Tag Archives: life

Introducing SlumberLife™, a New Life Simulator

Posted on by

We just teased this at PAX East over the weekend, but now it’s time to make a formal announcement: the Where Shadows Slumber team has been hard at work on an exciting new mobile game, and it’s available as a free download today! Read on for details…

Life Simulators Are All The Rage

Jack and I can be stubborn in our own ways, but everyone has to adapt eventually. We can see the writing on the wall – puzzle games are out, life simulators are in. Why solve cerebral brain puzzles when you could live vicariously through a digital avatar? Why go on a daring adventure when you could play as a character that eats, sleeps, showers, goes to work, and dies of old age?

That’s why our next game is SlumberLife™ – a life simulator based on the deep, specific lore that lies at the heart of Where Shadows Slumber. Starting today, you can embark on your own journey through the eternal nightlands seen in Where Shadows Slumber.

It all begins by customizing your very own character. Choose your biological sex, age, ethnicity, and vague religious affiliation. We hope that choices like the one between “Old” and “Geezer” are compelling decisions for the player!

Since the game is still in development, some options are limited. Check back later for more exciting paths!

Live The Life Of Your Dreams

In SlumberLife™, you can live the life you’ve imagined. But nothing in life is free, so nothing in life simulators should be free either. Whereas most life simulators use money or “gold”, we have Lantern Fuel. Use your hard-earned fuel to pimp out your ponchos, lanterns, and hats!

You collect fuel by working at various jobs. Then, if you work hard enough, you might get an exciting promotion!

  • Prison Guard (promotes into Prison Warden)
  • Thief (promotes into Kidnapper)
  • Ferryman (promotes into Murdered)
  • Knight (promotes into Corpse)
  • Walker (promotes into Torch Walker)
  • Rebel (promotes into King)
  • Lumberjack (promotes into Tombstone)
  • …and “many” more!

Everyone needs a place to live. But your character begins as a homeless wanderer, lost in the woods or whatever. Spend that fuel to give him an awesome new home to live in while he wastes away!

Choices include squalor, a swamp cage, a desert hovel, an “abandoned” mountain cottage, a desert palace, a winter fortress, a floating Bermuda house, and more!

Some of the better dwellings cost lots of fuel. Get ready to grind! This isn’t a premium game – it’s going to cost a lot of your time if you want to really get the most of it.

It’s not a life simulator if you can’t make difficult choices as you navigate your strange old person through a shadowy, unforgiving world. Our thrilling menu-based gameplay lets you choose between living a stable life, or doing something funny.

From the menu, select Crimes to make your character do something unhinged. If you weren’t worried about the mental state of the game developers before, you certainly will be once you choose one of these options!

After you play long enough, your character eventually dies!

Our Development Partners

Everyone is thrilled to be working on this game! Just listen to these real testimonials from the crew:

“When Frank told me about this game, I said ‘what?'”

-Jack Kelly

Jack is the lead developer and designer of the original Where Shadows Slumber.

Me too, Jack. Me too!

“This is a real game we’re working on, and this is a real quote.”

-Noah Kellman

Noah is one half of PHÖZ, along with Alba S. Torremocha. They created the beautiful audio of the original Where Shadows Slumber.

Classic Noah right there.

We’re also bringing SlumberLife to the newly announced Apple Arcade! Here’s a confirmation email I can share with you, straight from the source:

But we haven’t even told you the best part yet…

Releasing… Today!

There’s no need to wait before jumping into your new life as a strange old man. You can download the open beta for SlumberLife™ right now! (You’ll need to be approved for the TestFlight build if you’re on iOS) Links below:

The game probably has a few kinks in it, so please fill out this Google Survey about your experience with the beta.

Enjoy your new life!

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

If you never played the original game that inspired SlumberLife™, Where Shadows Slumber is always available for purchase on the App Store, Google Play, and the Amazon App Store!

Find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, 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.

The Good

Posted on by

In order to figure out what I was gonna write about this week, I took a quick scroll through the past few posts we’ve written, and I noticed something about the general tone of our blogs of late. Thanks to the pressure to get Where Shadows Slumber done, and the fact that we’ve entirely run out of new ideas for blog posts, everything we’ve written recently seems to have fallen into one of two camps:

  • A half-hearted explanation of a part of the game no one really wants to hear about, because we can’t afford to waste time writing blogs when we have work to do.
  • A frantic excuse for why the game hasn’t been released yet, which generally boils down to “working on this game is sucking out my soul”.

Even those descriptions fall into one of those categories! (Hint: it’s the second one). That fact aside, I’ve decided to take it in a different, more positive direction this week! Instead of talking about how much game development sucks, let’s talk about all the good that’s come from working on Where Shadows Slumber.

 

 

Lessons Learned

The first and most obvious positive result of working on Where Shadows Slumber would have to be the things that I’ve learned. Creating an entire game from the ground up in a game engine that I didn’t have much experience with has been incredibly challenging, but it has also left me with a lot of new knowledge and valuable experience.

Blogging

I’m still not the best coder on the team. That honor goes to Obe.

  • Unity itself. Unity is a very powerful, and professional, game engine. It may not have all of the depth of something like Unreal, or all of the customization of writing your own engine from the ground up, but there’s really no arguing that it’s not a “real” game engine. In fact, there is now a certification for programming in Unity.

 

  • C#. As a programmer, you get pretty used to picking up new languages, and, for the most part, it gets easier with every one you learn. The fact that I was able to learn C# isn’t the takeaway here – the fact that I was motivated to learn C# is. Without Where Shadows Slumber, I simply wouldn’t have had any reason to extend my programming repertoire.

 

  • Shaders. One of the most difficult technical challenges this project has posed has been the shaders. For the most part, the programming required for the actual game logic was similar to code I’ve written before. Shaders, however, delve into a very different type of programming. I now know far more about how Unity renders a frame than I ever thought I would, and I’m pretty happy to have that knowledge. Even if I don’t have to do any rendering work again, I’m glad to know what’s happening under the hood.

 

  • Project management. To continue a running theme throughout our blog posts, I’ll mention that this was the one that took me by surprise. When this project started, I was well aware of (most of) the technical challenges that lay ahead. What I didn’t anticipate was handling the vast array of tasks involved with actually managing a project. Where Shadows Slumber has helped me advance from a quintessential disorganized coder all the way to a slightly-less-disorganized coder!

 

There are a million other, small things that I learned throughout the production of the game, but these are the big ones. Throughout its development, Where Shadows Slumber has had a lot to teach me!

 

 

Personal Life

Another important (and perhaps more poignant) side-effect of working on Where Shadows Slumber is the personal relationships that it has helped cultivate.

17159203_1817437325174646_6524966612565150056_o

BFFs Forever!

Frank and I were friends in college, but just barely. We were in the same sketch comedy group, but outside of that, we didn’t really hang out. I guarantee that if it weren’t for Where Shadows Slumber, we wouldn’t be in contact at this point, and it probably would have been several years since we’d seen each other. Now, however, we’re definitely friends, and close friends at that. Frank and I are in nearly constant contact, which, annoying as it can be, keeps us pretty close. I don’t want to bore you by getting too gushy, so let’s just say that we do a good job of tolerating each other.

In addition to bolstering an existing friendship, this project has also created new friendships – with Alba and Noah, our sound engineers! They’re totally awesome, and I look forward to spending more time with them, hopefully even after we’re done with Where Shadows Slumber!

We may not be as close, but the other people that we’ve gotten to know are all of you! As an indie game, we have to do a lot of work to make sure people hear about the game. Throughout the past few years, we’ve been to over a dozen conventions, showcasing and pitching the game, making a name for ourselves, and, most importantly, meeting a bunch of really cool people! Seriously, all of the people we’ve met throughout this process, whether they be other game developers, fans, or just normal con-goers, are great. No matter if I’m annoyed with the game or frustrated with the drudge of development, going to a convention and seeing new people playing the game, or old fans coming back to check in, is always incredible. There are a lot of aspects of Where Shadows Slumber that I love, but that’s definitely the best part.

 

 

The Game Itself

I guess the actual most obvious result from Where Shadows Slumber would be the piles and piles of money we’re going to make from it. That, however, is not the point – as much as I would love for Where Shadows Slumber to make some money, that’s really ancillary to the whole ethos of the project.

Frank and I are avid gamers, and always have been. We set out not to make a lot of money or make the most popular game ever. We wanted to create something beautiful, something we could be proud of – and in that sense, I think we’ve done a pretty good job. When I look back on this project, I’m not going to look at my net profit – I’m going to look at Where Shadows Slumber itself, and I think I’ll always be happy with it.

trophy

I think we’ve got a chance at this one!

Of course, Where Shadows Slumber will serve as more than just an ephemeral trophy to put on my emotional mantle. The game itself is the end goal here, and there are some tangible benefits to that:

  • Money. Even though this isn’t the goal of the project, Frank and I are both hoping to make a little something for our efforts.

 

  • “Resume bait”. At some point in the future, I expect that I’ll be looking for a job. When that time comes, I’ll be handing out my resume, hoping to catch the eye of some company. But I may be just one of hundreds of applicants, all with similar experience and qualifications. How can I stand out? By having something awesome on my resume, something that other people won’t have, something that shows that I can set a goal and reach it, that I can meet technical challenges, and that I can manage a development process.

 

  • Experience. Working on Where Shadows Slumber has given me an incredible cache of experience to draw on. Pretty much any technical problem I run into, I can find a parallel with some part of the development of Where Shadows Slumber. The end result is a game that’s more than a game; every part of that game represents a different challenge and a different piece of knowledge that I can now look back on.

 

  • A trophy. I know I said that Where Shadows Slumber was more than just a trophy, but it is also that. From conception to completion, Frank and I have worked tirelessly to bring this idea to life. This is something we’ve built ourselves, from the ground up, and it always will be. It’s something we can be proud of, and something we can always look back on.

 

 

A Fond Farewell

happy3

Thanks for listening to me ramble on for a little bit. Anyone who has ever worked on a software development project (or pretty much any long project) knows just how stressful life can start to become when you reach the dreaded “crunch time”. We all end up hating our games as they come out, and I don’t want that to be the way that Where Shadows Slumber is released. So I’m glad I got a chance to take the time and share with you all the good things Where Shadows Slumber has done for me!

 

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

You can always find out more about our game and how awesome it is 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.

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

Indies: You Are Your Game

Posted on by

Hello, everyone!

This is Frank DiCola of Game Revenant, here with another post on our blog. Typically we use this space to chronicle the development of Where Shadows Slumber, a mobile puzzle adventure coming to iOS and Android later this year. However, this week things will be different. We’re going to take some time to brag about how great we are, both as game developers and as Renaissance men.

Yes, you read that correctly. This blog is about the personal skills that accompany independent game development, and why we have them and you don’t.

We’ll get a chance to talk about how Jack and I first met, the importance of acting and public speaking classes, and how indies become inseparable from their games.

 

36156_1508785207492_3110837_n

FRANK: “Where are my EGGS???” / JACK: “Here, here are your EGGS!!”

Where It All Began – Off Center

This blog post is a good opportunity to answer some questions that people ask us.

How did you meet? Did you always know you wanted to work on games?

Jack and I both went to Stevens Institute of Technology, graduating just a few years apart. We actually met in the comedy troupe known as “Off Center” (pronounced “off-chenter”) that performed sketch comedy and improv shows. I had just gotten rejected from the main stage fall play Noises Off, which was a new experience for me. Coming from high school, I was used to being the big fish in a small pond. I felt really confused, and Off Center was there for me. I started going to their show planning meetings.

The club focused on running short, free comedy shows twice a semester. They would usually be in the largest lecture hall we could find on campus. It wasn’t exactly a stage, since the seats were raised in an amphitheater style. It was more like a Colosseum.

I remember being really impressed during the meeting where we were casting everyone into the various sketches for the show. Jack took on like, 12 roles or something insane. Just because the show needed him! His stage presence was (and is) undeniable as well. Whenever the director told people they needed to be louder, they would just say “try to be as loud as Jack.”

Of course, we didn’t realize we both wanted to make video games until we found ourselves in an Intro to Game Design class a few years later. By then, we were already friends. But we’re not here to talk about game development. Let’s talk about the skills acting provides and why you, an indie developer, absolutely need them.

 

20171025_140828

The Only Thing You Have To Fear Is Public Speaking

You never know when opportunity is going to strike. Often times, as an indie developer, you’ll be given the rare chance to “pitch” your game to someone important. It could be a potential publisher who doesn’t have time to play your demo but can spare 30 seconds to hear a quick description. Maybe it’s a spur of the moment pitching contest, like the one I got 3rd place in at GDC last year, where you have to come up with a verbal presentation with no prep time and deliver it five times in a crowded bar. Heaven forbid, it could be an actual stage presentation where you need to pitch your game in front of an actual audience with nothing but your own PowerPoint presentation to save you.

Are your palms getting sweaty yet? Now imagine you’re at a booth at a show like PAX East demonstrating your game. About a hundred people will walk by the booth every hour. Do you have what it takes to attract them to your game? Could you handle talking to that many strangers for such a long period of time?

If these “opportunities” feel more like nightmares, you aren’t alone. Public speaking is something that people rarely get to experience for themselves. As a result, when you’re “put on the spot”, you panic. It’s perfectly normal. Public speaking is a skill you have not honed, and now you need to do it for the first time ever in front of a real audience?! No fair!

The skills you need for the examples above are all things that Jack and I exposed ourselves to during the Off Center years. After performing more than 15 shows over the course of a few years, with a few main-stage productions thrown in there, you get the hang of it. You learn how to:

  • Speak slowly, confidently, and audibly
  • Be comfortable making up a script and then deviating from it if necessary
  • Say what you need to say without going over the time allotted
  • Communicate your message non-verbally with your body

It’s normal to be afraid of acting in a play, giving a speech, or improvising a scene. But as independent developers, you are the public face of your game! Like it or not, there’s no one else that can wear this marketing hat for you. You have to do it. And you can’t ignore important opportunities to win prizes or glory just because you neglected to put points into your Speechcraft skill. Should your game really suffer because you never learned how to project your voice? What if the future of your game depended on knowing what to do with your hands while you stand up on stage nervously? (Hint: don’t put them in your pockets)

 

blog-upright-citizens-brigade

We live right near Manhattan, where the UCB has a few teaching theaters.

3 Ways To Level Your Speechcraft Skill

Let’s get nerdy for a moment. Imagine this is nothing more than a role-playing game like Morrowind, and you’re a character with various skills and abilities. You have a Speechcraft skill, but it’s low. Very low. High enough that you can talk to your friends and family, but not much higher than that. You’re super nervous for the first 10 minutes you’re with a stranger, such as on a job interview. As for getting up on a stage and talking to a crowd, you’re level restricted from even trying that. What do you do?

If you were trying to level your Sword skill, you’d take fencing classes. If you wanted to level Lockpicking, you’d probably join a hobbyist group of (ethical) lockpicks who have a passion for locks and love to crack them for fun. To level your Speechcraft in real life, you need to make an actual plan to expose yourself to public speaking. It won’t just happen on its own. This is a skill, after all. Skills don’t just magically level with no effort on your part. Here are three things you can do:

Join the club: If you’re still in high school or college, I really encourage you to try out for the play or join any kind of drama club your school has. Larger schools may have a wide range of acting stuff – the most helpful thing will be improv. Improvisation is a school of comedy where the actors go on stage without a script and make everything up on the spot. You don’t need to learn how to be a hilarious comedian. What you need is the ability to go out on stage without a plan and do more than just survive — thrive!

Join a community theater: If you’re out of school, it would be weird to hang around your school like a weirdo. I would never do that. <_< So instead, see if your town has a local theater that puts on a few plays a year. Don’t worry about the competition, just audition and see what happens. Remember, you’re not training for Broadway. You just need to become a competent enough speaker to feel comfortable in your own skin.

Take improv classes: This one will cost money, but if you live near a city (especially a hip cool city where all the people are hip and cool and do hip, cool things) you should be able to find a comedy club that also offers classes. The best part about doing this is that they’ll treat you like a beginner instead of expecting you to already be good. Some of these classes also do shows at the end as a final exam / graduation. It’s a good way to test your skill. After all, if you can make up a bunch of silly jokes, you can certainly talk about something you know very well – your game!

 

 

The next time I see you at a convention, you better look me in the eye and shake my hand! Then, you better beat me for first prize in the game pitching contest.

See you in the Colosseum.

 

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Get out there and start acting! If you have any other questions about Where Shadows Slumber, feel free to contact us! 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.

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

Drive

Posted on by

If there’s one thing an indie game developer needs, it’s drive. The competition is fierce, the process is difficult, and we even have to deal with our day jobs on top of everything else.

In order to get our games to market successfully, we have to do a lot of stuff right, make a lot of difficult decisions, and put in a lot of hard work. In order to accomplish any of these things, the first thing you need is the urge to make a game, the drive to make your dream become a reality. But what exactly is drive?

Drive
drīv
noun
  1. an innate, biologically determined urge to attain a goal or satisfy a need.

Drive is the internal force you feel that causes you to create something. Drive is forcing yourself out of bed hours before you have to get to work, just for a chance to work on your game. Drive is spending the evening testing the performance of your pathfinding algorithm rather than playing Rocket League. Drive is a lot of things, but I think of it as three core parts:

  • The urge to work on a project, including the confidence that it will succeed – This is where drive starts. It’s impossible to follow any large project through to the end if you don’t care about it and believe in it.
  • The dedication to work on your project, despite any sacrifices you might have to make – This is how drive shows itself, and is the trait most associated with the term. When you want to complete something badly enough, you force yourself to work on it, even (and especially) when you don’t want to.
  • The willingness and ability to make difficult decisions about your project – This is less often associated with drive, but I think it’s perhaps the most important point. Choosing to trim features or making an irreversible development decision is very difficult, but it has to be done. Your project will suffer if you don’t make decisions, and you have to understand and embrace that.

I’ve seen a lot of indie game development projects suffer due to a lack of drive. The most obvious ones are the games that were never finished because development petered out. Slightly less obvious are the games that take over half a decade to develop because the developers aren’t willing to sacrifice parts of their games, or the games that do come out, but are a little lackluster because of prioritization and decision-making issues. I even know quite a few people who are much more qualified to make a game, but simply haven’t felt the drive to do so.

Frank and I, fortunately, do have a good bit of drive, and we’ve been very careful to get as much use out of it as possible. At the beginning of 2017, we had picked an internal target release date of March 15, 2018, and I’m pretty proud to say that, up until about two months ago, we were on target to meet that date.

Unfortunately, no amount of drive can get you through everything.

 

 

So What Happened?

A few months ago, my fiancée, Molly, went to see a doctor about a lump she had felt in her neck. Long story short, she was diagnosed with cancer this past November. I won’t go into all the details here (if you want to find out more, you can read her blog about the experience here), but suffice it to say that it’s really turned our lives upside down.

chemo

“In sickness and in health”

It’s pretty difficult for me to think of myself as “lucky” in any sense right now, but I know that things could have been much worse – we caught it early enough that it’s still curable. She is currently halfway through her four months of chemotherapy, which means she should be cured by the end of March.

While it’s not as bad as it could be, it’s definitely not good. Molly is the most important thing in my life, Where Shadows Slumber included, and I will continue to do everything I can for her. She has been endlessly supportive of the development of WSS, despite how much time I commit to it, and I intend to be just as supportive of her. Unfortunately, on account of my already-busy schedule, that means some things are going to suffer.

 

Development-Hell

Development shot of the first Level of the Jail.

What This Means for Where Shadows Slumber

If you read this blog regularly, you may have noticed that I haven’t been contributing as much as usual – Frank has stepped up and kept the blog posts flowing. However, what you most likely haven’t noticed is how little I’ve been able to contribute to the project itself. This trend will continue through the end of March – I’ll still be working on WSS as much as possible, but that amount will be far less than it has been over the past two years.

gitcontributions

Cancer and Commits are inversely proportional

What this means is that our targeted March 15 release date is no longer feasible, and we’re in a position where we have decided to push the release date back a few months. We still don’t have a public release date, but you should know that we will be releasing in Quarter 2 of this year rather than Quarter 1.

While this is the biggest concrete reason to push back the release date, to be honest, everyone on the team is breathing a sigh of relief. We are all very determined to finish this project in a timely fashion, and we all have the necessary drive to do so, but we also know that the extra time will help us to make Where Shadows Slumber the best that it can be. I know Frank wanted more time to work on polishing up the art, Noah and Alba mentioned that they could implement some cool sound stuff if we had more time, and I could definitely afford to put more work into optimization.

 

Development-Snow

Development shot of one of the Levels in the Summit.

 

Moving Forward

Despite all of this, I still have the drive to finish Where Shadows Slumber. Aside from the shift in timeline, our plans for the game haven’t changed, and our goals seem as achievable as ever. Hopefully, come April, this will all be behind us, and the glorious future of Where Shadows Slumber will be the next thing on the horizon.

 

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

If you have any questions about our timeline and how it has changed, or if you have any other questions about Where Shadows Slumber, feel free to contact us! 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.

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