Jun 27, 2024
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Was at a bar last night with Foxworthy. Challenged him to a simple game of tic-tac-toe.
No matter how much I look at Trick-Stack-Attack, I cannot believe how it at all worked so well. Sure, may be a little too try-hard in the edge department and the tutorial could be better, but the sheer fact that there is any semblance of balance is impressive.
Then there's the music. Why does it hit so hard? WHY DOES THE UNUSED TRACKS MADE SHORTLY AFTER HIT HARDER?
Why? HOW did we make Tic-tac-toe go hard?
When I’m helping out JamPaktGames with a project I’m sometimes working with a 2nd artist. You got projects like Dishallowed where each artist works on their own part. For that game I was working on the battles while Figure Toys worked on the overworld. There are times I had to squeeze in new content in a style like with the Reaper’s Deathly Aces Grandecon demo. Again with RDA I also had to interpret the Aces and Reaper to make cards. However this year I have to work with a 2nd artist at the same time on the same things for Tic-Tac-Tome (the new Trick-Stack-Attack) and we’re going for a cute art style. However the big difference between me and the other artist is presentation. That’s the one thing that gets us. We can’t match our presentation of characters.
A couple of the overworld sprites for the old Trick-Stack-Attack.
I wanted it to kind of work like NES Godzilla where bosses can move around and you can evade them to keep grinding more tiles. Didn’t quite go through because something about my friend thinking it was just a creepypasta and it would be too close.
So Foxworthy is adding more modding capabilities to the new Trick-Stack-Attack.
It is mildly terrifying.
I have released the Trick-Stack-Attack boss sprites
I decided to start a Deviantart account to post the boss sprites from Trick-Stack-Attack. Foxworthy is making the new version for our next convention and we don’t plan to make this game about Tic-Tac-Toe a horror this time. I also decided to do this because some people wanted some of the images either from the game or from other posts I’ve shown..
https://www.deviantart.com/sometinydragon/gallery/86813464/trick-stack-attack
Looking back on it: I have no fucking clue how we made Trick-Stack-Attack anywhere near as good as we did.
Like Foxworthy and I were talking about a newspaper he found that asked how many squares are on a tic-tac-toe board. We thought this was stupid because there's 2 answers depending on how you draw the board. 15 squares with edges or 1 without edges. Eventually we started playing the stupidest game of tic-tac-toe and got the idea to make it into a game.
I joked that we use this gameplay for a game about a guy going through hell on his way to get milk. Then we started to plan that with seriousness, aiming for a Helluva Boss feel.
A game jam came and we decided to go in with the idea that we use this system. Out of curiosity we decided to go as a trio, getting Livion on board as the composer, freeing up Foxworthy a bit so he can work on the code. The theme was "Dreams And Nightmares" so we couldn't use the hell idea. We ended up making whatever came to mind. Now because I'm somehow more into making eldritch horrors rather than any of the silly little images you might have seen me post: I ended up making Style 18, which uses no sketching beforehand. Luckily, Livion makes more heavy metal songs, making the battles feel more like Yugioh duels. Foxworthy somehow made the game work within the time frame with a (albeit bugged) tutorial and features modding capabilities. Of course we used the modding to make enemy tests. I ended up making most decks except for the final boss.
After all that: not a lot of people played due to zero advertising and it being a small game jam. But we agree that it went so much better than expected. But now Foxworthy is working on a new version with HTML5 support and possibly complete modding tools. He asked Livion if he would like to compose again, and though I don't know the answer, he did reveal unused themes for the Depression and Anger bosses which sound incredible.