Vivarium Game Dev Blog

You wake up and find yourself in an enormous terrarium. Explore, meet characters, and grow your escape - and along the way, uncover the mysteries of the terrarium as well. Vivarium is an adventure game about finding where you belong while surviving in a familiar yet alien environment. Follow the development here!

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Here’s some of the things we’ve been working on lately in Vivarium!

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Wandering around during early morning, noon, evening, and night.

The changes in the lighting over the course of a day help add to the mood of the game a lot.

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Here’s a look at the game’s cel-animation style!

By the way, this house is where the player lives in the terrarium.

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Here are some highlights from our pre-alpha demo so far!

It’s been such an incredible experience working on this game for me and Mike. We’ve learned so much about game development, the way we like to work, and the stories we want to tell in our projects. 

I hope you enjoy this little montage of some of our favorite parts of the demo, and can’t wait until we can get some more playtesting in to see what players think of it so far!

-Trent

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shrug

[shrineinthewind]

Introducing our first footage for Shrine in the Wind! New game by the developers of @vivariumgame and @freedomlanes Shrine in the Wind is a platform adventure game about voyaging through a vast wasteland of spirits and winds, befriending strangers and wanderers, and finding spirituality in the legendary Floating Monastery in the cliffs. ☀️🏜️🏯

Who could this lonely traveler in the sandstorm be? There’s a lot more to see, so check back on Wednesdays for updates!

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Hey all — as you may have noticed, Vivarium has been on temporary hiatus. I'm working alongside Vivarium composer and developer of @freedomlanes to create a shorter term project in 2020. Similar to Vivarium, it will focus on a lot of story and adventure game mechanics, as well as featuring a lot of high detail animation.

Please have a look at our game, Shrine in the Wind, and we’ll be returning to double down on Vivarium before long. Thanks!!

[freedomlanes]

Been spending the last week adding a little bit more gameplay and polish to Fairy House before posting the download link by this weekend. My favorite thing I’ve implemented post-game-jam is these water shaders and sound effects!

I really wanted to make sure the game is at least somewhat good before posting it because I realized this week that I haven’t actually published any of my games to the public before!

Game jam games are usually not very polished, frustrating, glitchy, unintuitive, etc. So I figured I might as well make it a bit more painless to play through before letting the general public play it.

Don’t get me wrong though, this is still a game jam game; it’s super short (less than 15 minutes long), doesn’t fully take advantage of all of its mechanics, and has some gameplay and structural problems that would take a full redesign to make up to my standards.

But I think it’s still a pleasant little game with nice art and an entertaining little story.

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Loving how the shader turned out.

[freedomlanes]

Fairy House, the game I directed, wrote and programmed in less than 48 hours this past weekend won 2nd place at the Microsoft Global Game Jam site (the largest jam site in the country and the second largest in the world)!

@vivariumgame​ did the awesome art and animation for the game and I couldn’t be happier with how the visuals turned out.

I wanted to make a game inspired by the feelings of adventure, heartbreak and frustration that you get when you’re a kid, so I drew from movies like My Neighbor Totoro, Inside Out and Toy Story to focus on recapturing those emotions.

It’s a really short game with a simple story but I’m really proud of how it came together in the end. I’m going to fix some bugs and add a little bit more content to the game and then I’ll upload it to Itch.io and post it here!

After that I’m going to work on my other game jam game, A Walk With Yiayia, for a few weeks to learn how I want to create the quest/mission structure in Freedom Lanes. I’m feeling very inspired lately!

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I created all the animation and background visuals! So much fun to work on something quick as a refresher with Vivarium's composer, @freedomlanes.

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New idle animation.

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By the way, here’s the run cycle from yesterday with the startup and skid-to-stop animation. If you tilt the analog stick in the opposite direction and change angle by more than 90 degrees, the character performs the little skid.

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New run cycle — this one is a lot more playful and light. The older one felt too heavy in gameplay.

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Dont change from the fame. (: /)

Spam? Or a true piece of wisdom.

[freedomlanes]

I feel like learning how to draw/paint/make pixel art is such an endless cycle because I can always get better… but I do feel pretty good about the latest pixel art I’ve been working on.

I’ve had to redo basically all of the art in the game multiple times, which is why I haven’t created a huge amount of the town yet. I kind of planned on honing in on technique and an art style before really committing to creating the majority of the game’s artwork, and feel like I’m finally getting to the point where I’ll be happy calling most new pieces “final” game art.

So this is the latest iteration of Joey’s shitty car you’ll be seeing a lot of in-game. I’m really happy with it especially considering the first drawing I made of it.

Check this bad boy out:

Sometimes it feels like nobody sees what I’m doing so it feels good to see my old stuff and see a huge improvement. It feels like I’m moving in the right direction.

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What I love about working with Trent is that as an artist, he comes from a grounded place. Many game developers and pop artists seek pretty escapism and divorce their work from reality, while he just rolls around in the dirt of naturalism. 😁 Keep going man!

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If you turn to the opposite side while walking, the character skids to a stop. On the left, a turnaround of the skid drawings. On the right is a motion test.

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Rough animation and prototype for the idle animation system.

I couldn’t make a 2D animated game without some cool idle animations. If you stand still for a few moments, she’ll turn to face front, so you can see the idle animations clearly. (I animated her turning from every angle so it’ll look nice and smooth in-game).

I think little idle moments and acting-driven animations in games are great ways break from cycles to inject show some of the personality of the protagonist.

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Pencil test in-engine, and an idle animation at the end.

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WIP fast walk / trot cycle.

These are tricky to do because you see them across the entirety of the game, so it’s important to get the drawings and the speed right.