Vision Soft Reset

Hi everyone.  It’s been a while since the last post, and a lot of things have been added and tweaked. Not least of which is refining a large and very important new mechanic.  We’ve seen how Oracle can peek a few seconds into the future with the Vision and Flashback mechanics.  But her clairvoyance is not limited to this short amount of time.  Vision Soft Reset also features the Chamber Flashback, a unique mechanic that not only allows us to revert time by several minutes, but also allow us to revisit different locations and scenarios created from altered timelines.  This is a beefy mechanic that will force players to rethink how they approach these kinds of adventure games.

But first let’s talk about something else: game saving.  A pretty standard feature in games, saving creates a record of the player’s progress that can be resumed later.  Many games use automatic saves, although it’s somewhat of a tradition to have manual saves in retro-inspired adventures.  But as we’ll see, this format is very deliberately chosen to integrate with Vision Soft Reset’s other mechanics.

Saving is done on Chamber Platforms.

Each platform is identified by a unique icon.

It works how most gamers would expect.  Explore further and you’ll come across more save platforms.

Each save records Oracle’s location, time, and max health (among other things).  These saves are visualized in an in-game menu known as a Time Tree.  Each node on the Time Tree represents a time the player saved.  The horizontal position of the node represents the time the game was saved, the icon represents the location, and the dots represent the player’s health.  There is also an additional node which shows the player’s current time and location.

What an average player’s Time Tree might look like shortly after saving at the second platform.

Let’s continue the game.  Here’s a good chance to showcase some new areas and obstacles made since the last update.  Notably we found a health upgrade (bringing our max health to 3 hearts), and the Charge Shot decryptor (decryptors are codes that unlock features of Oracle’s suit).

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We end up in a room containing some familiar looking symbols.  Unfortunately, we’re also stuck.  We can’t jump back up the way we came, and there doesn’t seem to be another way out.  What can we do now?

Trapped at the bottom of a room.  Is this the end of our journey?

Here’s where the Chamber Flashback comes in handy.  By selecting a node on the Time Tree, we’re able to revert back to a previous time that we recorded at a Chamber Platform.

Observing the time in the upper right, we see that we didn’t teleport to a different location, rather we reverted to where we were a few minutes ago.  It’s kinda like reloading an old save file.  Well now that we’re out of that sticky situation, what else can we do?

The puzzles get more complex later in the game, no really!

So naturally we solve that puzzle from before and open a nearby barrier.  But how did Oracle know the correct combination?  She hasn’t gone into the room revealing the solution yet.  As it turns out, everything from when we last saved up until we got stuck in that room never actually happened.  It was all just one big vision that Oracle had.  We were able to take information we found from one possible future, and apply it to problems encountered in the present.  Pretty neat!

Oracle can still use the Charge Shot as well.

Codes are also sources of information that can be recalled through time.  Remember that the Charge Shot decryptor isn’t exactly an upgrade, it’s a code that unlocks abilities that have always been a part of Oracle’s suit.  Just like how we remembered the combination that unlocked the barrier, Oracle remembers the code that lets her shoot charge shots.  Since we’re not using upgrades, everything resulting from a Chamber Flashback sounds pretty good, right?

Wally might be ruining the mood, but he brings up a good point.

Not quite.  Even though we saw a vision of a health upgrade, remember that in this timeline we never actually collected it yet.  Health upgrades are examples of physical items, things that don’t transfer across visions.  We should probably go back and get it before continuing into the unknown.  Note that if we reverted to a time after we picked up the upgrade, we wouldn’t be having this problem.  We should probably save after picking it back up again (which will also record the newly opened barrier).

It’s up to the player to manage physical items when utilizing Chamber Flashbacks.  It’s an evil necessary for preserving consistency with the game’s rules.  It’ll take some getting used to, but smart players should have no trouble adjusting to this new style of gameplay (hint: save often).  It’s not as simple as it appears though.  In a later update I’ll explain how precious time is in Vision Soft Reset, and why using time to snag some upgrades instead of taking the fastest route might be a disadvantageous tradeoff.

Finally, visiting different areas after reverting to a previous save will result in branching timelines.  After saving at the first platform we traveled right, but what happens when we instead go left?  Each new destination is recorded as a different branch in the Time Tree.  These branches are completely custom built by the player’s actions, and it’s up to them to find the best branch that gets through the game.  What will your Time Tree look like?

Time Trees become more complex over time.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the depth the Chamber Flashback and Time Tree mechanics bring to Vision Soft Reset.  More will revealed in later updates!

The latest gameplay video for VSR.  The presentation got a complete overhaul since the last gameplay video, which is what this focuses on.

I feel that combat can very easily make a game feel repetitive and stale, which is strange because combat is usually added with the intention of giving players more to do.  To circumvent this problem in Vision Soft Reset, I want to introduce a large variety of enemies that all feel distinct from each other.  This includes differences in movement patterns, appearance, and even their cries upon death.  By mixing different enemies together for each encounter each battle can feel like a fresh new challenge.

And here are four such enemies below, wonderfully animated by Elias Frost, VSR’s second sprite artist.

Sealime:

A green seal-like creature that is usually content with just flopping around.  But some Sealimes are more dangerous than others, and will fling a barrage of projectiles if they feel threatened.  The Vision mechanic can be used to reveal which one will strike before being in the line of fire.

Ciurivy:

A squirrel-like creature that can lob explosive acorns.  They never seem to run out, but luckily they’re not very hard to avoid.

Magoom:

A mole-like creature that moves quickly while aimlessly slashing its claws.  Magooms will occasionally burrow into the ground and surface in a different location.

Smosey:

A small mosquito-like creature.  Not very threatening on its own, but in groups Smoseys become much more formidable.

Hi everyone.  It’s been a while since the last update, and much of that time was spent reinventing the visual presentation of Vision ~ SR.  My own art that I had been making was not meeting the quality standards the game deserves.  So here I welcome Arron Johnson, a skilled sprite artist that has been working on improving the in-game assets.  It took some discussion, but eventually we decided on a great new look for the game, a taste of which is below.

Pretty much everything has changed; from the UI elements to the ship to Oracle herself. The way Oracle is rendered was even modified.  Instead of an ordinary sprite sheet, there are now two separate sprite sheets used to animate Oracle: one for the upper body (e.g. aiming) and one for the lower body (e.g. running).  It’s a simpler workflow on both the artistic and technical sides, allowing me to easily change the stance of Oracle’s legs based on the slope of the platfrom she’s standing on.  It’s a nice feature you don’t see in many sprite-based games.

Other characters have gotten face-lifts as well, while still retaining my original vision for them.  We also finally got profile images for the text area, handily provided by concept artist Molly (who you might remember from the previous update).

The island tilesets and backgrounds have received improvements as well.  Levels are being reworked to account for the new look of these assets, and they are not quite ready to be shown off yet.  But the slightly-obscured screenshot below shows a bit of what it’ll look like.

With the revamp it’s only fitting to update the .gifs on the Gameplay page that explain some of Vision ~ SR’s key features.  Here’s the new .gif of the Flashback mechanic:

And below is the new .gif showing the Vision mechanic.  The shader rendering the silhouettes also changed; now they appear as a solid gray color rather than a grayscale version of the sprite.  This was done to reduce noise and more clearly differentiate the difference between attacks and their intangible visions.

By contrast, here are the old versions of these animations:

Quite the difference, wouldn’t you say?  I’m excited to think it’ll only get better from here.

After showing off some gameplay last month I realized I wasn’t satisfied with how the game looked.  Despite my best efforts the sprites I made looked too plain and simple, and it would take a disproportionate amount of effort for me to get Vision ~ SR to shine on my own.  Over the month of May I’ve been chatting with some skilled freelancers, and a few have signed on to work on this project.  By living cheaply I’m able to offer fair compensation from what I make at my day job.  One could look at my game’s development as a “really expensive hobby”, with “expensive” referring to money and free time.  But since I’m an adult now I can do what I want.

On this post I highlight the efforts of Molly Heady-Carroll,  who will be creating  concept art for VSR’s prominent characters and bosses.  So far she has been great to work with and you can expect more spectacular creatures to be shown off soon.  But for now I want to focus on the evolution of the design of Oracle, the main protagonist.

Oracle

Oracle is a cybrog, the design of which was inspired by BR-W9 from the 2009 game Contra Rebirth.  The decision to have VSR star a cyborg that can see the future was made for gameplay reasons; I needed a character that had most of their abilities from the start, but would be unable to use them until the player progressed through the game (I’ll go into why in a later post).  With this reference I initially just dove into making the sprites from there without drawing it out first.

As it turns out, getting a cyborg to look appealing while not falling into the uncanny valley is quite a challenge.  The first design had a stoic, creepily serious expression that never sat well with me.  I later replaced the face with a singular “eye” to make it look more appealing.  It wasn’t until I decided on getting a revamp did I consider updating the look further.

Amusingly one person told me that Oracle’s sprite resembled a “purple fox furry”, and someone else drew it like that.  Clearly this was not the intention.  But hey I got my first fan art of the game, so that’s a milestone right there.

Anyway I had Molly design some concepts, and we eventually reached on a final design shown below.  The alterations to Oracle’s “hair” was a great change; making her look more sleek and futuristic without being creepy.  Basically the concept artist made an illustration based on the pixel art sprites… which seems backward in retrospect.

Larva Oracle

Larva Oracle is Oracle’s true, suitless form.  While in the suit Oracle is a dangerous force to be reckoned with, and I thought it’d be funny if it was actually being controlled by a cute bug the entire time.  I still wanted a hint of mysticism in the design, as she’s still powerful with her ability to see the future.  In fact in larva form Oracle’s clairvoyance is a bit stronger, but she lacks any combat ability.  The four spots on her back are receptors she uses to commandeer the suit.

Currently Larva Oracle is only briefly shown in the game on the title screen and during her death animation.  The form will be more significant as the game continues.

Thanks for reading, I’ll be sure to share more designs and other fun insights soon.

There is no background music yet!  Apologies if this makes the video awkward!

This video shows an early glance at what the gameplay will be like in Vision ~ SR.  It showcases the title screen, basic movement, basic combat, basic exploration, and the Chamber Flashback ability.

I intend on commissioning a composer for music soon.  Presentation videos like these should be made first though to let them know what they’re actually making music for.

Hi everyone!  This is the first post of the development blog for the upcoming action-adventure game Vision ~ SR.  What better way to start than explaining how it all began?  It’d be good to write this all down before I forget anyway.

Initial Concept

Among many other sources of inspiration, the core idea behind Vision ~ SR came from the 2014 movie Edge of Tomorrow, where Tom Cruise’s character learns more and more about how to stop an alien invasion by repeating the same day over and over.  This movie was supposedly inspired by hard levels in video games, where the player fails a level so much that they eventually beat it just from remembering where all the enemies are and what they’re going to do.  This always seemed like cheating to me though, as the protagonist within the universe of these games would have no way of knowing all this information about the level ahead of time.  But what if there was a game where this was the entire point?  Would it work?  Would it be fun?

Contra and Contra: The Movie

In the summer of 2015 I came up with the following concept for a game.  The player is given a short amount of time (e.g. 15 minutes) to collect four keys in some sort of labyrinth.  The majority of the game would be preparation; using the short 15 minute periods to enhance the player’s own abilities and determine the location of the keys.  The paths taken would resemble a tree starting from one root location.  One path would have the player heading right, one heading left, one heading left and then down, and so on.  Ideally each path would serve a purpose, like determining the location of a key or unlocking a new ability.  Once the player has learned everything they need to know about the labyrinth, they must use their knowledge to plan a route that would allow them to snatch all four keys and unlock the final door in the short 15 minute time limit.

This structure interestingly resembles basic concepts used in graph traversal.  The initial runs are like depth first searches of a maze, and the final speedrun-like segment resembles a solution to a “travelling-salesman” problem, a classic “hard” problem in the Computer Science field.  For a while the game was called “Nondeterminism” for this reason, but the name was dropped for being a mouthful to say.

Vision ~ Proto

With the general structure of the game planned, that left the question of what the minute-to-minute gameplay would be like.  It could be anything really.  I chose a 2D platformer with shooting combat just because I like those kinds of games and had experience developing them.

I also wanted unique features that fit the “seeing the future” theme.  This is where the titular Vision mechanic comes from, which allows the player to see silhouettes of enemy attacks a second before they actually happen.  Going backwards through time, denoted Flashback, was also thought of at the beginning but initially I wanted it to be an unlockable ability the player would get later on, and wasn’t even sure the mechanic would be fun.  But I figured if there was even a small chance of including this mechanic, it would have to be integrated into the game’s code from the very beginning, which is why it was developed first.  More about Vision ~ SR’s gameplay can be found on the Gameplay page.

To test out the minute-to-minute gameplay, I created a prototype version of the game called Vision ~ Proto.  Proto was very short, and merely consisted of waves of enemies that the player had to defeat.  It showed off the gameplay, but little else.  Proto was a two-month project with a hard deadline of November 20, 2015, the date of that year’s Rensselaer Game Showcase (RGS).  RGS was an annual event at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the university I was attending, that allowed students to show off their game projects to the student body.  Naturally it was a great opportunity to collect feedback from players.

Vision ~ Proto at RGS

Vision ~ Proto Screenshot

People enjoyed it, I think.  Nobody hated it.  That was good enough for me, and I made the push to expand the game into Vision ~ SR.  I knowingly added features I knew would be removed for the real game, like a scoring system and a simplified menu, which resulted in some wasted assets.

Pushing the game to the next level was a long and arduous challenge that required me to work on it at least a little bit each day.  Menus, upgrades, dialogue, a tutorial, multi-screen rooms, multiple rooms, a map, more enemies, more environments, and even the initial concept had all yet to be implemented.  It took 4-5 months to evolve Proto into the game’s current state.  Now that many core features are now implemented (with the notable exception of music), interesting updates should hopefully be coming out more frequently.