GnomeStead - concept start - Godot Community Forums

GnomeStead - concept start

jbskaggs

Thanks for all the help on Kill all Cancer.

My wife and I want to work on a project called GnomeStead now. She wants it child friendly.

Currently we are thinking small city builder / trading single player game.

Synopsis: Grow from a tent to a walled city while trading with neighbors via viking gnome boats.

Game mechanics: Your town will be a small rpg village that you grow and the different buildings, farms and people sell you the Jarl of the town their products. You then take your little gnome ship and explore and discover other communities across a big lake. Quests are essentially challenges to get new buildings and trade routes.

Ship events: will be text based based on choose your adventure questions and then dice rolled responses. Combat not to be gruesome or central to story save as quest elements displayed thru static images.

Village mechanics: traditional rpg village- cute art style based on our previous works. Walk around, talk to people, get quests, tell a story and learn things about your Gnome people. And a court system: Scene with your Jarl avatar on throne giving Thumbs up, thumbs down on govt matters such as sentencing, taxes, technology.

Based on children's books we used illustrate and create together, this makes me happy to have her on this project.

If you have any input would love to hear it.

Thanks

jbskaggs

I wrote my game doc with building types, mechanics, goods, basic situations and trade mechanics. Actually turned out to be much simpler in design than I thought. But like sushi the difficulty will come with the execution of these ideas.

Basically about a 2 page game design doc, then building lists and quest lists brought it up to a whopping 9. But thats really just lists of whats needed.

I am encouraged by completing this with such lucidity tonight. I restricted every aspect of the design only to things I know how to do. And I eliminated most need for complicated or animated art.

The hardest part was working out the aspect my wife wanted which was the family drama development. And that turned out to not be that difficult once I started writing it out.

But expect celtic knots galore in the art by her!

jbskaggs

Worked today and got the first dialog scene between the gnomes and the birdpeople of Leaf Village completed. My wife also completed several pages of concept characters and objects. It was a good day.

The Dialogic addon is helpful and strange in how it works, with some very minor timing and animation bugs that I worked around, and one serious timeline json file corruption bug that I do not know how it was caused. And took me about 20 minutes to fix. Though technically for this game I could just use a previous dialog system I wrote- this one should save me time in the long run.

This game occurs almost entirely in dialog from the view point of the Gnome ruler in GnomeStead throne room. The rest from the POV of a small RPG. These dialogs in the throneroom either start, update, or end quests. Provide back info. Perform trades. Or initiate actions.

Artwise my wife has increased the age level from 7 years old to 13 years old to allow darker more realistic artstyles. She is a friend of Wayne June the narrator from Darkest Dungeon and though she doesnt want to go that dark and intense, she wants a little more grittier tense mood to the style of the game. One that shows some of the life and death struggle fantasy creatures would have in a wild American Swamp in Mississippi. She also wants this one to be stylistic in manner similar to Book of Kells movie- but more realistic.

Also she changed the other villages to more than gnomes: goblins, micepeople, sparrow people, molepeople, ratpeople, pixies. Friendly animals to be farmed and hunted. Such as shrews, hummingbirds, bees, large pinching beetles, earthworms, grubs, snails.

Monsters will include natural wildlife such as wasps, ants, beetles, bullfrogs, snakes, gators, snapping turtles, cats, shrikes, alligator gar, bass, catfish. As well as undead, witches, lycanthropes, trolls, fungi. Anyvillage can be friend or foe.

She will help me learn this style she is doing so I can help her produce art as well.

I am enjoying this project so far.

cybereality

Sounds cool.

Erich_L

You lost me at child friendly but then reeled me back in with city builder, then you got me with "darker more realistic artstyles". I can't wait!

cybereality

Well if you actually read some of those old fairy tales, they were extremely dark and maybe not for children.

jbskaggs

@cybereality said: Well if you actually read some of those old fairy tales, they were extremely dark and maybe not for children.

Not for our concept of kids anyway. They were pretty useful in world where death was real possibility and probable for kids. Plus it allowed the discussion of topics that could otherwise have been a crime. Especially the nursery rhymes.

fire7side

I don't know what the deal is with everything has to be turned into a darker theme. Like they show super heroes and they are all in these drab dark costumes. I'm tired of comic book themes anyway, but dark comic book is even worse. Oh, spiderman 299 is going to be much darker. In fact, you won't even be able to see the characters. We are going to put a flashlight on the blood and gore so you won't miss that, though. Hundreds of more decapitations!!!

cybereality

Yeah, I guess from when the stories were originally, the world was a different place. My mom used to tell me about Baba Yaga as a kid (she's an old Russian fairy tale), and it was super dark.

In terms of comics, I understand that the gritty versions are more modern. Like Nolan's Batman is definitely more relevant today that Burton's. But the original comics were very colorful and playful, but maybe having a bunch of people in yellow spandex won't sell.

I loved Spiderman 2099. It was the only comic that I read the entire series from issue 1 when it came out (for the first volume, 1992 - 1996). I was also into X-Force, I had X-Force 1 signed by Rob Liefeld. I was really into it.

jbskaggs

@cybereality said: Yeah, I guess from when the stories were originally, the world was a different place. My mom used to tell me about Baba Yaga as a kid (she's an old Russian fairy tale), and it was super dark.

In terms of comics, I understand that the gritty versions are more modern. Like Nolan's Batman is definitely more relevant today that Burton's. But the original comics were very colorful and playful, but maybe having a bunch of people in yellow spandex won't sell.

I loved Spiderman 2099. It was the only comic that I read the entire series from issue 1 when it came out (for the first volume, 1992 - 1996). I was also into X-Force, I had X-Force 1 signed by Rob Liefeld. I was really into it.

Thats Vasillia the beautiful in the pic, she is in several tales with Baba Yaga usually as a servant. I have written several novels based in Eastern Europe and Russian folklore- pretty good stuff. Baba Yaga of course bounces between villain, hero, and quest giver- as well as archetypal gate keeper. I have written several papers on Baba Yaga. In many Eastern Europe tales she is a friend of children and serves as a foster mother as well as being a cannibal to brats. That pic is in several of my reference books and I love it and the style.

My wife's art isnt dark like the new stuff- its similar to the water color above- less childish and little more real.

BTW I loathe comic books havent been able to finish one in almost 16 years. And the comic book movies are worse. Even had one of my novels stolen and used as source material for one. Which does not help. I love graphic novels- but I hate commercialized idiocracy that passes for story.

My Gnome stories are based on a blend of the Nisse or Scandinavian monsters / myths and the Gnomens or Mediterranean myths not the American garden decorations. They were a very vikingish / mafia like mythos. Very loyal to traditions, family, religion but would blackmail, murder, curse and steal if their greed. family or honor demanded it. In my children's books about them I reduced them to being traditional family centered stories about responsibility. In my adult books they were at war with humans and other mythos- especially elves, dwarves, and humans. They raised trolls for food, pets, combat, profit. For example their tall hats serve combat purposes - they are helmets and help them escape as the hats tend to become targets. They also serve as cultural markers: gender, age, rank, station.

So in this game I will be touching on some of that.

cybereality

Did you see this done with the new Blender?

jbskaggs

That was a pretty good movie, I wonder how long that took to make. And I wondered if they would be redcaps- but sprites works too:)

fire7side

@jbskaggs said: That was a pretty good movie, I wonder how long that took to make. And I wondered if they would be redcaps- but sprites works too:)

I was on the Blender forum when they made a real early one and it took a team of people months, but computers were slower and they waited a long time for the renders. That was back when I was using the Blender Game Engine. Buggiest engine of all time. I finally gave up on it.

cybereality

It took them 15 months. Which is quite long for a short, but I believe it was mostly community members and volunteers working on it.

Megalomaniak

@cybereality said: It took them 15 months. Which is quite long for a short, but I believe it was mostly community members and volunteers working on it.

No, the artists are hired from the community but are full time payed and work locally in Amsterdam in a professional setting. So a small team.

cybereality

I see interesting. Still pretty cool.

jbskaggs

Here is my first concept art of the starting throne room. This is a mish mash of my art and some freebie assets I modified. My wife likes this style and I can draw in it. You can probably tell this is very fast mouse art.

Anyway as the town grows this throne room grows and changes. The concept for a starting throneroom was harder than I thought it would be. I need it to appear as a chieftain's room but primitive still.

The other are some concept sketches Melinda did.

As far as animations the fire is animated. But I need to setup skinning and make sure the character sprite parts are pretty identical in size so I can use same animations and just reskin them dynamically.

Let me know your thoughts on this rough concept sketch what works what doesnt. Thanks

@"Lupas Deva"

cybereality

I think the art direction is good. You just have to be careful getting free assets if they are from different artist, or different resolutions and stuff and don't match well.

jbskaggs

@cybereality said: I think the art direction is good. You just have to be careful getting free assets if they are from different artist, or different resolutions and stuff and don't match well.

Thank you. We will be redrawing everything. There is no plan to buy or use free assets in end game. But we do like this style so its easy to make and fast. :)

Currently making rune stones for gui, Then I am heading to bed.

jbskaggs

My runestones looked great in my mind but in practice they did not come out right so my wife is critiquing them to help guide me to fix them. And she also spotted the style inconsistencies in my mockup and is giving me pointers.

Art on Fentynal sounds like a name of a ArtHouse movie but is my actual challenge when doing art right now.