Errant Works

Living the Dream by Camille, Errant Works Experience the life of a fledling game developer as you build the game of your dreams.

#trans #visualnovels #sim #videogames #gamedev
Played "Living the Dream" by @camillecee.bsky.social
pehesse.itch.io/living-the-d...
​The twist cut me to the core. I'm trans and some of the experiences described in this game remind me of things I've been through on my own life.
🧵

Trailer 2.

As a follow-up to Sybil's thread, for this Mighty Magical Sunday I'll go into (slightly) more detail on UI, especially regarding the bubble mode selection!

Rejoice, it's ✨ Mighty Magical Sunday✨

I hope you're keeping track because sometimes I get lost (several of us are chiming in with what we're doing on the game every Sunday!!)

Here's another design thread, this time diving a little bit more into our depiction of mental energy~~

#indiedev #gamedev

It's Mighty Magical (Musical) Sunday so here we go! One of the many cool things about audio approach in Mighty Magical Sparrows is character themes - I love the Tokimeki Memorial / Ace Attorney approach, so we're taking some of that vibe into MMS. This is Alys' theme, please enjoy!✨

Mighty Magical... Sunday?

Today, let's talk about game design that depicts autism, social survival tools, routines, and breaking them~~✨

Another thread about our indie video game undergoing development, Mighty Magical Sparrows!

#gamedev #indiedev

A desk covered in small torn papers and glass beads. The papers look like simplified playing cards with attacks and skills written on them.

Heeey, it's Mighty Magical Sunday!
Sybil here, in charge of design and writing and general metaphoric coherence of the nifty little thing we're working on.

So today let's show a little bit of our highly technological ✨PROTOTYPING PROCESS✨

Pictured: technological prowess, first iteration

So yeah, the Carmelina Script is an important tool for MMS; it controls the different aspects of the game and put them together to tell a story. But obviously, this is not the only thing there is. So, see you next week for a different subject!

An excerpt of a test script in Carmelina Script, our script engine, which shows different features and commands, like display a text slowly, or in bold, displaying a character, playing an animation, transition to another scene, ...

Setting when, where, and how dialogs and characters are displayed, managing text effects, setting different visual and audio effects, controlling and checking story flags, altering the player's resources, launching scene transitions, activating the town map, starting fights, enabling encounters, ...

Overall, the script is written in big flat text files containing events. Every piece of scene and dialogue is an event. Events are uniquely identified and branch to each other, building the narrative flow. And besides containing the actual written content, events are responsible for a lot of stuff:

For this Mighty Magical Sunday, we're gonna continue where we left off and talk about our script engine proper. At least in its current form, because as we saw last week, flexibility was a goal and the script syntax changed throughout the conceptualisation and prototyping of Mighty Magical Sparrows.

I think we made a good choice; while I worked on the core of the script engine for LtD, Camille worked on everything else. And we mostly kept that methodology when we started to beef up the system’s capabilities for MMS.

That’s some true happy ending right there for your Sunday. See you next week!

So why Construct? A game engine’s existing features and integrations were not criteria anymore on the custom script’s route. The main thing left was the capacity for our team to work concurrently. And for that, Construct’s event sheet system, behaviours and extensibility are a blessing.

Inspired by this article from Sarah Northway, we decided to roll our own script engine and language. And we agree with the story she relates: it was surprisingly easy, made in a relatively short span of time, and allowed us to fill our needs.

northwaygames.com/the-narrativ...

We wanted the script to be able to direct the game’s unfolding (state transition, animations, story variables...), to be translatable as is, and the script engine to be flexible enough to fit our use cases so that it was fun to write into. Writing games is hard and we wanted to reduce that friction.

It's Mighty Magical Sunday and this week we’re gonna talk tech stuff! So... which engine? Construct 3! Done, see you next week! Wait, no, let’s elaborate. The question came up back when we started working on Living the Dream, the game that would lay some of the technical foundation for MMS.

It's Mighty Magical Sunday and it's time to look a little more into what the game *is*! I've mentioned previously it started as a reimagining of my first released steam game, Honey Rose: UFE, and when figuring out what to keep from there, the first thing is "the graphix". Let's talk animation!

Mighty Magical Sundays 5✨: Introducing our head honcho producer, Simon @blackcorn.bsky.social !
He's the business face of the project when it comes to interacting with the world, as he does the tragically unsung work of gathering money (which requires an amount of energy few can deliver).

It's Mighty Magical Sundays! It's Ben Chandler's @threeohfour.bsky.social turn under the spotlight (even though he hardly needs an introduction)
An integral part of Wadjet Eye's identity, he cemented the aesthetics of the point'n'click genre through his hallmark sprite, painting and animation work.

Cast lineup for our tentative project currently WIP titled Cosmemoria, from left to right: Prime (main character), Mayhem, Bolt, Zero, Silver, Aurora and Bee, with Prime and Bolt as main characters in present time and the rest as their younger selves plus other members of their group from way back when

A preview of a fun side thing I'm working on with Valerian while we're waiting on news for MMS: a space-fantasy thing about memories, still very early days and we're trying to take a chill approach to this particular dev, but there you go, some designs, hope you enjoy