I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been able to get deep enough into Godot development at this point to feel comfortable offering development in the engine as part of my service profile.
Godot joins Unity and Unreal as well as bespoke development as a core Perfect Minute service offering. If you’ve got game development needs and want to use Godot for your engine, I’d love to have a chat!
Paint By Monsters started life, as with many of my original designs, as an attempt to subvert aspects of an existing popular design. In this case, it was the Horde Survival/Bullet Heaven microgenre, which has exploded in popularity since Vampire Survivors appeared on the scene.
This type of game is an attractive prospect for a dev – mechanically simple, technically and artistically feasible for a reasonably skilled development team, and with a reasonably short development cycle. If I had any sense, probably, I might have been content to simply create a much more direct version of the experience myself. But.
I often take a contrarian stance in some aspect of a new design (witness the small squad sizes in Contension or the worst-of-both-worlds combination of cards and tiles in Mechanisms). I often end up thinking about how to “reverse” a particular a genre. In this case, I was thinking about “reverse horde survival”.
The obvious first step, for me, was inverting the relationship of player and entities onscreen. In Horde Survival, you are one against many, so obviously in the reversal you play many against one. This eventually became many against few rather than one, since there’s still action economy to consider, but the core idea remains the same – the player uses a horde of relatively weak minions to fend off a small band of powerful invaders.
This idea, on its own, is the same basic formula as Dungeon Keeper and its ilk. That’s not a bad thing – Dungeon Keeper was a lot of fun, after all – but one thing dungeon defense games don’t do all that well is the kind of continuous action that horde survival has perfected.
So how could we channel that feeling of “action” if mostly you’re just spawning hordes of autonomous creatures? Feature Demo 0.0.1 took a look at the simplest version: spawning minions in realtime. Nothing fancy, just skeletons appearing whenever and wherever you hold the mouse button down.
The next few feature demos built on top of this foundation – 0.0.2 added a little agency to the enemy, 0.0.4 added a win condition, 0.0.3, 0.05, and 0.0.6 added new enemy and minion types. The “minimum viable loop”, such as it was, seemed complete. And it felt…not great.
I knew why it didn’t feel great. Even with a bunch of minion types to switch between, even with limited numbers of each minion type, even with adventurers carefully tuned so you could just barely beat them if you did a good job with the resources available…you were just moving the mouse around with the button down. It didn’t feel intentional.
That’s when I starting thinking ahead, thinking about what the Player Experience should be. Player Experience is something that gets talked about a lot more in board game design than in video game design, in my (limited) experience, but it’s important in both.
It’s not really about the core loop, though that loop will inform it. It’s not really about the theme, though the player will form impressions based on the theme that will affect their experience. It’s not even really about the action economy itself.
Player Experience, at its very core, is the answer to “What do I want the player to feel while playing this game?” For Paint By Monsters, as it turns out, the answer to that question is: I want them to feel like an artist who uses their art to stand up against tyranny, the same way many artists I admire around the world have done throughout the ages.
Until this point, mind, I had no idea that was any part of what the game was about. I thought I was trying a new take on something that’s kept me creatively engaged for years. I wrote a book a while back set in a world where music and magic were the same thing. I was spending hours in that world nearly every day for 2 years, and at some point, I realized that in that world any art form should invoke magic.
Paint By Monsters was playing some of those same notes, and I kind of thought it was going in the same direction. But reading a story where some folks use art as magic, and actually playing the role of one of those folks, as it turns out, feels different. There’s a lot that comes out of that, but the big thing was clarity on a few different pieces of design:
These, then, are the cornerstones of the game’s core gameplay loop. We call it Room Painting.
Each new room is a new chance to try to stop the Adventurers from getting closer to the Studio. In each room, you channel creative energy to paint minions into the scene, and somewhere in the ensuing chaos one side or the other emerges victorious.
There are a lot of fun bits and pieces that have emerged from this core concept, and I’m looking forward to talking about those in future articles, but the emergence of these three key ideas, and particularly the Brush Strokes mechanic, was the first time I felt like I was headed for a good understanding of the Player Experience.
Somewhere around this time, I started talking to artists. I eventually landed on the incomparable Curtis Rioux and his merry band at Stellar Boar Studios. At first we talked solely about the studio doing art for the game, but as I went through the application process for CMF, I realized that games have many kinds of design intermingling, and art was an area where I really didn’t have the right skills or sensibility.
Happily, Curtis does have such a sensibility, and furthermore, when I sat down with him to talk about his ideas as Art Director for the game, he was already moving at the speed of thought. He brought a bunch of medieval mythical creatures to my attention, the best of which we chose for our starting lineup. I can’t wait for him to tell you all about the process of bringing those to life.
This new input set fire to my brain. I’d had a vague notion of what the world map might look like before, but adding these unusual creatures to the mix, along with a bunch of HEMA nerdery (check out Tod’s Workshop and Shadiversity in particular), gave me a strong sense of the tone of the game. There’s a playfulness here that wasn’t immediately apparent with the generic royalty-free assets I’d been using initially.
I recognized, looking at these strange artifacts of ancient imaginations, that we’d do well to hold our tongues in our cheeks now and then.
Maybe because of that new sense of levity, I also recognized that the game feels a bit like an Action RPG, and also that dudes who just run around with swords are Bo Ring. We needed a little flavour. A little flare. A little Michael Bay, if you will.
At this point I’d already worked on 0.0.7 & 0.0.8 (heavily informed by the excellent upgrade system in Brotato) and 0.0.9 (Dungeon Keeper, obv), and those informed my ideas about where we might inject some Action Hero notes. I also drew these:
Just messing around with these sketches let me think in more concrete terms about what kinds of action might matter – interacting with the environment (particularly the addons from 0.0.9), the room, and the Minion horde. And that set me down the path to thinking about archetypes and Murder Hobos.
Murder Hobos is an idea in tabletop RPG circles that the group of characters in a typical D&D game is sometimes indistinguishable from a band of drifter serial killers whose sole purpose in life is to destroy life and steal property.
These days a lot of RPG players recognize that maybe this isn’t the healthiest model within which to run a roleplaying game, but for Paint By Monsters it fits perfectly.
The Adventurers are, after all the antagonists. It’s fine if they’re despicable. Better than fine – it drives home that whole thing about opposing tyranny.
And if the Adventurers are the expression of tyranny, then the ultimate realization of that is the crown itself. I’d already been thinking about including a traditional roguelike world map (sometimes called an FTL map), and putting Studio and Castle in opposition to one another fit very neatly into that setup.
This became the second loop of the game, which we’re calling Gauntlet Building. The player adds rooms to their magical gauntlet, trying to head off incoming Adventurers, and each time an adventuring party finds a room, they invade the gauntlet in search of treasure and glory, kicking off another iteration of the inner (Room) Loop (the one with the painterly gameplay).
There are, as with everything else, lots of fine details that have spun off from these seeds, and we’ll tell you more about those as development proceeds.
The final piece of our puzzle is meta-progression. Folks often say this was the real secret to Vampire Survivors’ success, and it’s hard to disagree. The game makes you feel like you’re adding stacks on stacks on stacks on NUCULAR WEPPONS.
This is the second place in the design where my inner contrarian raised his head. Most roguelike games keep the the meta-progression elements behind very simple interfaces. A few have played with expectations a bit, or used more traditional unlock systems where completing specific in-game goals will open up new and exciting possibilities. But we already had such an interesting, unique world taking shape that tacking on the merest mechanical necessities felt really unsatisfying.
I started thinking about Evil Overlords and the tropes around them. Think about the villains in Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time, for example – a dark lord is defeated, an epoch passes, a dark lord rises once again, ad infinitum.
As a word nerd, any chance to use the word “epoch” is a chance worth taking, and so we came up with the Epochal Loop. The Artist may not be a dark lord, but they do rise and fall in the same age-old cycle.
Curtis (remember Curtis?) suggested that maybe in these sections of the game, the player is travelling between worlds, exploring an infinite universe of possibilities, and I thought that was just the best thing, for lots of different reasons.
Among those reasons is how it explains why the world we’re on is always in roughly the same technological period. Sure, civilizations rise and fall, but these days folks like to say History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
We could say the roguelike elements of a game like ours – procedural worlds and progression, unlocked pools of randomly awarded abilities, cycles within cycles – fit this idea, but on some level it just feels better to say that maybe The Artist’s very soul is attuned to the medieval, and so when, in their travels, they happen across worlds upon which the people are just getting around to forging steel and fight senseless battles that will nonetheless inspire great art, they feel drawn to those worlds.
At least, that’s the backstory.
In Paint By Monsters, we call the place where the soul goes seeking its next home the Spirit World, and we’re building some unique gameplay around it. It will be a dark, mysterious place that lets you move at a slower pace – a good place to reset your mind and stretch your legs – and we’re still working out some of the details, but we’re aiming for a distinct identity that feels rewarding on its own rather than feeling like the player is wasting time away from the “good parts” of the game.
And not for nothing, it fits nicely with the Perfect Minute Games ethos – we make short, beautiful games for smart, busy people.
So that’s where we’re at as far as the high notes go. I’d like to talk sometime soon about the other end of the design process – the nitty-gritty details of planning each thing in a way that will lead to a reasonably well-defined end goal – but for now I’ll leave you with this teaser for our forthcoming art devlog.
One of the things I took on when I started looking seriously at turning Perfect Minute Games into my full-time gig was an accelerator on-ramp program run by Genesis here in St. John’s.
The program, which is called Evolution, is not new to me. I completed it a while back, along with another Genesis course, when I was focused on earlier iterations of PMG and some other ideas. Both courses were, at the time, aimed squarely at preparing pitch decks to present to VCs.
I had a problem with this approach in my previous encounters. VCs – particularly those in my neck of the woods – don’t really get into games all that much.
VCs like to bet on companies that will scale massively, for one thing. They make a lot of bets and pray one of them will grow their investment by 10x or better, paying for a whole cohort of failures. Game development doesn’t really scale like that, barring a few mega-dev/publishers (Zynga/Tencent, EA, a few other outliers).
They also like to bet on the company, not the project. Games are usually funded per-project, which is the way most creative work is funded. Ask any experienced grant writer how many times they’ve written a project proposal versus a company proposal, and you’re pretty likely to get a much bigger number for the former than the latter.
VCs also want company equity, and the number of game studios that actually develop a stock that’s worth owning is vanishingly small. Not to mention company equity usually means board seats, and hence some level of executive influence or even outright control. Very few VCs are equipped to exert non-destructive influence over a company making games, and that’s assuming they’re not the type of VC that will strip-mine the company for valuable IP and dump the carcass in an alley.
Now, Jason Della Rocca and Keith Katz did (do?) run a gamedev incubator of sorts , and there are a few other accelerator programs around the world that focus on game developers, but even there, the numbers are small, and the model is murky at best.
I recently decided to withdraw from the Evolution program. I realized that the problems I’d encountered in my previous run-through were still there, and that I was stressing myself out trying to balance the time demanded by the program – which are MUCH heavier than they were the last time around – against the time required to actually work on things that apply to a game development business.
It doesn’t help, of course, that every investor I’ve ever talked to about games has, to put it politely, laughed me out of their office. There is an overwhelming negative signal from such folks towards game developers trying to establish a studio. One of the problems with the Evolution program is how focused it is on exciting these folks, who are all but openly hostile to the business segment I’m in.
So how do we fund startup studios? There’s certainly lots of advice on the subject.
I don’t want to suggest these problems are unique to game developers. But I do think they’re more imposing for us, as a rule. There are far fewer resources suited to the challenges of our business. Even those challenges that are otherwise generic – think building a working business model, analyzing market trends, making revenue predictions, establishing business relationships, and so on – don’t map cleanly to their game development incarnations.
Meanwhile, the dominant “traditional” modes of game funding – publishers and hardware incentive programs – fall outside the expertise of most business development resources. Even those resources focused on the tech sector as a whole don’t know enough about the game business to be helpful. They don’t adjust well to a business that operates, as mentioned previously, much more akin to arts funding.
There are resources that can help, though. The IGDA exists, for one, and there are mentors out there who will, for a reasonable fee, offer their hard-earned insights. There are half a dozen commercial market analytics services that can offer insight into how games make money. Some of them aren’t even crushingly expensive!
But it’s been my experience, thus far, that the average founder in this business is going to need to pick up bizdev in a hurry. So let’s talk about what to look for.
I’m sure there are many, many other tools out there I’m missing, and I’d love to hear what you’re using. My goal isn’t to provide infallible expertise so much as it is to provide a starting point for someone who might find themself in my shoes. It can be grueling, and if you’re a dev as well as a bizdev, the time and effort required can leave you feeling stretched and exhausted.
But if we’re going to do this for a living, it’s critical work. I wish you luck.
“Bangkok Road Confusion” by hc.saustrup is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
I’m gonna talk about all the faffery in a minute, but if you want the TL;DR, I invite you to take a look at feature video 0.0.10 – Brush Strokes;
One of the folks in my local gamedev community, the incredible artist rsvpasap, asked me a while back what kind of “painting” there was in Paint By Monsters, and at the time I didn’t have any kind of sensible answer for them.
Well, now I do, at least in the first-proof-of-concept sense. The Brush Strokes feature was directly inspired by that conversation, and I hope Angie would be proud to have sent me down this road.
I’ve been mostly buying assets for PBM from itch.io artists, but there’s only so much content you can find there. I’ve looked at a bunch of new spots, particularly ArtStation and the Unity Asset Store, and in the latter I happened across the Gesture Recognizer asset.
This asset, on its face, is exactly what I wanted for Brush Strokes – a clean, simple asset focused specifically on recognizing a range of gestures, with good editor integration and the ability to create new gestures without a lot of faffing about. So, you know. Good job Raphael Marques on that front.
Unfortunately, Gesture Recognizer has a few problems out of the box that make it less than ideal to work with as of this writing. Maybe the creator will update it sometime, but in the meantime let’s talk about how I approached the issues that I encountered.
The first problem – and really, this is as much an indictment of Unity as a vetting agent as it is of the asset creator – is that unless you’re starting with the example level included with Gesture Recognizer, creating a new Gesture and trying to fill in the ID field causes a whole boatload of exceptions to show up in the Console Log. These will lead you back to the GesturePatternEditor.OnInspectorGUI method, and in particular to this line of code:
var closedLineProp = gestures.GetArrayElementAtIndex(currentGestureIndex).FindPropertyRelative("closedLine");
There are two exceptionally unfortunate things about this line of code. The first is that nowhere does the editor code check to see whether currentGestureIndex is a valid index for the gestures array. The second is that it is only really required in a small subset of gestures, because closedLine is only a concern when you’re closing a gesture that contains a closed loop of some kind.
My solution to this issue was relatively simple. I put an if statement around the entire editor block containing this piece of code:
if (gestures.arraySize > 0)
{
//do stuff, including the array access
}
This fixed the editor errors, at least for the cases I care about.
I ran into some issues with the OnRecognize event that the asset uses, but I can’t 100% rule out PEBKAC for those, so I’ll just state for the record that Dynamic Events are tricksy, and you should look for them at the very top of the event list for the handler object.
OnRecognizeThe really tricky bit with this event, however, is that the parameter for the event, RecognitionResult, only includes the points from the recognized gesture. The asset seems to be focused on some kind of cleaned-up vector drawing use case, so I’m sure that works great in that circumstance where you’re doing the scaling and whatnot in another component (for the record, you probably need to inherit from DrawDetector to do that properly).
But if you’re more interested in the gestures themselves – place, size, all that kind of stuff, and if you want to keep things nice and centralized to boot – you’re going to want the points as measured at the time of input.
Now, I’m not proud of my solution to this one, but I will say that it serves the purpose, and that’s enough for the kind of rapid feature iteration I’m doing on PBM. What I did was this: I changed the array of points that define the input being examined – which is a member variable in the object that invokes OnRecognize (that is to say, DrawDetector) – from private to internal.
internal List<UILineRenderer> lines;
This lets me do the following in my event handler:
var cam = FindObjectOfType<Camera>();
var dd = transform.GetComponentInParent<DrawDetector>();
var lines = dd.data.lines;
var line = lines[lines.Count - 1];
var point1 = cam.ScreenToWorldPoint(line.points[0]);
var point2 = cam.ScreenToWorldPoint(line.points[line.points.Count - 1]);
Vector3 gestureVec = point2 - point1;
Vector3 gesturePos = ((point1 + point2) / 2.0f);
This works for basically any straight-ish line, and gives me the two primary things I care about:
I expect to have to do more complex analysis for future specializations, but these two vectors allowed me to specify
Of course, then I had to figure out how particle system shapes work and how they interact with the Position, Rotation, and Scale of their host GameObject…but more on that next time.
I put up a ko-fi page recently, and a friend was kind enough to be the first person to put some gas in the tank. So thanks Samwise!
I am so grateful, and I hope I can find a suitably exciting spot for your in-game cameo! How do you feel about being the first villager against the wall when the revolution comes? No? Ok, we’ll workshop it!
I’ve created a first look devlog over there with a few details about two features I’m hoping to add as I go along – Lair Building and Brush Strokes.
Go have a look!
https://perfectminutegames.itch.io/paint-by-monsters/devlog/441934/paint-by-monsters-first-look
Been looking forward to this one a while now. Obviously there has to be betterness as you play, right? That’s how this works, right?
You can play and play til you run out of monsters!
Loot hoarders gonna loot hoard.
Both the monster palette and the basic win/loss screens added tonight.
