Monthly Archives: March 2018

Help Us Test Where Shadows Slumber!

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Hello everyone!

This week’s blog post is a quick announcement to let everyone know that the South By Southwest (SXSW) build of Where Shadows Slumber is available for testing. We brought 13 Levels to SXSW last weekend, and now you can play them on your phone!

(Do you want to join our open beta? Android users can sign up on their own by going to our Google Beta page. However, iOS users should email me at contact@GameRevenant.com to be added to our list!)

 

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What’s New In This Build

If you tested our previous build, you played the first 13 Levels of the game. The Worlds we showed off were the Forest, the Jail, and the River – in that order! This time, we took the River out (I’ve been working on it all week) and replaced it with the City. The City is actually World 4, so if you notice a spike in difficulty, that’s why. Like last time, this build is 13 Levels, with the 5 City Levels at the end. The first 8 will be the same. Sorry about that! Testing isn’t all glitz and glamour – sometimes it’s about playing the same thing over and over again until you find every last bug.

The City World is really cool – as you can see in the images posted here, it’s an impoverished desert city under heavy guard. The shadows from Obe’s lantern cascade over crumbling walls and the silhouettes of soldiers as you make your way to a palace on top of the city. All the while, a sandstorm is raging and Obe’s clothing flaps furiously in the breeze.

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There’s one more surprise – we have cutscene animations now! They don’t have sound just yet, so your phone isn’t broken. (Don’t put that in the survey, we know already!) You’ll see both cutscenes right after you beat the third Level. There’s two in a row, for story purposes. Sorry about that. This won’t happen too often, but sometimes the story requires a climax at the end of one World followed by a brief intro to another.

There won’t be too many more beta tests, so please take this opportunity to download the build and try it out before we remove it from the store. To prevent people from getting full copies of the game or getting the experience spoiled, we may not release the full game to our open beta audience. Please test it and give us your feedback!

 

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“Which one of you is ‘Grongus’?”

What We’re Looking For

Please fill out the survey for this build! You can find it here, as a Google Form. Answer all of the required questions and as many of the optional ones as you have time for. We go through this feedback in detail as a time and it really helps us.

There are plenty of bugs we already found at SXSW, and we’re sure you’ll experience them too. Thanks for testing!

SURVEY LINK: https://goo.gl/forms/fkQHZBtnPnR8boWL2

 

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Thanks for testing our game! Feel free to share your thoughts on the most recent build in the Comments section. You can find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.

Slumber by Southwest (SXSW)

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Jack and I have just returned from our first trip to the South By Southwest Music Festival (SXSW), a week-long party that consumes the city of Austin, Texas every year around this time. Although “South By” lasts a full week, we were only in town for the SXSW Gaming part of the festival, which ran from Thursday, March 15th to Saturday, March 17th.

According to pretty much everyone we met, the gaming portion has really grown over the past five years. SXSW didn’t have a gaming section of the show for a long time, but recently it’s gotten so large that they had to put us in the Austin Convention Center just to hold all the video games!

I’ve been to Austin once before, when I went to Unite 2017. I was happy to return! The food is hearty, the locals are friendly, the weather is summery, and seeing hundreds of thousands of people flood into Austin was truly a marvel to behold. But how did it stack up as a gaming convention?

 

 

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High Traffic, High Engagement, No “Crowding”

SXSW might be the best show we’ve been to so far in terms of crowd size and crowd management. Let me explain…

One way a show can go wrong is if there aren’t enough people. When we went to Gameacon 2016 in Atlantic City (back when we launched our free Demo), we encountered this problem. If there aren’t enough people at a show, you end up sitting at a table bored for extended periods of time.

Another way a show can go wrong is if there are too many people! This isn’t really terrible, but it does make things hectic. I remember last year’s PAX East showcase being insane. It becomes a madhouse, trying to hand out iPads to everyone, charge every device, give everyone the pitch in a loud convention hall, and give out business cards. In other words, you want a table full of people playing your game without the excessive crowd traffic.

That’s where SXSW Gaming really excelled. From the time the show opened at noon on a Thursday, there were people in the hall playing our game at the table. Yes, you read that correctly – noon on a Thursday. I’ve never seen a show pull people in right away like that, and I assume it’s because SXSW is such a dominating event that people take off from work and see everything the festival has to offer.

The icing on the cake was that since Jack and I were selected for the Gamer’s Voice portion of SXSW Gaming, they gave us two free 3-day pass wristbands for us to give to our friends. How thoughtful! The staff was wonderful, and the experience of exhibiting at the show was effortless. We thoroughly enjoyed every part of the experience.

 

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Gamer’s Voice at the SXSW Gaming Awards

They did something really unique at SXSW that I haven’t seen at too many other conventions. During the three days of gaming, con-goers could vote for their favorite indie video games on iPads strewn about the show floor. Instead of the way these things usually work, where an academy of faceless judges votes on their favorite games, the idea was to create a “Gamer’s Voice” award for the various categories: mobile, tabletop, VR and PC/console. After three days of voting, the winner was announced at a ritzy award show Saturday evening.

These kinds of events are perfect for us since we don’t have a ton of money for booth fees. We applied to this contest back in December of 2017, and I think the entry fee was $50 or something trivial. Then we were selected to attend the show and given a 10 x 10 space on the show floor, as well as two Platinum badges which run $1,650 a pop. So it’s almost like we won $5,000 if you add together the cash value of all of these things [ 0_0]!

I love the idea of Gamer’s Voice, although Jack and I were a bit unprepared for the voting process. The attendees seemed a bit unprepared too, since most of them didn’t realize there was a competition going on. The whole thing seemed like an odd test of our political “get out the vote” skill rather than a focus on the quality of our game. We tried everything we could, including bribing people and busing in voters from out of town, but we didn’t win! You can watch the recorded stream here.

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Stu and Paulette Denman accepting the award for Gamer’s Voice: Mobile!

At the award show on Saturday night, our friends at Pine Street Codeworks, Stu and Paulette Denman, took home the grand prize! Congratulations to them and their team for their work on Tiny Bubbles. They deserved the award – Tiny Bubbles is a very pretty game, it’s super polished, and the mechanics are very creative! The game launches on iOS in a little over a month, so go check them out and support our indie brethren! This also marks the second time so far that Where Shadows Slumber has lost to Tiny Bubbles in direct competition, so we have a new rival! The results of the award show can be seen here.

 

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Sweet Rave Parties!

As guests of SXSW, we were always invited to their crazy parties. We had to skip out on the Thursday night party they threw for the gaming exhibitors because we were so exhausted from our travels. But we were happy to go to the SXSW Gaming Awards, as well as the afterparty.

It felt so weird being in the audience of the SXSW Gaming Awards. It finally hit me that I was a part of the same award ceremony where they were handing out awards to games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’ve attended these before as an audience member, like when I was at GDC last year and watched the IGF awards. But now Where Shadows Slumber was actually one of the games in the running, so I was a participant rather than a spectator. What a rush!

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This isn’t a photo – it’s the book cover from my upcoming cyberpunk RPG system.

After the show, our indie enclave congratulated the Tiny Bubbles team and decided to all go out for dinner together. Then we went to the last SXSW party of the whole festival, which was a gaming rave they threw in this outdoor club called The Belmont. They had this crazy DJ system called WaveVR where someone was on stage mixing the music in virtual reality.

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Left to right: Frank DiCola, Jack Kelly, Jai Bunnag, Paulette & Stu Denman, Mattis Folkestad

It was fun hanging out with our fellow indies, watching Jack’s sweet dance moves, and chugging refreshing Waterloo™ watermelon sparkling water. 10/10, would go again! We hope to see this crew again sometime soon.

 

 

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Post-Show Slump

I have no idea how Jack had the strength to actually go to work on Monday. I spent most of the day suffering from a post-Austin hangover, sifting through the pictures that went into our Facebook album. Regrouping after these shows is always the hardest part. I’ve been reflecting on a few reasons why that may be the case…

  • We met a bunch of cool indie people, but we have no idea when we will see them again.
  • We’re super pumped from the hype of the show, so going back to drudge work is a bit depressing.
  • Lots of people gave us good feedback on our build, so I’m torn between fixing that stuff or moving on to finishing the rest of the game.
  • We also promised we’d send out this build over TestFlight and Google BETA, but it still has a bunch of the same errors that it had at SXSW.

The worst part is that since PAX East 2018 is right around the corner, I’m going right back into “ramp up for a show!” mode. Hopefully I get some meaningful progress on the art done in the next few weeks! Preparing for shows always makes me anxious.

Feel free to send in your “post-show slump” advice in the comments below or on Twitter! We could use the pick-me-up. Thanks for reading this blog post about our travels to SXSW – if this looks like your idea of a fun time, signups for SXSW 2019 have already opened up to the general public!

Being invited to the show was a great honor, and the traffic at the show was great. This is a show that I hope we can return to one day, once the game is released. If we make enough money from the game to return to Austin for SXSW, I think it would be a good investment. If you are in indie and you can make it to Austin next year, I strongly recommend that you apply for Gamer’s Voice as well.

 

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Thanks for reading our business trip blog! You can find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.

 

 

 

Show Prep!

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For those of you who haven’t heard, Frank and I will be trekking down to Austin, Texas tomorrow to represent Where Shadows Slumber in South By Southwest’s Gamer’s Voice Awards! It’s a real honor to have been invited, and we’re super psyched to participate in one of the biggest media conferences in the world.

Of course, attending a show like this isn’t a walk in the park. There’s a lot of stuff we have to do to get ready for it, and that’s not even including the toll the show itself takes on us.

Since we’re going to SXSW tomorrow, last week was prep week. Let’s take a quick look at what that prep involves.

 

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Pre-Show: Game Prep

The whole point of these conventions is to show off Where Shadows Slumber, so one of the most important parts of preparing for the show is making sure we have a version of the game ready. One of the biggest surprises I’ve found is how much time and effort this takes. Since we’re actively working on making a game, you would think that we would be able to build and deploy it in a matter of minutes. However, this model of game development isn’t quite correct – having a game that’s 90% complete doesn’t mean we have a complete game with 90% as much content. Rather, it means that we have a game where most of its parts are 100% complete, and some of them haven’t even been started; we might even have a bunch of complete pieces that aren’t hooked up together.

Unfortunately, this means that show prep is quite time-consuming. It mostly comes down to the minutiae – we update the game’s build settings from “easy to develop” mode to “ready for production” mode. We have to change some configuration in order to bring only the levels we want. Small bugs or visual glitches are things we often ignore for the time being and revisit after level design and implementation is complete, but they have to be fixed for a show (even if they’re going to be changed again later). If we weren’t planning on implementing something (like menus), we may have to throw together a crude version just for the current show.

These annoying little time-wasters are one of the reasons we made the demo version of the game – no matter where we are in development, we can always simply bring the demo to a show, and know that it will work. However, as development has stretched out, we find that we don’t reap very much reward from showing the demo; people have already seen it, we’ve already heard all of the same feedback on it, and it doesn’t do a great job of showing how far Where Shadows Slumber has come. Especially for a big show like SXSW, we like to have a build of the game that has some recent work and shows off how awesome it can be, even if it does require jumping through a few more hoops.

After all of that, the only thing left is to actually build the game. This process is pretty easy for Android, and a little more complex for iOS, but it’s not too bad in either case. Then we actually test out the build on our devices, to ensure that users will get the best experience they can out of Where Shadows Slumber. If there are any bugs, then we have to go in, fix them, and build again. This is a much more time-consuming debugging process than usual, but, again, it’s usually worth it to get a chance to show off the most recent developments of the game.

 

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Buttons from Herb Ferman, dropcards from Moo, and Alba & Noah’s Phoz cards!

 

Pre-Show: Physical Prep

The most important part of showing off the game is the game itself, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things that need to be done. First and foremost, we need travel and lodging – a show isn’t much good if we’re not there for it! This is one of the reasons we go to a lot of shows in the northeast, but not too many elsewhere; we can often drive to Boston or Washington D.C., and sometimes we even know someone who lives nearby (and is willing to put up with us).

Another important factor in going to shows is actually being allowed to show Where Shadows Slumber at the show. This involves a lot of emailing back and forth with the convention runners, whether it’s them inviting us and us accepting, or us begging them to let us come.

Once we know where we’re staying and how we’re getting there, we have to figure out what else we’re going to bring. Most of this comes from a pretty stock list – we need devices to showcase on, computers to play videos, our banner, a tablecloth, foam floor padding, etc. On top of that, we like to bring business cards (above), and sometimes Where Shadows Slumber buttons. These can take some time to design, because we like to use very recent content from the game. After that, the only thing left is to coordinate between us when and where we’re going to meet, and it’s off to the show!

I should mention that most of the non-game prep that goes into these shows is done by Frank. He’s the one in charge of Game Revenant’s bankroll, so he ends doing anything that requires actually purchasing something. Which is pretty awesome, because I’m far too scatterbrained to handle organizing any of that stuff.

 

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The Show Itself!

I know this post is about the show prep, but I would be remiss if I failed to mention the show itself! The preparation is a lot of tedious stuff that makes us feel like we’re wasting time, but actually going to the show is the part that really exhausts us. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort making a great game to show people (both in terms of specific show prep and in general), so we end up spending 2-4 days showing it to literally every person we meet. And at a large convention, that usually ends up being several hundred people. We’re on our feet, talking, conversing, explaining, and schmoozing for pretty much the entire convention – it really takes it out of you!

All in all, show prep is a necessary evil. When you’re already spending most of your free time working on something, it’s really galling to have to spend even more time on more tedious parts of that project. But, once we get to the show, it quickly becomes clear that it’s all worth it. Frank and I are pretty used to Where Shadows Slumber at this point, but seeing the look on someone’s face when they realize what’s going on for the first time is a really great feeling. And knowing that we put in the work to bring the best possible version of the game to a show really helps us understand how people are going to react to the final game itself.

I should probably wrap this post up. Honestly, it’s shorter than most of my other posts, and probably not quite as good, but I don’t really have any time to make it better – I have to fix a bunch of bugs before we leave for South by Southwest tomorrow!

 

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I hope you enjoyed a look at our pre-show process – if you have any questions about our con-going habits or anything else, we would love to hear from you (although we probably won’t get back to you until after SXSW). You can always find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, join the Game Revenant Discord, and feel free to email us directly with any questions or feedback at contact@GameRevenant.com. And if you’re in Austin this weekend, make sure you come by our booth!

Jack Kelly is the head developer and designer for Where Shadows Slumber.

State of the Art – March 2018

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Welcome to State Of The Art, March 2018 edition! This monthly progress report is written by Frank DiCola and is focused entirely on how the game’s visuals have improved in the past month.

Missed last month’s State of the Art? The February edition is right here: click me!

SPOILER WARNING: This post contains screenshots, GIFs and videos of later sections of the game. If you want to experience them in all their majesty for the first time on your mobile device when the game launches, don’t read on!

 

 

 

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A Whole New Aqueduct

Like the other unfinished Worlds in Where Shadows Slumber, the Aqueduct used to look pretty dumpy. It was passable, but the colors were lifeless and the geometry was too perfectly straight. There was nothing about it that made me love it. As the game’s artist, that’s a pretty bad feeling. I never want any section of the game to make me recoil in disgust. My goal, as I’ve said before, is to make every Level my favorite Level. When it comes time to add screenshots of this game to the App Store, I should think to myself: “How can I possibly choose!? All thirty-eight Levels are so perfect and photogenic!”

If you read last week’s piece, titled Creating a Level: From Concept to Finished Product, the GIF above will look familiar. I chronicled the entire development of this Level (called Noria), from the time it was just a pencil sketch in Jack’s notebook all the way to our finished awesome Level. Here’s a look at the rest of the Levels in World 3, the Aqueduct.

 

 

 

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Level 3-2, “Tradeoff”

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Level 3-3, “Anchor”

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Level 3-4, “Torus”

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Level 3-5, “Island”

I won’t return to the Aqueduct before launching the game, but if you really have a critique that’s valid and you absolutely must make your voice heard, comment below this post and I will read it! Who knows – you may change how the final game comes out!

 

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The Dust Storm Is Here!

They say you should never have a favorite child, and I think that’s probably good life advice. But I think I do have a favorite World, and it’s the City. I really wanted to include something like this in the game, and I put a lot of love into these Levels. It’s a crazy World where we go through a ton of locales in just five Levels, from the “bad part of town”, to a military tower, to a luxurious palace. And this is all during a sandstorm!

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Level 4-1, “Slum”

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Level 4-2, “Alley”

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Level 4-3, “Tower”

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Level 4-4, “Fountain”

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Level 4-5, “Labyrinth”

What do you think of these Levels? We are bringing these Levels to SXSW, so your advice is more than welcome! Slam that comment section with your sweet, sweet critiques. I need them to survive o_o

 

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Hell Revisited

I’ve just begun polishing World 2, the River. We aren’t bringing this one to SXSW next week, so I won’t get a chance to keep working on it for a little while. But so far I think it’s really cool! It needed a modest redesign in order to make the aesthetic work and I believe I finally nailed it.

The biggest change is that the ugly Lincoln Log wall setup I had is now going away. I was never really in love with it to begin with. There was something too neat and orderly about it. This is a swampy river that leads right back to the hell-jail you just escaped from! It should feel gross, a bit disordered, and disorderly. To achieve that, I’m working with a toolkit of gnarly trees, rickety boardwalks, and custom ashen rocks.

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Here’s a sneak peek! What do you think… too much vignette, or not enough?

Still to do: redesign the Walkers to look like swamp denizens, add more motion to the clutter and plant life, and finish the remaining four River Levels. Expect that and more next time, in the April edition of State of the Art.

Thanks for reading!

 

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We hope you enjoyed this update about the game’s artwork. Have a question about aesthetics that wasn’t mentioned here? You can find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.