Onward!

I'm now going to convert it into an early game - IE, the scientists will now be able to research.

Things are going smoothly, if not as fast as hoped.

Bowling for Brains...

I have to make a significant change to the goal system in order to accomodate duties, planning, and dates. I am doing so, but I'm not sure how long it will take. If I am brilliant, it could take a day. If I'm not so brilliant, a week.

Ah, (somewhat) rapid prototyping.

The Brain of a Virtual Geek

For the geeks in Her Majesty's Hackers, I'm using a simple act/reinforcement cycle: perform an act, get a reward or punishment, be more or less likely to perform an act.

However, there are a few hundred problems with that as stated. Fortunately, I have solved most of them with a simple "exhaustion" system. When an action is performed on an object and a reward is given, the person re-rates them all. But he or she also raises the exhaustion level on all of those things, making him or her less likely to continue.

Exhaustion diminishes over time, but most importantly, it rises linearly. On the other hand, valuation cost is exponential. So, if you gain 5 points of exhaustion and 10 points of valuation, your exhaustion will go up from 9 to 14 but your valuation will only go from 9 to 10. So, on the next sweep, your total current valuation will be -4. That is, valuation minus exhaustion.

Exhaustion drops pretty swiftly as time passes, and there's some multipliers to reflect personality. For example, someone whose social exhaustion multiplier is 0.1 will need to have an exhaustion rating 10 times higher than someone with a multiplier of 1.0 in order to effect the same valuation drop. Also, someone with an 0.1 multiplier will drop exhaustion 10 times faster than someone with a 1.0 multiplier. This means they'll do quite a bit more socializing.

There's a slew of actions, but they are broken into categories. For example, there's a bunch of social actions, from talk to hug to punch, but they are all "social" activities. That is, if someone participates in those, they are under the impression they will be getting a social reward.

Now, I could do that via learning algorithm - each person learns which actions are likely to produce which kinds of rewards. But that would probably take quite a lot of computing, since each person would have to rate each action on each object or person in the game. So, instead, I'm using a hardcoded "likely response" system which allows characters to choose actions suited to the rewards they want.

The "want" for a reward is simply the current valuation of the reward. Which means "valuation minus exhaustion". The character chooses the reward he wants most and looks around for likely candidates. From the list of applicable actions in each candidate, he sees if there are any which would suit his interest. If he finds no local, suitable actions to take, he halves the value. If it is still higher than the other wants, he goes hunting for it.

For example, if he's looking for "respect", that's a social goal, and so he'll look for other people. Upon finding one, he'll determine how much respect he wants and the various social activities to gain respect. For example, winning a game will theoretically gain him a small amount of respect, whereas explaining his recent theory will gain him a larger amount of respect.

If he only wants a small return at the moment, he'll probably invite Bob to play chess. Otherwise, maybe he'll tell Bob about his new theory. Either way, there's an introductory phase where the two (or more) people greet each other and synchronize.

Of course, it might turn out that Bob doesn't want to hear about your boring theory, or doesn't play chess. I do have to keep track of this stuff, because otherwise the simulation falls apart. The "social memory" will weight your chances of doing a particular action with a particular person based on their earlier reactions to your offers... and based on what other people have told you.

If Bob says, "I don't much like chess", when you feel like just plain old socializing, you may tell Susan "You know, Bob doesn't like chess." Then good old Sue will faithfully record a memory telling her not to play chess with Bob. The slant on the commentary will also tell Sue what you think of Bob. What she thinks of you will determine how seriously she takes what you think of Bob.

What you end up with is a rather nice evolving set of activities and friendships and enemyships.

It does tend to stagnate into a "solved" pattern, but with the addition of mad science, random events, and variation in skill, it should remain pretty fresh once everything's working.

There's a few things I'll be adding that aren't existant yet. For example, I want people to be able to make dates, instead of just suddenly going out on one. "Meet you for dinner" or "play chess at lunch" should be perfectly valid. Haven't quite gotten there yet, though.

I would also like to add a "character arc" plot manager. For example, Sue's evolution into a social creature rather than an antisocial creature, or Bob learning bravery. These guides should make the game far more interesting.

Similarly, there should be some level of algorithmic analysis on the conversations of others. For example, if everyone tells you that Bob hates chess, but Bob is constantly playing chess with you, maybe that means Bob has another reason to want to spend time with you. I don't really need this added level of complexity, especially since all my people are intended to be socially inept, but it would be nice for future games.

I'm going to go reprogram the whole thing now. It's not clean enough, yet.

Progress!

I have less time than I expected this weekend - had to set up my office, among other things - but I made some significant progress. Characters aren't talking to each other yet, but they are running around using objects in the ways objects were intended to be used.

I don't expect to have a whole lot of time tomorrow, but I do hope to get all the things I wanted to get done yesterday done on Tuesday.

Things are coming together. Just a smidge slower than expected.

Braaaainnnns...

Plugging away at brains. I've implemented the core "attention" capabilities - the ways the scientists seek things out, adjust to rewards, and so forth. Since it's the core of my personality system, it's actually more complex than it sounds. The two other complex features are the full socialization engine (which includes real communication) and the tech system. I should stress that even if those two engines should fall short, the personality system is in working order. (At an alpha stage, of course - no polish yet.)

Tomorrow I don't have a whole lot of time to program, so I'll probably fail to make significant progress until Saturday.

Next up: Device utilization and primitive (placeholder) socialization engine. Basic conversation system, so the scientists can think at you and talk to each other. Estimated time of completion: Saturday night.

They Don't Mind...

Well, this is about how far I've gotten. Obviously, the graphics are placeholders ranging from extremely rough to prototype. All the tilemaps need renovation, as I'm not entirely sure I have the right to use them in a release product. (I didn't draw the tiles, I used a pattern brush.) Obviously, the rooms won't be so empty in the final cut, either, and scientists will be able to take more shapes than simply "circle".





The scientists already move and see on their own, but I haven't given them a brain yet. As you can see in the first shot, scientists have several "modes" they can be in, reflected by what kind of effect they're giving off. Right now, the only two modes are "command" (the blue "walk" feet) and "curiosity" (the yellow question marks). In the near future, I'll also be adding things such as "work" (red hands), talk, sleep, and maybe one or two others.

Although they can run around, they can't really do anything. They have no means of using items, or talking to each other, or valuating items. I'll be adding those in, but it may take a bit of time for me to figure out the exact way to do it.

:)

Curious George... The Curious Little Mad Scientist!

So, one of the things about mad scientists is that they are very curious creatures. And when they see something they haven't seen before, they scurry over to take a look. I programmed this in for a sundry of really good reasons.

One of the things a good procedural algorithm will do is catch you by surprise. And this one did: I put scientists in, then brought up a menu to build a new room. And the curious scientists ran over to the menu to examine it.

I think I'll leave it in. It kind of encapsulates the tone I want for the game, to have scientists discussing the strange "menu" object. Debating it's worths and uses. What is it for? Is it an alien? A ghost? A relic from a long-forgotten civilization? What governs its comings and goings?

Hee hee... maybe I'll even make it something they can scan for and research to discover new technologies.

Symbolic!

One of the things I want to do with Her Majesty's Hackers is to get the player deeply involved with the personality of the characters. Given that the characters are not exactly high-fidelity, it's important that I utilize as many of the tricks of the trade as I can find.

One trick of the trade that no algorithmically-narrated game ("The Sims", for example) has ever used is "symbolic drift".

Symbolism is one kind of symbolic drift. Something comes to stand for something else. A crow stands for death or for the soul. A flag stands for freedom... or slavery. The exact meaning of a symbol changes from story to story, and is carefully carved out of the portrayals in the story.

Of course, a symbol doesn't have to be something tangible. The color red can be a symbol, and so can a phrase or even a single word.

Once you have a symbol, you can develop it to mean dozens of things, and hit the audience with it any number of times, either subtly or overtly. For example, someone taking out a memento of his dead mother is pretty obvious. Having the final fight just before dawn is slightly subtler, but still pretty clear to people who watch for symbolism. Subtler was the origami unicorn in Blade Runner - how many of you even caught it, the first time through (presuming you watched the version which contained it, of course)? Subtler yet are choices in colors and layouts - shots which subtly suggest imprisonment or freedom by their choice of rigid or flowing layouts.

Obviously, the subtler symbols are not symbols which usually undergo much change. Sometimes, they act as clues. More often, they merely act as emotional touches. Either way, they are usually imported wholesale from the outside world. They are not built up inside the story.

On the other hand, the more overt symbols can be developed openly and joyfully within a story. They are a place for you - and the characters - to hang your emotions and memories.

It would therefore make utterly perfect sense to use these kinds of symbolics in Her Majesty's Hackers, because I know precisely who is feeling what when.

So, I think I'm going to include something that makes physical and linguistic symbols. I think it's gonna be great. :)

Update

Pathfinding and any-color character displays complete. Now working on adding devices (chairs, cabinets, desks, giant mecha) and adding character independence.

... Pathfinding was fun. It's been a while since I LISPed, as it were.

Progress Report

After a few days of fussing, I have adjusted to the new version of Torque 2D. I have developed a stable system for building a (one-story) set of rooms (with connecting doors), zooming around with the camera, pulling up context-sensitive displays, and menu handling.

And a really spiffy way of displaying numbers. :D

No screenies yet, because I'm using early placeholder graphics. IE, the rooms, when placed, are not rooms. They are the name of the rooms. Drawing the rooms themselves is still to come.

I'm planning on using furniture and floor "tiles" to build my rooms. This should increase the visual complexity of the rooms and allow for independent animations, should I choose to use them. It should also allow pathfinding within rooms with some ease. This does mean I have to draw maybe 50-60 small pictures: different floorings, furniture, doohickeys...

Well, back to it.

Perspective shifts?

I just wrote an article on my personal blog about the importance of perspective shifts in games. Let no man (or woman) say I do not practice what I preach!

Her Majesty's Hackers is a game based around the idea of perspective shifts. Your area grows and shrinks. Your technologies get weirder and more game-altering. Your people change and intermingle in continuously varying - but comprehensible - ways. And, of course, escaped inventions get radically more dangerous as you scale up the curve.

Oh, and, of course, the whole world slowly changes in the background.

There are no radical, sudden perspective shifts planned into the game, mostly because it would take a significant amount of programming and I don't care to add on to the dev time. But I am confident in the design's enjoyability as it stands.

Back to work!

Upgrades...

Well, I'm going to try to use the 1.1 A2 version of T2D. That's the newest alpha. They call it "1.1", but it's really more like "0.7". However, it has some good new features. Like "clone" and "copy". Sure beats writing those things manually, I'll tell you. They also implemented a "save/loadcopy" functionality, and if that's any good, I won't have to write the tedius lines of file-handling I always did before.

There's new collision types. I probably won't be using them in Her Majesty's Hackers, but they'll be very useful when I program any other game. Now, you can have things bounce or stick to each other when they impact. There are a few other options.

The new version allows collisions with particle effects, which could, again, be handy in any game which isn't this one. They also added some weird vector and 3D stuff, which I'll not be using, thankyouverymuch.

The new version allows for thrusters, which was always a slow workaround to implement in scripting. (The old version had constant force always related to the world, rather than the orientation of the sprite.) It also allows rotational offsets when mounting - you might remember I wrote a surprisingly long rant about how I had to work around the lack of that in the last version.

I have heard unconfirmed rumors that the newest version supports (gasp) the right mouse button! This would be a huge step up for me, as that was my biggest gripe about T2D.

The downside? It's got some interesting new bugs, apparently, and it's got more than twice the download size. About two and a half megs, just for the T2D part of it, let alone all the content. Kind of irritating, given that I programmed that whole puzzle game in less than half that in the earlier version.

Meh. I'll switch, see if it gets me anything good.

Hammering on the Early Stages

T2D has some irritating restrictions - I can't seem to create two independent "cameras", which means I can't have the map scroll by and the sidebar stay in one place. I'm sure this is something they'll fix before they move from Alpha to Beta, but for now it means I have to do things quite differently.

But I am getting things done. I think the final result will be both unique and quite responsive.

As a side note, why does Blogger say, "Scheduled outage at 3:30PM PST"? Shouldn't it just say, "Scheduled outage in 1 hour 7 minutes"? Wouldn't that make more sense?

Herding Cats...

Perhaps the most important question you can answer when designing a game is "how does the player interact with the game?"

This creates spades of answers for other questions you might have thought were the most important, like "how does the game play" and so forth. It also leads to a bunch of important questions such as "how do we provide the juiciest feedback" and "what kind of limits does this create".

In the case of Her Majesty's Hackers, the main interaction will be through a desaturated map of the facility. This is important, because the map changes as you add new laboratories and other such changes. The scientists and visitors would be represented on this map, and their actions would be represented with little effects and animations. Their representation is an important choice. For example:



In this example, I'm using iconic representations of their faces. However, this kind of gives it a goofy, childish feel - and it also puts some strain on the artist, as he has to create iconic representations distinguishable at small sizes. If you want to change those representations by emotion, suddenly your image requirements are ramping up.

On the other hand, you could represent them with colored shapes which can be set by the user:



This requires only a few graphics and also looks sharper and more professional. Or, rather, it will, with real graphics. Obviously, the sketches are not the final product.

Of course, the shapes are not exactly human-y. Therefore, we'll splash humans in your face at every opportunity. Not just visually: the end game will require a bunch of "non-talk" human sounds, like you might hear in the Sims. However, these sounds would be overlayable, to create an impression of multiple humans socializing, rather than the regimented, inhuman feel of evenly distributed turns. People don't act like that.

Graphic humans are important, too. If you click in a room, small representations appear off to the side - faces layed over the shape that represents them, along with names and action/thought summaries. Clicking on a particular shape (or on the representation to the left) will highlight a single character, enlarging and giving more detail.

The actions these humans take will be represented in a clear but cartoony way using vibrant graphics and lively effects. These will give a feeling of life to the otherwise rather inhuman colored blocks.

As to a limit, the use of colored blocks limits how many humans we can have. Really, any iconic representation does, but it becomes very clear with colored shapes. People will only be able to associate so many shapes before they start losing track of who is who.

This plays into my hands, actually, as I want to keep numbers down in order to keep the player feeling "close" to the characters. By continuously raising the chance of an experiment going haywire, I plan to have the number of characters max out at about a dozen: any more than that, and you simply can never get any work done. The point of peak efficiency will scale up and down depending on the difficulty - as low as six (hard) to as high as ten (easy).

Interactions will be done by popping a menu up when you right-click on a person, their representation, or their dossiere. Then you can select all kinds of actions, often by clicking elsewhere on the map to assign them or move them.

The map scales in and out as you see fit, of course, and there's a minimap in the corner, above whatever sidebar info you have pulled up. (There's sidebars for non-personal info, such as income and project progress as well as the sidebars for personal info.)

It's kind of an RTS feel, but very room-centric.

I think I'll also let you "unmount" sidebars from the main sidebar. For example, dragging someone's dossiere out onto the screen will create a semipermanent window that monitors where they are, what they are doing, etc. You could do the same thing for project tracking. Leave them open until you don't need to.

Also, the speed at which time passes will be very settable. Unlike The Sims, you aren't managing these people's time so closely as to tell them when to eat and where to go to the bathroom. You can, I suppose, but the game isn't really built for that, and there's no real time pressure for those kinds of things. Really, they are there mostly for the social reasons.

By describing the interface, I can see the limits of the game. :)

A hack hack here, a hack hack there...

Machine City is a game I was building for a lot of reasons, but it is not a game I would have chosen to build if I had known I was going to do it alone. Therefore, the idea of spending another 100+ hours rewriting virtually everything that sets it apart from any other shmup is intolerable.

SO, I'm going to work on another game instead. I may ressurect Machine City later, when the setback doesn't hurt so much, but for now:

Her Majesty's Hackers



This was going to be my second game - the game I planned to make money on - whereas Machine City was intended to be largely for the experience of making a game and trying to sell it.

"Her Majesty's Hackers" (HMH) is about an empire a bit like colonial England crossed with giant robots. It's steampunk. Heavy steampunk. Same world as Machine City, but above ground.

In this game, the young new queen, in an attempt to get an edge in a war her empire is losing, starts bringing in the best minds from all over her kingdom. Placing them together in a number of facilities, she does a "Los Alamos" and tells them to come up with something bright.

Your job is to manage one of these groups.

On the surface, HMH is mostly about deciding which scientists to bring in, managing what projects they are working on, and making neat discoveries. It's like a tongue-in-cheek Steampunk version of "Civilization", except instead of managing a whole civilization, you're working out of one facility.

Of course, the real hook isn't the discoveries, as much fun as they are. It's the fact that scientists are fickle and socially inept creatures, and you've got six or ten of them all living and working together, not really allowed out much thanks to security restrictions.

So you get inept soap-opera melodrama against a background of rampaging robots and peasants with pitchforks. You can, because I am such an understanding and caring guy, turn the difficulty for the soap-opera up and down independently of the difficulty of winning the war.

The reason I'm so fired up about this game as opposed to Machine City is because I believe I have the most cutting-edge personality simulation algorithms. I haven't seen any other games come anywhere near what my test programs have done. So, you should be able to clearly identify with the various scientists, far stronger than in any sim game to date, including "The Sims".

I hope. :)

Anyhow, I'll post updates as to how I'm doing on THAT. So this blog is temporarily not about Machine City... but I think you'll like this game even better.

Side note for the people who read my personal blog: HMH does not use player-driven Pattern Adaptation Control. Rather, it turns the idea on its head, and uses pattern adaptation to drive realistic characters. This is rather a different application, but the same fundamental theory. I think you will enjoy it.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Turns out I lost around 150 hours on Machine City. The entire script parsing system has to be rewritten from scratch.

So, I took a step back and made a free puzzle game called "Rettamitna". It's about a meg - larger than I would like, but Torque 2D isn't intended for such simple games.

It's very simple. The objective is inspired by too much KD. There's a grid of different size balls, some red, some green. You can shift a row left or right. When you do so, any ball larger than the ball beneath it drops down and combines with the lower ball. If the balls are the same color, this makes the ball bigger. If the balls are a different color, it makes the ball smaller. (A red flash means you combined different color balls. A green flash means you combined same-color balls.)

My high score is near 300. Can you break 300?

This is not a polished product. I built it in about 3 hours, including testing and release packaging. It has some ugliness in it, and if you try to "spin" the rows too fast, it can "drop" balls. This costs you the potential for points, but perhaps you can figure out a way to do it to actually get badly placed balls out of the way...

The game is easily malleable. Any number of colors can be done, and any size board. But I decided two colors was plenty challenging.

Think carefully, and have a great download.

Love windows!

Due to the Windows' "pop things up without warning when a background task finishes" tendencies, I just fucking lost my core game files. My backups are from two months ago: I don't have a new backup yet thanks to moving across the country. Data recovery programs are giving me nothing but bad news. It can recover temporary internet files I deleted a month ago, but not these .cs files.

Fuck! At least fifty hours of work down the drain. I didn't lose any graphics files as far as I can tell, but I don't even know which features I implemented in the past month.

I fucking hate Windows. Why do they do that? Do they presume I wouldn't be doing anything important while their shitty little background tasks run? That I wouldn't for example, be about to clear a USB disk drive, and would rather not have it clear my fucking Torque 2D master directory? Aaah!

I miss my Linux box. If I had it, I would at least have a recent backup.

Well, back to work, I suppose.

An Example...

Here's what I'm talking about.





I could put anyone on the bench... or I could have Kit sit on anything of approximately the same height. Pretty basic, but it means I draw twice as many pictures in the beginning. :)

How many pictures?

Okay, a while back I mapped out the first scene. It requires, in addition to default "conversation" poses, 22 images. Here they are:

Cave Entrance
Greasy Camp
Bench, rear view
Truck Longview cab special (inhabited 3/4 view)
Truck Longview proper (3/4 view)
Truck Windshield occluder (front view)
Truck Proper (front view)
Clipboard (being held/signed)
Flyer side view
Flyer entrance view
Flyer Windshield occluder 3/4
Flyer Cockpit Proper 3/4

Kat sitting, rear view
Casey sitting, front view
Jeanette sitting, front view
Lucius driving, front view
Jeanette referring to...
Lucius handing...
Kat signing...
Kat climbing into...
Kat giving thumbs up, 3/4 view

Some of these pictures are pretty simple, like drawing a clipboard (being held by a generic left hand, amusingly...). Some are considerably more complex, like drawing the "greasy camp". There are only two or three pictures I won't use again, later - that's why I'm splitting up foregrounds, backgrounds, objects, and actors. Otherwise, I'd just draw seven full pictures and be done with it.

This way, I can later have Jeanette refer to, say, a widget. Or I can have Kat climb into a sewer. Or I can have other people driving the truck around.

In theory, therefore, the "cost" of this scene is only two or three pictures. That's acceptable, especially since it's on the extremely high side. (Most scenes won't require any "unique" images.)

That doesn't, however, change the fact that I have to draw 22 pictures to put the scene together, not counting default conversation poses. Ha!

I'll get cracking on that, and you'll see them here.

(Due to tablet difficulties, I may not draw final images, but clumsy make-do images.)

Early Game

The early game is probably the most important part of the game. The first five minutes lure the player into the first half hour, and at the end of that time, he or she knows whether they'll bother to keep playing.

Also, the early game is usually the only thing in the demo, meaning it is all a player gets to see before making their decision to buy.

The early game is doubly important for Machine City. I have to determine exactly what people like and feed it back quickly and accurately. Therefore, the first few scenes have to contain sharp memetic choices.

What I've done instead of making one-dimensional characters is make "meme packs" which I hope most of the players will more or less click with. Each of the three characters you can talk to and choose to use as copilot in that early game are patterns which many players should find interesting.

These are rough sketches that follow, because my tablet setup is shitty at the moment. Ever try to draw on your stomach? I'm working on it.



This guy is the "action man". His suggestions will tend to be towards blowing things up and frontal assaults. His powder-blue suit aside, he is the testosterone hound.

As the game goes on, you quickly discover that he funded the expedition. You also run into some of his family members. He's the wuss in the family.



This is your mechanic, probably named "Casey". She's the "fun hacker" culture. She should appeal to people who like being geeks without being pompous, as well as people who are looking for a more comedy-centric game. Her suggestions tend to be more for bizarre contraptions and complex new doohickeys.



In addition to appealing to the "sexy librarian" stereotype, she is the more serious scientist. She has an acerbic wit and a deep understanding of biochemistry. For example, pressure-point methods, poisons, and recreational drugs. Her advice runs towarards surgical strikes and information-gathering, and she is a very good tactical advisor.

It is my belief that, combined with the main character, these three characters should offer a fairly wide "spread". If you don't see a character in there that could appeal to you, let me know!

When a player starts to talk to and rely on one or two of the characters, the game skews dramatically in their direction for a short while, then rights itself when it knows the player isn't going anywhere for a while. :)

Who Are You Talking To?

_Review...

One of the things that sets Machine City apart from other games is the pattern adaptation engine. This means that the player continually faces choices, and when the player makes those choices, it tells the engine exactly what kind of things the player likes. Then the engine can leverage that preference to advance the plot in the ways that particular player prefers.

For example, in Deus Ex, you face many choices, both in gameplay and story. Whether to use a tranq gun or a rocket launcher. Whether to kill the agent or simply leave her alone. Etc, etc. Each of these choices influences the rest of the game to some extent. You need different tactics with different weapons, plot points are slightly different if approached from different angles.

Machine City simply feeds that back in on itself. If you show a preference for, say, high-explosive weaponry, the game is more likely to give you more high-explosive weapons and challenges which are either good for or against high-explosive weapons. Similarly, the plot will likely contain an unusually large number of explosions.

It's not just the gameplay: the plot is also adaptive. If you show a marked preference for the friendly young mechanic, the game will not only give you plot related to her, but also tend to throw in plot elements which contain many of the same ingredients - young and friendly, as the obvious two.

This means that the game is really two games. The one where you blow enemies up, and the one where you make strategic/social decisions as to who to rely on, what paths to follow, and so forth.

Some of the difficulty with this concept springs from the need for tons and tons of content. I won't know for sure whether the method is worthwhile until I have created a hundred full situations and interactions.

So, on this page, I'll post those 100 early-game situations as I finish them. Keep your eye here, and you'll get to see them paraded in front of you - and even get to download and play them, once there are enough of them to work well.

A Bit on the Side

Originally, I planned on using rather realistic art for Machine City. The problem with that was twofold. One, although I can do that style on paper, it's extremely hard for me to do it on a tablet. Two, it takes too much time. Through the tablet, that would have produced characters looking (uncolored) something like:



Then I got into a cartoony-cartoon kick. Cartoony-cartoons are great. They're expressive, easy to draw, and clear as a bell. Using a cartoony-cartoon style, the characters would have looked more like...



or



While these cartoons have many advantages, they also have a big disadvantage: they're funny. At first glance, people will assume it's a comedy. That's not the end of the world, but it's not suitable for the mood I was going for, which was not purely comedy. (I've never been able to write pure comedy. I always get sidetracked by, you know, substance.)

So I ended up with characters that were simplified but not too incredibly cartoony:



These are relatively easy to draw, which means I can draw a lot of them. That's important, since it's just me, and there's at least two dozen characters all in all. Many of whom need literally dozens of graphics. That's not including enemies, backdrops, weapons...

Anyhow, I'm back on the job.