Researching for Angeline Era in Ireland

Dev Timeline 4 of my upcoming Action Game!

Welcome to Part 4 of my Angeline Era “Dev Timeline” series! You can see other posts in this series here. By the way, if you’d like to opt out of devlogs (or other types of posts) you can always adjust your subscription settings!

In the Dev Timeline series, I reflect on past developments of Angeline Era. I think that having hindsight makes it easier to draw conclusions on what exactly was accomplished. Today I’m writing about the back half of 2022.

(Also, I’m still accepting questions for an upcoming Q&A post, feel free to ask anything!)

Developing Levels Slowly...

If you’ll recall, Angeline Era today combines the “Bumpslash” (an automatic attack triggered by walking into an enemy), and a Gun that only shoots forwards, and has ammo that reloads when slashing an enemy.

In July 2022 we experimented with different guns, like a shotgun that targeted multiple enemies. Through making and discarding these ideas, we honed in on the gun's role as connective tissue between bumpslashing. Notice how the gun allows me to stay aggressive in the moments I’m not slashing.

I was also working on levels. Early level design is tricky: making up theory to guide you, while repeatedly coding, on top of making and testing. The only way out of this loop is resisting over-theorizing and perfection, and testing out levels, getting feedback and doing it again. Eventually (over months…), the proportion of time spent on theory and adjustment-based goes down, and I’m able to use a new, internalized level design philosophy (and a handful of rules of thumb) to make a bunch of levels and enemies quickly.

So what’s the point of theorizing about design? It acts as rough compass. For example, in this level pictured above, we were inspired by the idea of fast-paced obstacle courses and dodging enemies, rather than the core focus of bumpslash combat. In fact we didn't even have Bumpslash as an idea yet while working on this level! You still had to press a button to do an attack.

By following this level design theory - we were able to see that something didn’t quite feel right. Having to stop to attack felt at odds with quickly moving around. The focus on platforming felt overly precise and tricky. It’s those kinds of observations that can show the way to sort of design we desired with the game’s more action-packed levels: something fast paced, direct, intuitive.

Scale of Levels

Compared to Angeline Era, my past games have much bigger - and thus fewer - levels. Anodyne, ETO, Anodyne 2 have roughly 20-30 things I could call “mid-sized levels”, Sephonie has around 8-10 big levels. (Not counting - maybe Inspiration Dave’s 30+ tiny and Sephonie’s 30ish Linking Puzzles). Angeline Era will have… maybe around 80-100 things I could call levels in the final game? I actually try not to think about the number too much because it’s scary… but…

I would say a small level is around 1-10 minutes to play. A medium is 15-30ish, big levels 30-60+ minutes. I’ve yet to really understand what skills you gain from working on bigger-sized levels (my theory is it’s something related to understanding pacing and overall world-feel of a game, how to connect level to a game’s story), but I am intuitively certain that what I’ve gained from working on Angeline Era feels distinct.

I have a better sense of intuition on how to figure out core spatial or entity (enemy/interactable obstacles/etc) ideas that can lead to an interesting 5-10 minute experience. Maybe the biggest takeaway is that when you have to make a bunch of levels in a week, you start to gain an understanding of what improvisation will get you - vs. what paper-planning will get you. It’s hard to develop this looseness with bigger levels, where the cycle of ideation → paper planning → coding → level drafting → testing takes longer.

I guess the point is: you learn different things working on different games not just from them being different genres, but from how large the base “unit of play” is. I think designers can learn to specialize in certain sizes, but there’s also a value in hopping between different scales. I would say smaller-level-sizes is more my preference, the bigger levels get the more time-consuming and tedious it feels.. but sometimes a game just demands bigger levels. Oh well.

Sephonie’s levels. They’re so big! And yet, necessary for the story we wanted to tell.

Even the Ocean’s biggest levels were about 25-30 of these ‘rooms’ stitched together. I would say they’re still ‘smaller’ than Sephonie because they have less narrative weight/openness, though.

A “Small” Angeline Era action level, pre-art-pass. There are some more complex than this, and some simpler, but this is roughly the size they come out.

A “medium” level from Anodyne 2 - the area with the carwash and Geof. Compared to, say, Angeline Era, this area contains a lot more narrative linkages and ‘worldbuilding weight’

Flaglessness

One interesting idea from before our Ireland trip was "flaglessness".  This means that there's not many moments in the game where you will have had to do X before doing Y. You can trigger most events in any order and there are almost no questlines. Our idea behind this was to keep things simple for the player: as long as you're exploring, you're making progress. But it also acts as a useful constraint for ourselves. Through flaglessness, we could hone in on the essence of Angeline Era being about exploring this strange, bumpslash-focused world - and encountering wondrous story moments throughout. Rather than linking X event to Y event - the focus is more - how do we make an impression - mythlike, almost - from a collection of 5-15 rooms and some enemies, NPCs or code? 

This idea of flaglessness also works well with the small level sizes I just mentioned.

I hope this create a unique texture for the final game... one that feels like a woven myth of the world of Angeline Era, a place where you encounter different sights. Interestingly this calls back some of my thoughts about Kenzaburo Oe's The Game of Contemporaneity. I wonder if it is related! Hmm... you never know what influences will make it into the final game.

Ireland for research!

Don’t drop the phone, Melos!

We decided to go to Ireland for research - initially Marina's narrative interest, but secondarily my interest as a 1/4-Irish American person. Roughly 3 weeks were spent planning for and going on the trip. There was a huge variety of nature and history to take in and we did a lot of fun reading related to Ireland. I even got to visit an ancestor’s hometown!

Cute river stream in my Ancestral Land of “Ballyhahill”.

Our trip ended August 4th 2022. One of the most direct influences is that after our trip Marina started work on what would become the final story for Angeline Era. In the weeks after the trip, she developed and we discussed core concepts to the story - Angels and Fae, the time period, the name of the country (Era, an alternate-history Ireland). The game stopped being Anodyne 3 (did I ever mention this? Haha...). 

A month later on September 9th we decided on the name "Angeline Era" - and picked the protagonist's name - Tets. It turns out we were to combine aspects of Japanese American history, Irish and Christian myth, and more. Of course, things in the story changed but it was the first step on honing in on the final story.

We read a lot during this time - sci-fi, utopian studies, irish history, christian myth studies, asian american literature studies, japanese american history, early asian american immigration, WW2 studies... for me, taking in various media influences like Coji-Coji's otherworldliness or the sense of place of Disciples of Ascensia.

It was all a great foundation for figuring out more about the game's overall structure.

Reflecting on this, I think the trip helped me think more expicitly about "how do I create a process of research that can feed into my creative practice?" This might be a tendency with artists but as I get older I feel less desire to primarily pull from my own life and emotions, but also others' - via through written down books and records, older works and media, chatting. Research feels like an asynchronous, cooperative process with other writers and people you'll never meet, learning from whatever they've found out themselves. I feel we often see famous game designers (rightly) espouse the value of first-hand, verbal and sensory experiences, going outside and moving around, but I often think that a scholarly approach is lacking in that equation. We need to trust not just in ourselves but also what others have noted and observed over time. That’s The Power of Books.

Various other tasks took up my time - making more test levels (some inspired by the trip), enemies, fixing stuff for Sephonie on console, work on the autocuber tool, unpacking our trip into various NPC and scenario ideas. I kept detailed notes and photos of our trip and used these as reference to jot down dozens of shape, mood, atmosphere, etc ideas. These don't really make it in to the final game, but the process of doing so helps cement a certain range of imagery and ideas in my mind.

Internet and other Scraps

A funny idea we scrapped from this time was having an interactive "wiki" you could explore to read blog posts by characters and information. This ended up being too narrative heavy and complex for the game, but it was fun to think about. I seem to always want to include something like this in my games but it never works out. Just like farming mechanics... (sad)

A month or so after we still only had a rough picture of the game's world layout, so we were still into this idea where there would be big setpiece levels influenced by styles of games - like a 2D Metroid 2-influenced level. There are still some levels influenced by this philosophy in Angeline Era, but it's not the focus. I also made some 2.5D-only levels, which aren't in the final game - since making those levels led to realizing they aren't the best fit for the game's combat. (Although 2.5D appears at certain moments.)

A lot of October was spent giving feedback to Marina's story draft, as well as making an RPG-maker-like Event system in Unity that we'll be using for cutscenes. It was cool I was able to make this with Unity - the engine itself is based on my experience doing cutscenes for AOA/Ano2/Sephonie, and the intention is to reduce the pain-in-the-ass-ness of cutscenes. (They all used to be hand-coded...ha ha..)

The jury's still out on if this tool will be useful - it's been a little over a year and I haven't seriously used it - but cutscenes are a really late-development thing so I'll probably have info on it later this year.

But unlike level design which you want to test right away, something like this tool is made from the standpoint of fixing inefficiencies from past games. So I think it'll work out okay. The main aim is to reduce the amount of bugs and retesting as I make events. Making events is just Really Tedious, but what goes on in them is mostly decided at the writing phase.

We also planned for our November 2022 Keynote speeches at UBC ! The talks went well although I got COVID and had to quarantine in Vancouver above a Tim Horton's for a few days. It was kind of scary and sucked but the Tim Horton's was good and Marina was staying next door too. I got to play Nepheshel, BOSSGAME, and Dragon Quest 6, at least...

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, be sure to subscribe for free! Next time, I’ll pick up with the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, where the level design direction would finally start to come together.