I made an old-school 88 by 31 graphic to link here if you want.
- You can see it in action here.
- More about 88×31 links.
88×31
Are you your memories?
A question to ponder: Is you minus your memories still you?
Broken mask
4 figures digitally enhanced and recoloured
I thought I’d see how far I could take the phone photograph of my sketch rather than scanning it properly.
I’m quite pleased even if there was quite a lot of airbrush and touch-up required. I’m not convinced about the shade area, but I can always go back and take another crack at it.
Here’s the before and after:
Testing out an idea on you
I have a thought for a machanic that I might include. The entities that you meet in The Endless Rooms have mostly forgotten who and what they are. I have been thinking that memories could manifest like little flappy moths or butterflies which you must catch and return to their owners.
To that end, I’ve been sketching some ideas.
The plan here is to use mirror symmetry and so I have only drawn one side of each.
RSS isn’t dead
You can subscribe your own way. One way to do that is via feed. So, I drew a feed icon. I’m using it on my site to link to the feed.
Free* to use if you wish
If anyone ever wants to use my sketch for RSS, I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license.
Jagged RSS by Matt is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
I made a graphic to promote my patreon
Why you should follow my Patreon
- I have a free tier to include everyone
- I’m planning on offering patrons postcards featuring my art
- Paid followers get access to a special channel on my Matrix Dreams Discord
- I post unique content and links to all the stuff I make
- Polls, sneak peeks, and updates
- Access to D&D games hosted by me (when I run them)
- Dad jokes. Seriously, they are so groan-worthy.
I kinda feel validated in my art approach here
Language and Engine
At this development stage, I plan to write this game using Python and the Ren’Py story engine. This is because The Endless Rooms is narrative-heavy heavy and I have a little experience with Python. Not a lot of experience – the only complete project was a driver for a 7-seg display written in MicroPython.
I’m taking a few departures from your average Ren’Py visual novel.
- Art style – as I hope you can see, my art style is fairly unique among visual novels and related media.
- The narrative is non-linear – the story is not so much divided into paths as such and can be explored in a number of different ways to get a range of endings.
- The focus is on exploration – you are encouraged to explore the rooms in whichever way you wish.
- Hidden secrets – there will be a fair amount of hidden options, items, and choices.
- Attention is key – ideas, clues, and easter eggs will depend on your attention to some details.
- I like to subvert expectations – expect your assumptions to be open to question.
- Fun fibs – I like games that fib (tell lies) in a way that is fun when you discover the truth
As I begin to get into the guts of the coding, I will release code snippets and screenshots.
Exploring colouring ideas
These little dudes with the fancy masks form the bulk of the characters you will interact with. As such, I’ve been sketching a bunch of them to explore ideas. I’ve also been experimentally colouring those sketches.
From my sketch book
As I work out the visual style and designs for my game, I sketch them. Here are some photos directly from my sketchbook.
Catish
Colouring of one of my sketches.
World Map: Array decisions
I’m going back and forth at the moment on the subject of the world array. In The Endless Rooms, there are endless near-identical rooms. For what I hope are obvious reasons, I plan to go with an array of 100 by 100 rooms, which should feel like an unlimited number without actually being unlimited.
This means that there will be 10,000 rooms to explore. If I create an array to map all the rooms, I probably don’t want to load into memory the objects for every room, entity, creature, puzzle, script and so forth. I may need to map where to find those things and include in the active array, completion, changes, narrative progress, and the like.
The question I am currently playing with is how much I need to keep in memory and how much I can defer to files.
This is a key set of choices that I feel I may need to make early, as changing later could be a lot of needless work. I’ve been using ChatGPT as a coding buddy to talk through ideas (I’ll write my own code, thank you chat), which has helped me get some ideas organised in my brain. Not because ChatGPT is particularly helpful but because I have had to codify and explain what I’m trying to figure out.
Any thoughts? I’d love to hear them.
A remix of the track “There’s something wrong”
This tune is called “There’s something wrong”. I’ve remixed it but I’m not sure which version I like best.
For the logo, I gave my little masked dude a white glow so he looks better on a black background.
The Remixed Version
The Original Version
Which do you like best?
Please leave me comments and replies (or even mentions) with your thoughts. I want to know which you like. Or, if you hate/love them both, what you hate/love/etc..
Lord Matt – There is something wrong
This is a track composed by yours truly. It was created to be part of The Endless Rooms. I may not entirely be finished with it. I’m thinking about adding some EQ, compression, and that sort of thing.
Please feel free to critique, offer feedback, praise, criticise, love, or hate. Basically, I’d like to know what you think.
