards preventing the Veiled Goddess from reverting back to their original purpose: death beams. You don’t need to be female to influence the centuries of accumulated ancient priestess soul fragments in each statue, but it helps.

The numerous Temples in Veilheim fall in and out of public opinion. Sometimes Temples lose government funding and get downgraded to cults, but the Temple of the Veiled Goddess has been an official Temple since it was established.

There are more Veiled Goddess statues than all the other deity statues combined. All the other deities are depicted in a defeated or distressed state, as if they know it’s the Veiled Goddess’ city.

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: How Revenants Move

Revenants have no physical senses, including proprioception and balance. For the most part, they move themselves with telekinesis instead of physical means. Nobody in Veilheim cares about anything that happens in public as long as you aren’t actively causing mass destruction and/or attacking people, so if you want to fling your head into your chest so hard it bounces off twice for each massive step you take, that’s your own prerogative. Imagine crowds of revenants flinging themselves around and scraping across the ground. This is one of the things that I can’t properly convey only using words.

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: Opium Smoking Husband - Part 1

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: Plants

On a planet without seasons, plants on The World are unable to coordinate flowering and fruit growing based on environmental cues like temperature or daylight hours. To make sure everyone flowers at the same time, plants have developed pheromone communication using fimbrels, moth-antenna-like organs seen here sprouting from the stems of beet cultivars from Punt. Fimbrels are shaped to have maximum surface area to better sense pheromones, allowing these plants to be much “smarter” than plants of our world. 

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: Guards

The guards of Veilheim are friendly and helpful, and you are meant to feel like a vile little creature as you cause problems in the city. There are ten guard regiments, one for each district. Guard ranks are indicated by how many free fingers they have, and if anybody else wears quilted clothes, they will get arrested for impersonating a guard. Due to ancient deals, patrolling guards must wear violin-shaped badges containing The Necromancer’s soul even though everyone hates him and he has no authority in Veilheim.

Even by revenant standards, guards tank enormous amounts of damage, and if they have fingers they will kick your ass. At any given time, most guards are doing accounting for other government departments and running their own private safe deposit business, so it’s very unclear how many guards there actually are in Veilheim.

Guards dress very similar to the Sidrans who took over Veilheim after the Post-Alexandrian Ophtha ruling class fled when the plague reached the city, because even after 700 years, wearing thick layers of fabric and carrying super long polearms continues to be the best way of safely dealing with rampaging revenants.

Guards must wear badges of The Necromancer because if they refused to wear them, he’ll just show up in Veilheim whenever he wants. Is it wise to give The Necromancer surveillance over the city? No. Could The Necromancer use the badges to take control of the entire guard force? Probably. The Necromancer mostly uses the badges to yell at people, but they contain so much Death Magic they basically function as defibrillators for revenants. If imbedded in a weak-willed madman, the badge will compel them to go into the wastelands where The Necromancer may steal their bones, but it also gets them out of the city.

Lowest ranking guards have no free fingers and thus can’t carry anything. They are mostly assigned to menial tasks like being roadblocks, and are usually newly dead. Ostensibly, their faces are exposed to appear more approachable to the living, but given that it extremely doesn’t work, the true purpose is in the event that a guard goes mad, their heads can easily be knocked off.

The next highest ranking guard has one free finger and can hold their signature weapon: the star mace. Being super long both allows the guard to be safe while impaling someone on the sharp end, and also generates enough force from falling over to incapacitate most revenants. A common guard strategy is to form a wall and everyone slowly advances while bashing people with star maces. Getting maced leaves distinctive injuries that can later be identified even if you escape the scene.

The guard rank above that has three fingers. At this point, we start seeing skeleton guards, who have drastically lowered strength for obvious reasons, but can operate in the Living District since their plague transmission has been reduced. Here we see a catch pole and a shorter star mace for fighting in buildings and other close spaces. 

With four fingers, officer guards are now dextrous enough to do paperwork. As you may have noticed, their fabric armor is more ceremonial than practical, but given that they survived the last three ranks, officers will kick your ass. All potential guard candidates are taught to read and write, but if they become illiterate after they die, they can never advance beyond three fingers.

District guards, in charge of an entire regiment, have five fingers. There are 10 of them and they all look different, but for demonstration purposes we only see The Wasteland Guard. Guards in the wastelands don’t have to wear badges because The Necromancer is there all the time already. The Wasteland Guard believes to have pared away anything and everything from itself that gets in the way of guarding Veilheim from outside threats, but its colleagues are annoyed because The Wasteland Guard causes tons of managerial problems and piles paperwork onto wasteland officers and other district guards because it would rather solemnly stalk the wastelands.

Master Guard has six fingers. Wearing all 10 guard regiment colors is useful for his main responsibility of training future guards while they are still alive, who can more easily discern movements of different colored limbs, but by dead fashion standards, it makes him an inconsiderate asshole. By being gigantic and standing on a roof, he can demonstrate moves to the living from another district without physically being there. Master Guard also runs internal investigations on other guards, but his most important role is eating all the leftover meat before it goes bad and/or comes back to life. If the guards don’t eat their way through their entire weekly meat ration, their next ration will be reduced. Master Guard can also get out of his giant body and into other guard uniforms, giving a nasty surprise to anyone who expects to smack down a two finger but it’s actually Master Guard and he kicks your ass.

Guard Captain is the ultimate leader of all guards, but loopholes out of wearing badges because she isn’t technically a guard. Post Event 3 Moratorium prevents me from talking any more about her.