Angeline Era: August 2024 Devlog

Welcome to the August 2024 Angeline Era development log! It’s very hot in Tokyo. As much as I like aspects of summer, I don’t sweat well, meaning summer is especially dangerous for me. I’m looking forward to the autumn coming.

Last time, I talked about the development of the "Setpoem", a vital concept for Angeline Era's action-adventure design. Read that here.

Is The Game Done?

No! Well, development is still going smoothly. There’s quite a lot still remaining across the board, but it’s all the kind of stuff that gets knocked out pretty fast. Music, sound effects, cutscenes, art, level design.. while there’s a lot of it, it’s straightforward because it’s built upon decisions established earler in development. The main trick now is to not burn out, and take shortcuts when necessary.

One reason the game takes a while to make is the sheer scale. The design of the game - where you uncover each level and travel a nonlinear world - means it’s designed for you to miss a lot of content… in particular my goal is that on a single playthrough you only see like 30-40% of the levels. This means the game has somewhere around 120-150 levels. That’s a lot. I don’t expect anyone to see everything on their first playthrough, rather, I’d prefer it if you play with a friend and hear about what they found instead.

Here’s the demo overworld (left) vs. an early block-out of the in-game overworld. Oh wait… on the right, that’s not just the in-game overworld… it’s only one of the 7 overworld areas. (Sweats). Not to mention.. [redacted]. Well, like with lifting weights, the more complexity you work at with games… the better you get at managing it. I’m okay! I’m okay!

Angeline Era won't have a detailed world map, nor progress trackers. You'll miss content… and you'll like it! It’s almost guaranteed people will miss levels, as a few players missed the town in the demo. Here’s how we hid the town in the demo, which some players still missed.

You level up in towns. This is the demo in the first town (which was missable). However, in the final game, the very first town (Dublin) will be a rare instance of being required for story progression.

If you're a fan of Marina and I's other work, you might know that this approach to missability is very unusual for us. With a few exceptions, you're generally expected to experience 90+% of the stuff we've prepared for each game. But in this game, I want you to miss most of the stuff. I mean, you should definitely clear the game all the way to the end… but you won’t need to beat every level to do so.

Try a run on normal difficulty, clear the game, then maybe switch it to hard and see what else you can find. Perhaps, you should attempt a "low-A-press challenge?".'

150 levels???

How did this happen? That’s what I ask myself each morning as I look at my level design progress spreadsheet (Good news: It’s over 70% done…). Well, that number is after cuts and deciding to stop making new levels. In fact, there are literally pages of unused enemy and mechanic ideas that we could have explored, but at some point it needs to Stop. There’s a certain balance to be struck with the game’s main story content, and while part of me could make bumpslash levels forever, I’d also like to move onto other tasks, and I think the game is better at this scale.

130-150ish levels sounds wild, but it's not such a fearsome thing when broken down. For one, keep in mind that the vast majority of levels are roughly 10-12 screens in size. The art style we use is extremely modular, like Legos. Music is reused between levels, as are enemies. The levels fall into three categories - Action (Scale), Non-Action (Encounter), or, Town. We have an efficient process built on good combat fundamentals, and there’s a fleshed-out game world for the level to be in. This makes for a pretty efficient level design process whether I’m working in a more action (Scale), exploration (Encounter), or narrative (Town) focused mode.

Please meet my friends

How to make good levels? Revise!

I spent much of the 2nd half of 2023 and early 2024 making dozens of Scale Levels. Many - most - of these were not acceptable for the final game. And for the past 2 months I've been revising and finalizing a few each week while attending to other tasks. I'm actually in the final stretch now and am on track for my goal of finishing the revision work by early September. After I post this I’m off to finish up some more levels.

The demo we released in May was so valuable. From feedback, I got a much better intuition on pacing and difficulty in the levels - when to turn up the heat on the player? When does an intense idea need to be counterbalanced by a sillier idea? When should a level go all-in on something ridiculous, but not necessarily hard? The entire game of Angeline Era could be seen as our attempt at exploring the question of what it is to “write” through the vocabulary of this Bumpslash stuff.

I also played the demo on the hardest difficulty, including the notorious last-minute Arcade Mode, which helped me build my intuition for creating unique pressures and physicality in every room of Angeline Era, ones that will feel fun to overcome (the game is challenging!). It’s only by playing your work on hard difficulties that you can fully understand the range of design at your disposal. Much like drawing, there are many different “rendering styles” I can use for any given Angeline Era room.

I feel my powers of improvisation and design-in-the-moment have improved as well. I think about 50% of a level’s design comes out on paper, the rest only comes out as the level’s being assembled, tested, coded, put together, and it’s that improvisatory process where the best ideas emerge. And these don’t just apply to only action, but non-action levels as well.

For example… as a non-action example… there's a store in the game… where you can buy overnight stays at their 'inn'. Well. That’s the basic idea, but… (redacted).

My general rule of thumb is a level should make me laugh or yell, even if I designed it. Further, the core idea of it should be visualizable and expressible through an illustration, like these neat Link to the Past ones.

Revision Process

My revision process is fairly consistent. I like to stick to it because of the sheer volume of levels - if I didn't have some process in place I'd be wasting my time trying to figure out how to revise each time.

For an old scale level, I do a run through the level, and take notes on difficulty for each screen of the level, as well as minor bugs. I make notes on how the level compares to the to the "Angeline Era Scale Level Design Philosophy", as this philosophy has developed considerably in the past 4 months, and many levels were outdated, featuring weird vestigial or level design stuff.

An unrevised level from 2023. You start at the bottom and awkwardly have to find a key in the top-left before taking on the top-right branch. This reflects an older more Anodyne-esque style of design, which presents a conflict with the action pacing of an Angeline Era Scale Level.

I then go and cut out the vestigial stuff. If an idea doesn't work, if it totally sucks I delete it, otherwise I might note it down in case I could use it in another level. If the level's in real bad shape, I might split the level into two (maybe an Encounter level will form, maybe a 2nd scale level). I might take what few room ideas work, and build upon those. Rather than think of an idea as failed, I like to think it just hasn’t met or found its right potential. Levels can grow, too…

In any case, I'm also taking into account where in the game the level happens, as that affects enemy difficulty and narrative theming, or stuff like the spatial theming (mountains? valley? swamp? etc…). It's a sometimes annoying level of detail to have in mind, but I think you'll appreciate it in the final game.

Here’s the revised level. The structure has been tightened up, as well as focusing and clarifying each room’s combat ideas. The difficulty is much higher as it occurs later in the game, and the level has a much stronger identity.

As for the non-action levels (“Encounter” or “Town” levels), those haven’t had much revision, simply because I didn’t do many of them until this year. Those levels have been tricky to do without having a sense for where in the game’s world they occur, so now that I know that information, they’ve been easier to make.

On Scale of the Game

Angeline Era has certainly tested our limits as a two-person team. Development is looking to be our second longest - faster than Even the Ocean (3 years and 8 months), but longer than Sephonie (2 years and 7 months). Now, ETO took a lot of time mainly due to having so-so tools (many which had to be hacked together ourselves), and a general lack of experience with the pre-production phase, which lead to a few long rounds of revision. (Generally there was not enough focus on “what’s a good level?” early on). On top of that it was still our largest story to date. And maybe just having too much fun doing other stuff during development…

Sephonie wasn't inefficient, rather, there ended up being a surprising amount of work in each system (the cutscenes, linking puzzles and platforming each feel like their whole own game to me, in some ways). If we were to attempt a game like that again I’d definitely seek additional help or try to find some pathway that allowed the HD-ness of the game to be reduced across the board.

I wouldn't say Angeline Era's development has been inefficient, it's just simply a large game. If anything it's a testament to our experience that we'll probably finish right around the 3 year mark, given what we’ve managed to accomplish! A research trip, an entirely novel 3D combat system (and action-adventure approach), an original alternate-reality fantasy setting, a moving Japanese-American tale, original art/music styles, not to mention the two huge Event Editor and Autocuber tools, That Fish Boss, and of course, plenty of levels and story to pull it all together.

Given our investment in the tools (and it being fun to work with them), you'll probably see a cube-based 3D game from us again in the future… however, it may not be Bumpslash-related (I only have so much Bumpslash in me, actually…but who knows), and it probably won’t be what we work on next.

Financials

Our sales predictions look healthy enough at around 25,000 wishlists so far, with my prediction putting us at around 40k on release day. Wishlists convert at a lower rate nowadays, but Angeline Era’s Demo release has shown there seems to be at least a little bit of word-of-mouth-ability to it. Hitting 40k wishlists would guarantee us a decent amount of financial breathing room.

I think we’re on track for a Q2 2025 release, but you never know. I also anticipate that QA/testing will be a bit longer than our other games.

Certainly, the game won't be a major hit (or will it? Come on world, I'm ready!), but I think it will be our most financially successful game yet, especially if word of mouth or fan art takes off…

We have a few things planned to help with that. For one, we plan to underprice a bit. Angeline Era is certainly a "$20 game" (well, it’s $70 in my heart..), with arguments for being a $25 or even $30. But we plan to price it at $17.99. There's something about that that feels a bit more likely for people to suggest it to friends (compared to $19.99).

Anyways, we still need to finish the game, but at this point it’s just a matter of time. The Era of Bumpslash is upon us…