Dreamons - Adding Back Monster Catching Aspects; Braid

Dreamons now involves permanently acquiring 'Archetype' party members again. Also, I didn't know that hit indie game Braid recently released an Anniversary Edition, and neither did most people!

Gasp! I actually spent the whole of last week focusing the vast majority of my waking time on game dev! I haven’t done that in ages! I made some significant progress on Dreamons, and enjoyed myself with it for the first time in a long while.

I hadn’t worked on it in a few weeks because I’d been distracted by trying to address issues with my less-than-ideal life situation, but I convinced myself that finishing Dreamons would be a step in that direction. Because I was so focused on games dev, though, I didn’t make any progress with other stuff like learning how to drive, looking for part-time work or volunteering, etc. Seems that when I focus on one big thing, I can’t focus on the others. It’s why I doubt I could continue with games dev if I got a ‘real job’, which is one of the biggest reasons I’m so reluctant to find one.

Anyway. I want to talk about some of the changes and progress I’ve made to Dreamons!

I already wrote a post on my Patreon about a week ago, but even though I have 72 paid members and about as many free ones, the posts often get no apparent engagement, so I don’t know whether anyone even saw it.

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Originally, Dreamons was a spin-off of sorts from Atonal Dreams, in which you’d capture, train, and battle with the monsters I’d already made for that game. ‘Dreamons’ at that point was a term for the monsters as a whole, similar to Pokemon (in Atonal Dreams, they were called Figmon).

I realised the magnitude of the work I’d have to do for such a thing though (designing, modelling, and animating an adequate amount of monsters), so I soon scrapped it. I wanted to retain the monster catching aspects, but with human ‘archetypes’ that you’d collect instead. It made more sense for a silly game about convincing others of your beliefs, anyway.

I liked that, but it had issues (which I described in the Patreon post; basically, battles became too crowded), so at some point I scrapped it.

Instead, I introduced the six elemental dreamon characters, and intended for those to be the only allies you’d collect over the course of the game.

That’s where I’ve been with the project for a while, but I found myself regularly missing the monster collection aspects, and wondering how I might bring them back.

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I can’t remember what prompted it, but late last week I had an idea for how I could do that without bringing back the issues I’d scrapped them to get rid of. It didn’t take long at all to implement, since I was mostly bringing back scrapped stuff rather than creating it from scratch.

I spent most of my time improving the UI! The old version of the card-like ‘statues’ used to display status in battle can be seen in the previous screenshots, and now they look like this:

The various stats were arranged haphazardly before; now they make more sense (the primary ‘HP’ bar is clearer; manipulable states are clustered at the top; mood and element displays are combined to make it clearer what moods do). The number in the triangle at the bottom is level, which I’d previously removed with the monster catching aspects, but now have added back.

I revised the menu, too, from this:

To this:

Changing equipment used to take you to a separate screen; I added this ring menu instead of that.

I had to add some Pokedex-like UI for acquiring new ally types…

…and a menu for switching them in and out. I removed the Bestiary I previously had in favour of this (archetypes’ lore flavour text now displays on their status screens).

You only acquire one of each archetype, so it’s less like Pokemon and more like roster-based games (I’ve only played gacha games that have that, though other games could have similar roster systems too for all I know).

It’d potentially be possible, then, to fill in all the ‘roster’ slots and build all of the characters to max level (which will likely be something low, like 20).

I also made a new area for the sake of testing, which took under an hour. Making all the actual areas won’t be too time-consuming once I actually get around to it (though making them look less bare-bones would take longer).

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I’m really pleased to be getting back into this, and proud of the progress I made in a week!

I’ve been delaying making progress with the game while stressing about life issues, and worrying that I need to do promotion stuff before continuing or else the game will flop…

But I wonder whether I should just accept and expect it to flop, to go largely unnoticed and to make no money. Chances are it will anyway, and if I shift my mind in that direction, maybe I’ll actually be able to sit down and make progress on the game again so then I can get it out of the way and then focus on the other life issues I need to address.

That’s a thought. Maybe I’ll change my mind about it in a week, but I like the idea currently. HMM.

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A few days ago, I saw this post on Reddit about (an article about…) how Braid: Anniversary Edition sold poorly.

I loved Braid when it came out years ago, but I had no idea this version was released! Seems most people didn’t, as the developers did no marketing and hoped the original’s reputation would be enough to drive sales. It wasn’t.

I read through a lot of the comments, which mentioned some interesting things.

Some mentioned how the only other game the guy, Jonathan Blow, had released was something called The Witness, which I’ve never heard of or played, but seems to be very well-regarded. And that was years ago. But the sales from Braid and that were enough to keep his studio afloat for years.

Which he spent developing his own programming language, for some reason? And working on some Sokoban game, of all things?

A lot of people spoke poorly of his chararcter, calling him pretentious and full of himself. Apparently Braid: Anniversary Edition includes 15 (!) hours of commentary by him, which some people described as ‘a threat’ or a reason not to buy the game. I’d hate to attract the attention of hordes of strangers, who I know wouldn’t rate my mind well.

Others said that Braid wouldn’t make so much as a splash if released in today’s indie scene, which is probably true. There’s way too much high-quality competition.

I haven’t exactly done any research into this, but I think it used to be that games were exclusively made by big development teams and sold in physical shops, and while a few mavericks tried making their own games, the lack of resources to do that - or to market them - meant it didn’t happen often. Then Flash game along, and people like me were able to make games alone in our bedrooms, though making a living from selling them still wasn’t a thing.

Then indie games came onto the scene, and Braid was, I think, one of the first? And remarkable at the time for being made ‘by one guy’ (even though the bits I remember most about it - the visuals and the music - were not made by him).

Was that back when Steam Greenlight was a thing, and it was tough for anyone to get games on that platform?

Either way, Braid did extremely well because there were essentially no other options available. That’s no longer true at all, though.

Some commenters also mentioned Fez, which I’m aware of but never played, as if it came out around the same time and had a similar impact and financial success. Someone said the developer couldn’t deal with the attention and disappeared, or something; I could relate to that.

Anyway. It all got me thinking about how I’ve wondered for years whether to continue with MARDEK or re-release old games in some form, but even if I did I doubt much good would come of it. The juice wouldn’t be worth the squeeze, as they say. More and more I’m thinking I need to just relegate games dev to an occasional hobby, rather than some primary focus that’ll ever bring in fortune or fame.

I would like to get Dreamons finished and released before moving on with my life, though. I’m eager to get back to that next week.