The day has finally come when the art is final and I am able to update the old screenshots (and gif!) 🙂
Right now the only thing left is to fix some small bugs and performance issues on MacOS. And the trailer, which is in the works! If it all goes well, the game should be out really soon. I can hardly believe it, seems like I have been working on this forever (on and off, but for a long stretch of time).
If you work with press or gaming related content on YouTube and are interested in the game, let me know so I can arrange you a review copy 😉
A quick post to share recent updates. Last week @SiebelGustavo finished a new model for the “Point 665”, the bar that appears in several stories from Taxi by Night.
And to give you a perspective, this is what the placeholder version looked like in the early access version
This improved model will be featured in the next update. And, in a future one, there will be a few stories that take place inside the bar as well.
That’s it for today, hope y’all are doing well during the quarantine and staying the fuck home =)
It’s been a while since the last update on how Blackout is coming along, so I decided to share some details.
The text is finally complete and fully edited. Here are some stats:
Chapter names are redacted to avoid spoilers, since they are basically different locations in the game. There was a 10k words increase since the last time I made a word count, mostly due to additional scenes (and endings) that were added, and also some details added in the editing process.
So what’s left now? Well, there’s some art still to be finished, and in the meantime there will be a lot of testing and fixing going on. Speaking of art, here’s a sneak peek on an unfinished piece.
Taxi by Night has finally launch on early access, and just in time for the itch Halloween Sale!
You can get a 10% launch discount until November 4th!
If you want to know more about how the updates will work, and what do you get for buying the game early, we have a detailed FAQ post. In case you have any further questions, you can leave a comment here, on the game page or even through our channels on Discord, Twitter or even email minichimeragamestudio@gmail.com.
We have also set up a rewards program as a way for you to support the game in case you really like it, or even have a say or become a character in the game yourself. You can check all the rewards on the game page.
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I hope you enjoy the game, and if you do, please let us know, and help spread the word about it.
If you don’t like it, leave a comment as well, we’re doing early access because we need your help to make the game better =)
Still not 100% sure about the color, let me know what do you prefer, orange or yellow. I think I like the orange one a bit better, but the yellow stands out more in the dark.
On this post, I will write about something very important that we have been working on for a long time: the map of New Wenders!
We’re not Bethesda, so we didn’t start the game with a map, on the contrary, the idea for the map came in very late, when the story was already finished. More precisely, when we updated the game to widescreen aspect ration.
If you played the preview version on itch, you probably noticed the map is just a placeholder and serves to nothing but aesthetics. But we wanted to make it interactive and something the player can use as a reference for story events.
We ended up removing the “chapter select” screen that is on the preview version. This screen was supposed to appear every time a chapter ended, as a transition to a new location.
Old Chapter Select Screen
But since we now had a map, it made more sense to show the transition through it.
New Chapter Screen
Nothing fancy, the pin just moves from the current location to the new. This will also show up when loading a game, so the player will be able to see all important events from the current playthrough.
The pin show where the player is now. A red dot indicates a location already visited in the current save; A blue dot indicates a location visited in a previous save; A yellow dot indicates a location still unknown.
The player can also access the smaller version of the map at anytime. When he passes the mouse over the points marking the locations, he will see some information like how many passages has he visited and what events happened in each location.
Location Events
The evens will written in bold if it happened during the current save, and grayed out if it happened in a previous save. If the player never seen experienced the event, it will show as ??????. In a similar way, the visited passages for the location appear in bold, while the known passages from all playthroughs appear grayed out.
This will make it easier (and more interesting) for players trying to see 100% of the passages or events =)
This post is more focused on the map itself, later on I will talk more about New Wenders. What kind of city is it? What kind of people inhabit it? What do they feed on?
A noir game where a vampire drives a taxi in the streets of New Wenders.
You play as the taxi driver, and get to talk with the passengers through a series of branching dialogues.
Ultimately, you can choose whether you want to take them to their destination or feed on them.
Taxi By Night was made in 5 days for #VampireJam, so it’s very small in scope, I used it mostly to learn a bit of 3d development. The game will be updated with more story bits 🙂
All 3D models are from Quaternius. You can get them for free on his website and support him on patreon.
At first I decided to add keyboard control to make testing easier and faster (also tendinitis), but then I realized it might actually be a better way to play rather than using the mouse.
For the regular gameplay, you can advance pages with the left and right arrow, and make choices with numbers 1 to 5.
The white font on the third choice means this option was already selected on a previous play-through, since the game has many different paths, I thought it would be nice for the player to visualize which options are new to him.
The SPACE key has a different function depending on the context. In most places it will act as a mouse click (advancing a dialog cutscene, maximizing/minimizing an image), but it is also used in the minigames. By the way, if you played the demo version, you will notice that the minigames are now linked to the relevant attributes, so they will be harder or easier depending on the value of your attribute.
Fitness-based mini-game
And of course you can access the Map (M), File (F) and Options (O).
Besides that, I’ve also started working on polishing some aspects like adding fade in/out and adding some animation to tape-covered text.
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity” – Edgar Allan Poe
July was a bit of a short month for me in terms of gamedev. I took a 9 day vacation since my brother was visiting me, it was very hot and we went to some nice places around Greece. Also spending 9 days away from my computer did wonders for my tendinitis =)
Hydra is nice 🙂
So in the end I managed to dedicate only about 10 hours to Blackout (half the time I usually work on it in a month). I’ve been trying to increase this time but my life has been a bit chaotic, and also sometimes is very hard to find the strength to work extra hours when you already have a 8h/day programming job. And what did I do with these 10 hours? I almost finished the text revision! In fact, as of writing this, I already did, so I decided (right now as I write this) to change the focus of the post and talk about the revision instead of the CYOA framework I’m using, like I promised on the previous post. I want to do a detailed post about the framework, that’s gonna take some time, and the text revision is fresh on my mind since I finished this weekend.
The Revision
It took me almost 50 hours to go through the whole text (around 65k words), making changes in almost every single one of the 600+ passages and also writing a bunch of new ones. I also “translated” the text to twine, as I mentioned in the previous post, separating every chapter as a single twine story, in order to be easier to visualize it.
The so called “chapters” is another point I’d like to talk about. After handwriting the first draft of the story, years ago, I first put it into google docs, and as it still felt convoluted (with things like big numbers “Go to passage 534” or similar passages with weird numeration “Go to passage 41.2”), I decided to divide the story in Chapters. Well it seemed very easy and straightforward to do that, since the story spreads across several different locations I could simply make every location a different chapter: Alley, Taxi, Hospital…
All good.
The Problem
But what about the names of the chapters? I had kept the location itself as the name at first, but as we approached the preview version release, I tried to come up with better names. It proved to be a very hard task, first because what the character does in each chapter can vary a lot. If you played the preview (The Alley), you probably know you can have an encounter with cops (which can go many different ways); you can find some weird stuff in the alley; you can also see none of that and just leave.
The second thing is I can’t do numbered chapters either, because the order of the chapter changes depending on your choices, so it would be kind of weird if one person’s chapter 2 was the hospital, and other’s was the taxi.
So when we released the preview version, this is what the “chapter select” screen looked like.
The idea of this chapter select screen was more to entice the player on what was to come, I was not 100% clear on what the functionality of it for the full game would be. But it raised another problem with the chapter names: spoilers. We got some feedback of people saying they would rather not know the name of the places the character would go beforehand. I was aware that might happen, that’s why I did not put all the chapter names in the preview, some of them are extremely spoilery.
The solution
So, how to solve this? I’ve come to realize that most of the times in game development, we’re the ones who create the problems, specially when it’s something related to the design of the game.
What is the problem? Chapters.
Who said we need to have chapters? Well, I did.
And what if we just… get rid of them? But… Ahm… Actually, that might work!
As simple as that. I created the chapters to organize the text, but the game itself does not benefit from it. The game is designed to be played in a single sitting, it does not need long break points. Also, we have a map inside the game, that will take care of conveying the transition of the character through the locations (and also show the stats for how many passages the player visited in that determined location)
Of course the decision might not be as easy in every game, but I’ve come to this realization recently while working on another game with a friend (still in early design state), most of the problems we tended to dwell on were arbitrary rules that were either created by ourselves or by other games of the genre, once we learned to break our own rules the design work started to flow and the game became much more interesting.
That’s it for today! I’ll be taking 2 weeks of vacations this month to go to Brazil, so next month’s post will probably be mostly about the blackout framework.
It took way longer than I expected to finish this updated due to the fact that I was moving to another country and as you might imagine that takes quite a lot of time and effort.
But now about the game. If you played the previous version of blackout you probably noticed id had a 3by4 aspect ratio (aka iPad), because Blackout began as a mobile project. We have since then decided to change it to PC, in part due to the great feedback we got here on itch.io. To do that, we redesigned the whole in-game menu and character file. We also updated all the textures in order to have a more unified look and higher resolution.
In case it’s your first time hearing about the game, this is what it used to look like in the previous iterations:
First and Second iterations
What I think added a lot was the new “Folders” to represent the character file and options, as well as the Map. For this version the map is a placeholder, but in the final version you’ll be able to see the location you’re at and get some information.
New game UI
The complete changelog for version 0.0.2:
– Added widescreen support (now default) – Added new in game menu with map and character sheet – Improved Textures – Improved Text quality – Text and Button animations now don’t have a delay if you’re seeing it for the second time – New sound effects – Small Text fixes
I hope you’ll enjoy the update, and meanwhile we’ll continue to work to finish the game. This is the first chapter, the final game will have 10, but which chapters you’ll see will depend on your choices.
We have a newsletter you can subscribe to keep up with the development or if you are interested in participating in out future beta test.
If you like the game, please help spread the word, send the itch.io link to a friend, tweet about it, anything helps! I would also like to thank everyone that donate to the game and people who made videos on YouTube, this really helps with our motivation to finish the game =)
Mini Chimera Game Studio 