Get the game here: Itch.io: https://dwoboyle.itch.io/void-wisp Website: http://www.voidwispgame.com/ Tumblr: https://voidwispgame.tumblr.com/ Facebook: https...
Void Wisp will be coming to Steam and some other platforms so here’s the trailer!
I’m glad to say that a completed release of Void Wisp is now available. You can find it here on itch.io.
There is a lot that I want to say about it’s development, problems I’ve encountered, and what I learned during it. Void WIsp was my first attempt to do something vaguely commercial. I wanted it to be something that I put in a lot of effort into and be confident that it would be worth the player’s time and money. While there’s a lot that I either cut or decided not to add, I feel I did achieve what I set out to do. I’m proud of my little game.
It was a long process getting it to that point. While there certainly were roadblocks from my inexperience with programing they were minor compared to other things that sapped time, energy, and motivation.
Marketing, PR, etc, for a game is tough and I learned I have really detest doing it. Haha. Trying to shout loud enough into the void of press and youtubers is exhausting and tedious in a way that nothing I’ve ever done is. There’s something about it that’s so incredibly anxiety inducing despite the fact that most probably won’t even look at the stuff you send them. Magnify the feeling from when you have sent out tons of resumes and haven’t heard anything for a couple of weeks, but in this case it’s only been a day. Maybe it comes from a feeling of imposter syndrome, or maybe it from knowing there’s thousands of other small devs doing the same thing.
If there was one thing I would have someone else do instead, it’s all the marketing and PR. I’d loved showing Void Wisp at SIX last year. Stuff like that is a lot of fun. I’ll talk about a video game, haha, it’s just getting that game out there that I find tough.
Another big issue I’ve had is dealing with working a day job while trying to make time to work on a video game. I find it really hard to do, even with a part time job. Something about coming home afterwards that just saps any motivation. It’s tough because I can’t do game work anywhere else then on my home computer. I don’t have a decent laptop that can handle it anymore, so I can’t like stop at a cafe after work to then work on a game for a couple hours. Not having access to a lot of modern technology like tablets or smartphones has been an impedance for me since their creation and unfortunately I do not see that changing anytime soon.
But the main problem that prevented me from pouring more hours into Void Wisp was post-election depression. I don’t my make political leanings hidden. I don’t think most folks can afford too nowadays. It’s hard to find motivation to work on a small irrelevant distraction when it seems like the world is collapsing and every day it’s getting worse and worse.
I love Void Wisp, but it was always meant to be a game that people play while listening to a podcast or play to lose themselves in. It doesn’t really have a strong message related to the current state of the world. It’s about the fear of closeness and feeling lost, and I hope the resonates a little bit, but largely meant to be enjoyed without exploring a theme. And that’s fine. People need games like that. People need to make games like that. But for me it just felt like I could be doing something more.
I’m not entirely sure what my next project will be exactly, but I want it to say something more and be something more. Even if that is just “Hey, shit’s fucked, don’t forget it, and keep fighting.” There’s so much I want to bring to video games that I’m just not seeing too many other people do. I would love to focus solely on the systemic ideas. The world is just so fucked up right now, it feels like there is a moral imperative to make something that is more than just a fun cool game.
Void Wisp was an incredible and important project for me. I am a much better game developer now than when I started it. I’m excited to move on to something else.
It’s been awhile since I’ve really posted much about Void Wisp. Development is still going on, in fact I’m gearing up to put out a Beta version of it. I am aiming for February 5th as the release date. With the Beta will come an increase in price from $2.50 to $4.00 due to the massive amount of new content. The Beta will be essentially feature complete though I will likely add in more stuff here and there.
Here’s the bullet points of what will be coming with the Beta:
50 pre-levels each with 5 medals.
Over 5000 individual obstacle sets.
Way more visually and aural customization.
Rebalanced difficulty options.
Lastly I will be putting Void Wisp on sale until the 4th! Right now you can go grab the most recent version for 60% off! That’s only $1! Buying it now will give you access to all future updates forever for free.
This is partly due to needing some extra income for next month’s rent and because any sales or downloads always help motivate me to keep making it. So please consider picking up a copy. It would mean a lot to me.
LINKS:
Website
Itch.io
Steam Greenlight
Mailing List
It’s been awhile since I’ve really posted much about Void Wisp. Development is still going on, in fact I’m gearing up to put out a Beta version of it. I am aiming for February 5th as the release date. With the Beta will come an increase in price from $2.50 to $4.00 due to the massive amount of new content. The Beta will be essentially feature complete though I will likely add in more stuff here and there.
Here’s the bullet points of what will be coming with the Beta:
50 pre-levels each with 5 medals.
Over 5000 individual obstacle sets.
Way more visually and aural customization.
Rebalanced difficulty options.
Lastly I will be putting Void Wisp on sale until the 4th! Right now you can go grab the most recent version for 60% off! That’s only $1! Buying it now will give you access to all future updates forever for free.
This is partly due to needing some extra income for next month’s rent and because any sales or downloads always help motivate me to keep making it. So please consider picking up a copy. It would mean a lot to me.
LINKS:
Website
Itch.io
Steam Greenlight
Mailing List
I am the developer of Void Wisp and I’m issuing a challenge to everyone who makes youtube videos of games. Can you beat my high score?
The format is simple. You have 5 attempts in Caravan Mode on Standard difficulty to beat my final high score of 375.01.
Upload of a video of your attempts! You get the game for 2.50 or use the free Demo. If you’re a popular youtuber and would like to request a code please check out the game’s website for more info!
Thanks!
LINKS:
Website
Itch.io
Steam Greenlight
Mailing List
Today I’d like to talk about my design philosophies and how they influenced the design of Void Wisp. They are; Allow the player to play how they want, Don’t waste the player’s time, and Question all conventions. Allow me to explain these before I mention how they are relevant to Void Wisp.
Here are the bullet points:
Thinking “Well this is just how it’s done” is the most dangerous and limiting thought a designer can have.
Video games, in their most basic form, are rulesets before anything else.
Make the game you want to make, but make it to be played by other people. You’re grand design ideas are not sacred or absolute.
Don’t let junk get in the way of letting the player play the game.
Just let your players experience the content in your video game.
(If you’ve never heard about this game. Take a look at the game’s website.)
Let’s start with the last one first. Question all conventions. A lot of developers are out there exploring the next big thing in games, whether is VR, new pricing strategies, or something that pushes what we think of as a video game. It’s important as an artist to push the boundaries of your chosen medium. Otherwise you’re a craftsman (not that there is anything wrong with that!) However, while looking out to the fringes is where the proverbial fun is at, there is still a lot of room to explore in what we would consider as traditional video games. So that brings me to: Question all conventions.
Genres of video games have certain mechanics for a reason. Usually it's because those mechanics were in a game that sold really well so other developers decided to implement similar mechanics. Whether or not they said “Hey, this was super cool!” or “Hey, we could make a lot of money doing this!” is irrelevant. This is how genres are born and it leads to certain conventions becoming standard and expected. You shoot dudes in a First Person Shooter. There’s a Ryu-like main character that’s easy for new players to pick up in fighting games. Character action games have a thrusting attack a-la Devil May Cry’s “Stinger” move. You try to smooch cute anime boys in an Otome game. Etc etc etc. Regardless of how specific you get, and some subgenres can get real specific, these genres all have things that players of them have come to expect.
Often though these conventions go unquestioned by both the players and developers. Take lives for example. It used to be that if you were making any sort of action game, especially for home consoles, your game had to have some sort of mechanic where you limited the amount of attempts a player had, called “lives.” This came from arcade games where a mechanic like that made a lot of sense. Arcade games were often simple and focused on earning a high score. Limiting the amount of attempts a player has makes a lot of sense when the goal of the game is just to get the most points or survive for a long time. It makes more sense when you factor in the business model of arcades. If an arcade game has a discreet ending then having a mechanic that causes your players to pay again to attempt to get to that ending each time they fail is, at least, understandable. “You’re out of these fellas so pay us another quarter, kid!” It may sound kind of sleazy since it’ll will no doubt influence the difficulty curve (just play Wonderboy In Monsterland to see that,) but that’s a larger topic.
Where lives started to make less sense was at home. Why limit the amount of attempts when the score isn’t the focus, when surviving for a long time isn’t the goal, or when you’re not going get more money from their constant failure? Instead of adding challenge to the game, lives started to feel more like gates preventing people from finishing games that were increasingly more story focused. Eventually both PC and console games did away with lives and moved to save systems.
All that just serves to illustrate the point that conventions should be questioned. “Why do we need a lives systems?” could be extended to any common mechanic. Why do we need crafting, an open world, health pickups, trading, guns, explosions, white male protagonists, anime tropes, etc, etc, etc. Questioning these things is not the same as disregarding them or disregarding the designers who implement them. These are questions a designer should ask themselves when designing a game.
In my mind, it’s poor design to think “to make *blank* kind of game you need to have *blank*”. This leads to bland cookie-cutter design that relies too heavily on tiny iterations and leads to stagnation. Compare almost any modern AAA title to another to see this. Thinking “Well this is just how it’s done” is the most dangerous and limiting thought a designer can have. That’s not to say you have to completely reinvent a genre or even a mechanic each time, but you should always ask “Why do things that way?” Even if you end up doing things that way in the end.
Now that we’re questioned the conventions, what about the player? What role does the player have in the design of the game. Well, I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of the Death of the Author. Basically, a work can be interpreted as however the person experiencing wants regardless of the creator’s original intent. This extends to game design as much as any other medium. There’s probably a good argument that it’s more true since games are an interactive medium, but I’m not the one to make it. Regardless, players aren’t just the audience experiencing the narrative but an active participant in the narrative. As such, different players are going to experience the game differently. There’s a lot more to this, but that’s beyond the realm of this article.
The thing is, just like how a toy maker can’t control how a person will play with a toy, a game designer can’t control exactly how a player will play their game. So,to me, that means that it’s the job of the developer to allow the player to play the game in whatever way that they want to. Within reason, of course. Video games aren’t freeform abstract things that exist solely in the player’s imagination. They are, in their most basic form, rulesets. Regardless of what “makes a video game a video game” they all have a set of rules that the player must play in. Whether it’s how a character model’s hitbox interacts with the geometry, where things are hidden in a hidden object game, or the variables that change when a dialogue choice is picked in a visual novel. That’s what the developers control. The ruleset. What they don’t control is how the player chooses to interact with this ruleset and how it makes them feel.
Players are people and people live varied lives and have varied experiences. When I say “Allow the player to play the game how they want,” what I mean is to take into consideration the different sorts of people that will be playing your game. Maybe one player can spend 40 hours mastering the systems needed to really enjoy your game, but what about the player who can’t due to their living situation? What about the player who is new to the genre? Who can't afford a high end gaming PC? Who is color-blind or deaf? Who only has functionality in one hand? Who just doesn’t like screen shake? (These are just examples and aren’t meant to be equated.) These are the sorts of things you MUST consider because you’re not the one who is playing your game. Make the game you want to make, but make it to be played by other people. You’re grand design ideas are not sacred or absolute.
Every now and again you’ll see people complain or express worry about a game designer aiming to make a game they love more accessible. They fear that a game will be made too easy for experienced players. But what these players (and, perhaps, even the designers) don’t understand is that any options you have in a game is an accessibility option. Putting options into a game that control all sorts of things allow players to customize how they want to experience the game and allows them to find the enjoyment. Whether that’s resolution control, audio volume, control bindings, difficulty settings, player character pronouns, or whatever. Any setting is there to allow the game to be more accessible. Often times there is not enough of them in my opinion. Even if only 0.001% of players even consider these options a developer should put as many as possible.
Why not extend this to difficulty settings? Usually games will just allow a handful of loose options like Easy, Medium, and Hard. This is not enough. It’s fine for presets, but more games should allow the players to tune all sorts of aspects. Maybe some players feel enemies have too much health or that the player starts with too much health. It takes little development time to allow players to mess around with that stuff. Some games do this, but it’s far from the norm and I just don’t understand why.
Oh but what about your ever so perfectly tuned combat encounters? ...Who cares? It’s not about you. It doesn’t matter how much experience you have designing encounters or how long you’ve been a game developer. It’s about allowing the players to enjoy themselves. Maybe they’re looking for a finely tuned combat encounters, or maybe they just want something to blast through after a long day. If they want to run through your game completely invincible let them.
Obviously what settings you allow depends on the game. You wouldn’t allow players to be invincible in a multiplayer game since no one player’s enjoyment supersedes another's. You still need to design the systems that make sense for the game you're making, but don’t limit your players’ experience out of fear that they’d break your careful crafted systems. They’re not sacred. They’re just math making cool stuff happen.
To put it in another context. If I feel a movie’s pace is too slow I can fastforward. I can turn to any page of a book or even throw it across the room. None of those were the intended way to enjoy that movie or book, but those options are there. In video games, players are already doing this. Whether it’s through built into the ruleset or via mods or cheat engine, players will find a way to enjoy a game that’s not how the developer intended. As a developer you might as well embrace that and allow them to do that in a more controlled fashion.
Finally this brings us to “Don’t waste the player’s time.” This goes hand-in-hand with another critique you often hear “this game doesn’t respect my time.” They’re not exactly the same thing, but they’re similar enough that I’m going to lump them together here.
Modern video games can be full of time wasting mechanics and system. Stuff like incremental collection systems (i.e. “flower picking” for crafting system), basing certain things on heavy randomization, cutscenes you can’t pause, uneventful travel over far distances, repetitive missions or encounters, the list goes on. Those are major things, but it can be small stuff too like too much tweening on menu or room transitions, lacking menu wrap for gamepads, or awkward menu controls.
How can you tell if your game mechanic is wasting a player’s time? This can actually be kind of tricky and will vary from player to player. In general, anything that doesn’t really advance the character, world, narrative, or game state is wasting time. It’s part game feel and user experience design, and part just making something that’s worth someone’s time.
Kill 5 wolves, then 20 goblins, then collect 3 winter roses. Those sort of quest chains from MMOs is a good example of time wasted. Those worlds are static, doing those things offers little reward, and feels like busy work. The character gains experience points and may advance a level or two, but the world doesn’t change. That player doesn’t get a deeper understanding of how the game works or a fun story for their character. They probably walked all over the same 100 foot area and approached all the combat the same way. They may have had to wait for mobs to respawn as well. It could take an entire evening to do barely anything. As you could probably guess I don’t have a high opinion of traditional MMOs. Haha.
That’s on the grand scale. Let’s talk about the small stuff. You have to ask yourself “How long does it take me to get into the game from the launching the file?” This will vary from game-to-game depending on style and system, but generally you should be able to get into the game super quickly. Under 10 seconds. Similarly you should be able to close out of a game as quickly.
Redundancy is something that can help here. In this context, redundancy is allowing the player to achieve the same thing through different means. Example: You have a menu for a RPG with submenus like Items, Equip, Status. A player goes to the item screen to use a potion then wants to exit the menu completely. Well they could press Circle to bring them back to the main menu then Circle again to exit, or they could just press Triangle. What if they want to go from items to the equip screen. Well they could back out to the main menu then go down to equipment or perhaps they could just hit one of the shoulder buttons. These little control things are redundant. They allow the player to do something that would shave a couple of seconds off, but they improve game feel and UX so much.
As a rule, don’t let junk get in the way of letting the player play the game. As illustrated above this permeates through all aspects of game design. Since this particular bit is so dependant on the specific game let’s start talking about my specific game, Void Wisp.
There’s a lot ways these principles impact the design of Void Wisp. One example is the lack of an unlock system. It’s very common for games to lock content behind some sort of progress in games similar to Void Wisp. As a convention for a small arcade-like puzzle or action game it makes a lot of sense to gate progress to later levels or to reward a player with some new cosmetic option when they complete something. Options can be overwhelming to people, and you surely wouldn’t want someone jumping into the last stage before they completed the first, right? Well… why not?
Let’s look at the stage unlocking mechanic a bit. You’ll likely have your UI laid out such that the easy levels are at one end and the tougher ones are at the opposite. You’ll also likely have them numbered or labeled in a way that indicates “you should probably start here!” If a player feels the first couple of levels might be too easy, why make them play those levels? Unless your UI is a real mess then the argument of “this will overwhelm your players” is pretty absurd. Player’s aren’t idiots. They’ll see numbers in order and understand what they mean. If they don’t, then at least those number should nudge them to starting at the lowest one.
Too me this convention is unnecessary. Unless you’re making a Free 2 Play game and charging for level pacts, maybe let people choose whatever level they want. If players purposely want to avoid content in your game then you have a bigger problem. I would extend this to stuff like a Super Mario World world map.
Now some folks like the feeling of progression. Why they like it isn’t important. There are tons of non-cynical reasons one would like it. In the Mario World example, it has a great game feel and allows for all sorts of interesting secrets. What you could do is have a standard unlock mechanic for those who want it and an option to unlock everything. Void Wisp will not have something like that, but I could myself putting that into a future game.
So how does an unlock system stack up to the philosophies mentioned above? Well, allowing players to pick any stage or cosmetic option they want from the start allows players to play the game how they want. Not making them play through levels that they may find too easy prevents from wasting their time. Finally, it questions convention since it’s only not included since I asked myself whether it was necessary.
That’s one example. How about another?
Void Wisp has a pretty robust customizable difficulty system. If there is a thing that could affect challenge then you could probably tweak it. Ideally this allows players to figure out how what is best for them. However, as mentioned in earlier dev logs, not everyone wants to do this so I’ve included some presets. I think this is the best solution. I’ve found that once people have played a few games and understand the mechanics they’ll start to mess around with the settings beyond just the presets.
There still needs to be some balancing since altering the settings changes a “difficulty rating.” Particularly with the obstacle speed. Points are gained each frame you’re “touching” an obstacle. That is, each frame an obstacle is within your point range. I haven’t quite done the math to determine the exact amount of possible points you can get when the obstacles are moving at the default speed. Right now it’s just by feel. Regardless of balance, this allows the game to be more accessible. Anyone’s score can, in theory, be compared to anyone else’s regardless of how they changed the settings.
How does this stack up to above? Well, it absolutely let’s players play how they want. Time wasted is not so much a factor here, but it does help players learn the game at their own pace rather than hold their hand or make them smash their face against a wall. As for conventions, I think I already covered that above.
The last example I would to talk about is the core mechanic of Void Wisp. You only earn points by grinding along obstacles. Not by dodging or going far like in similar games. This came to me before I had even really thought about any of the philosophies above. I was just thinking about how to something in the genre that I hadn’t seen done before. Obviously there have been games that have had similar mechanics. Many modern driving games do. There’s even an old arcade game out there that does something similar. But those weren’t the inspiration. The idea ultimately lead me to the thought of “question all conventions” and these other philosophies though.
It came about because I wanted to make something that deterred the players from just playing forever. I never liked the idea that you could get the high score in a game by just playing it nonstop like some sort of endurance thing. It didn’t seem fair to those who didn’t want to dedicate their lives to a single session of a game.
So if there was some way I could make gaining points missable and limit the amount of time a player has to gain them then I would avoid that issue. I could have done this another way. I could have had dodads that you collect while you dodge obstacles for example. But I like risk v reward mechanics so I came up with the grinding mechanic. I think all the other mechanics of the game just kind of fell in around it once I had it.
But how does this let the player play how they want? This is a base mechanic. It in itself doesn’t really do that as it’s part of the basic ruleset of the game. But it doesn’t get in the way of the mechanics that do let the player do that. Much like how you can physically move any chess piece to any spot on the board regardless of what the rules of chess say, you can still dodge all the obstacles instead of grind on them in Void Wisp. I don’t care if you play the game like that. You won’t be getting any points, but if you’re enjoying it then who am I to prevent you?
This is quite long, so let’s call it here. I am not saying that these are the right or only philosophies a game designer should have, but they are mine. Thank you for reading and I hope you have had a lovely day.
Alpha version 1.10 is now out. This adds a ton of new stuff. Here’s the big things:
The obstacle database has been increased from about 1400 to over 2600. You’ll now be encountering a lot more varied obstacles. The main addition include horizontal rectangle sets and putting vertical rectangle sets that were in the early pre-alpha build back into the game.
The Wisp is now closer to the center of the screen. Future plans may include the option to set where the Wisp is in the difficult options. For now though, I decided to try moving the Wisp forward a bit to see how it affected game feel. I think I prefer it this way.
Changed the default music pad as I received some complaints that the original default had some weird crackling sound in it. That pad is still in the game, but the new default should not have that issue.
Speaking of new defaults, there is a new default background that has some slight parallax scrolling to it. There are two new backgrounds that have this effect, Horizons (the new default) and Mountains.
Lastly, you will unfortunately not be able to bring your high scores and settings from the previous version into this version or any future versions. The way those are stored has changed and the ini files that info is stored in is now encrypted. I recommend deleting those old files which can be found in appdata/local/VOID_WISP
As always you can read the full version of the patch notes in the game’s readme file.
LINKS:
Website
Itch.io
Steam Greenlight
Mailing List
I updated my itch.io username since I was having some issues with having an underscore in it. You can now find Void Wisp at https://dwoboyle.itch.io/void-wisp
It’s been too long since I’ve done a development log for Void Wisp and I just released prealpha version 1.30, so I figured it’d be a good time for some update about this project. There’s a lot to go through but I’ll try not to ramble too much. (Too late…)
If you’re reading this and you have no idea what Void Wisp is well!, it’s a simple arcade runner in the vein of Helicopter or Flappy Bird, but instead of gaining points by surviving you gain points by coming close to obstacles without crashing into them.
