Month: August 2022

If you’ve been following along with this weekly series of blog posts, you’ve learned enough about Somnipathy to know our game has a lot of text. If you haven’t and this is the first blog post you’re reading – congratulations! Welcome! We’re glad you’re here, and we think you’ll really enjoy Somnipathy!

Because our game has a lot of text, we need to present that text to the player… which means we need to have fonts to do so. Fortunately our team includes Babs, who we have presented with the title “Empress of Fonts”.

Over the course of development so far, Babs has crafted, revised, adjusted, and finalized dozens of variations of hand-drawn fonts for us to use in the game for different purposes, different characters, and different times.

I’m an avid journaler with an appreciation for good handwriting, so having the opportunity to use tools like Calligraphr to create a unique typeface for Somnipathy was a labor of love.

For the rest of the team, the process of seeing the fonts come together has been a sort of magic all it’s own, especially when the first few were implemented into Somnipathy and began to provide that extra layer of texture and friction for Aggy and the rest of her world. It was a very subtle but large step in making the game inside of our collective minds turn into something real…

We’ll be back next week, to talk more about Tearcell Game Studio itself, provide a proper introduction to the people behind Somnipathy, and also make a big announcement. We hope to see you then and in the meantime don’t forget to wishlist us on Steam!

A view of the inside of the Tearcell virtual workspace, maybe?

We are back again, with more discussion from inside the development of Somnipathy! This week we want to pull back the hood on two very different systems involved with our work: one in-game, and one out-of-game.

PickyBurrito49 is one of the programmers on our team, and he’s taken the lead role on several subsystems within our game. Frequently this means that he works on a system isolated from the rest of the game’s development, and then only gets to see how it interacts with our world after plugging in a reasonably functioning alpha version for us to play with. Sometimes, this breaks the game entirely! This kind of work also means that sometimes he has to go back to the drawing board with an idea, so we asked him about his process building out a system that can’t be tested until an alpha implementation:

Our technical director makes my job easier because he has a knack for seeing into the future and providing parameters for subsystems that are capable of handling whatever we need them to do upon adding them. Some rebuilding is still inevitable as the game continues to evolve but overall it has been pretty fun to be able to build out ideas I have and share them with the team. I am looking forward to seeing the public reaction to Somnipathy too!

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the work of our Creative Director, Mink. She leads our small yet mighty team of creatives as they excavate the art mines, iterating upon ideas to come together into a cohesive and coherent whole. Along with her talent as an artist, she also has a background in film and animation that we all rely upon heavily as we work. The art mines are very time consuming, with many versions of concepts being extracted and discarded before a particular character, element, or object being locked in. She took a few moments to pass along her philosophy on iteration and feedback to share with you:

The term art mines is funny but very fitting for what can be considered as the “trenches”. A gaming project is guaranteed to have a surplus of art needs and in truth, “art never really is complete,” you merely stop making changes – ideally, when it has become “enough”.

Thank you for “checking out” this blog post.

Much like everything else we do, teamwork is key to achieving our vision. Sadly in the world of Somnipathy, Aggy does not really have a team to rely upon – other than you, the player! Remember to wishlist us on Steam, and help Aggy find her way.

In Somnipathy the world can be very dark in many ways, but that doesn’t stop us from throwing all kinds of small details into the game in order to make it feel alive. Those small details are also one of the ways that our small team crosses boundaries between development disciplines in order to bring them to life.

Our lead writer, HighVoltageCatfish, is deeply inspired by atmospheric horror games past and considers Silent Hill 2 to be one of the all-time greats. His writing style both for Somnipathy and in general is heavily influenced by it. Yet along with wearing the hat of “lead writer”, he also serves as our primary level designer which means that he’s also responsible for making a lot of the small detail choices within the world of the game. We asked him what principles he uses when setting up the physical world that his story will be played out within, and he had this to say:

“I’ve been having a lot of fun with the synergy between writing the overall story as well as designing the levels, especially when it comes to allow players to make their own connections between things in game. Where it might be superfluous or overly verbose to have the Superintendent talk about safety measures with The Otherside, it is far more informative and concise to place some railings along an edge of an expanse along with a well-used, cluttered workbench nearby.”

Another one of our team members who crosses disciplines is pnutbutterprincess. With a background that includes work as an artist and as a programmer, she often ends up tasked with small but recurring details that hover on the line between the two. Many of the elements of our HUD design were her work, both in the code and in the on-screen appearance. Currently she has been prototyping some of the icons that will appear as part of other in-game systems that we’ll be talking about separately soon. pnutbutterprincess described her philosophy on creating those elements for us…

“There is some magic in creating elements that are both memorable and intuitive without being intrusive or confusing in some way. When creating, it can be scary to stare at a blank slate and try to come up with elements that will make sense and look good. I know that the other artists on the team all do amazing work, and they are there to back me up and help revise once we find good concepts.”

Talking about all of this sometimes fails to communicate just how involved some of the work in the Godot engine can be in order to stitch together all of the elements into a unified whole. We might be showing you fun concept art or screenshots here, but most of the time what we are all looking at is more like the image below.

Thanks for reading this week’s entry! We’ll be back in a week’s time with more from the team, and more about what goes into bringing our game to life. In the meantime, don’t forget to wishlist us on Steam!

Somnipathy Cutscene 01 Concept Storyboard

This week, we are thinking about storytelling. No. Wait. We are ALWAYS thinking about storytelling… this week we are thinking about… CUTSCENES. As we close in on the completion of the first chapter of Somnipathy in our internal builds, we are moving to flesh out the encounters and events that inform the world you will be exploring as players in Somnipathy. The image at the top of the page is the initial draft storyboard that one of our talented artists, Ryan, put together for the very first cutscene you will encounter in the game.

When asked about this cutscene, Ryan described the key elements under consideration and what the cutscene’s intended message to the player is.

For this cutscene introducing the Creeper, it is critical to communicate the nature of that entity to the player. The Creeper is an ever-present threat that will come for Aggy even in places she would otherwise feel safe (for example, her apartment). Fighting it through conventional means is futile! The player’s only choice is to run.

Of course, making cutscenes come to life is not solely the work of the artists on our team. In order to make the art and concepts come to life, everything needs to be wired together inside of the game engine. We asked our Technical Director Darius, who is also the driving force behind the studio, about what it’s like implementing a cutscene or other set piece in-engine.

Getting the artwork is only half the challenge. It’s exciting, but then you’re like, “Wait, how am I going to do this justice in engine?” Godot’s animation player is REALLY powerful thankfully, and makes timing things very easy. Still, you have to take off the programmer’s hat and put on the director’s hat, and that hat sits differently.

Because our team is so small, communication is very important, and we keep a constant and vibrant flow of discussion active internally so we can all stay on the same page. Discord for us is key, as none of us sit in the same room at any point during our development. Its all remote work when you can find the time.

That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in this space soon to talk about the Tearcell team and some more of what we’re doing to bring Somnipathy to life. In the meantime, enjoy another piece of wonderful work from Ryan below.

Somnipathy Cutscene 01, Frame 01 Concept Art-in-progress

For more information about Somnipathy, check out our Steam store page.