Apparatus: A Cyberpunk Game

[Perihelion]

"brain: an apparatus with which we think we think."
-- ambrose bierce


Welcome to the project thread for my cyberpunk adventure/puzzle game, Apparatus. If you think this looks a lot like my old project, Paradigm Shift, you're right! It's been retitled.

I'm glad you asked! First, this game features 100% original graphics done by yours truly. Second, it's got fairly original gameplay: you control two characters in tandem to solve puzzles and kill enemies. Finally, it has a nifty cyberpunk setting! Global society has more or less collapsed, leaving the world to the whims of tin-pot dictators, powerful corporations, and most notably inscrutable superintelligences.

I know you were going to scroll to the pictures first, so let me save you the trouble.

As you can probably tell, I'm going for a retro atmosphere with SNES-style graphics. I intend to offer a choice between playing at 100% or 200% resolution, assuming I can figure out how to make it work. This is 200%, obviously.

Ever played the GBC Zelda games? Sort of like that, except you control one character with each hand. Expect both puzzles and killing shit. The puzzles themselves will vary, but expect both cerebral challenges and tests of your reflexes. Everything is real-time, so you'll often have to do two things at once.

The characters themselves will probably rotate a bit as you go through the game, and each one has several unique abilities. Most will have both combat and non-combat applications, and you'll acquire more as you go. Controls are fairly simple--you have four direction keys, plus an ability trigger, per hand--but you can open a menu to pause the game and switch to different abilities. The skills themselves vary from guns and cracking security codes to grappling people with your metal tentacle arms (yes, metal tentacle arms) or controlling robots.

Gameplay example! You have to get through a corridor, but the corridor is lined with nooks full of security bots. These bots will come out and attack you if you trip a sensor. They'll squish you if you try to fight them, but behind each one is a console that disables them, so you can lure the bot away with one character while the other runs into the nook and activates the console. Or, if you have the robot control ability, you can take one over and make it fight the others!

If you're curious, I'm developing this in Game Maker.

I won't go into too much depth here, but much of the game centers around collectives, which are basically hive minds with or without AI involvement. There are many different types with different strengths, weaknesses, degree of stability, and so on. In general, without very careful setup and psychological screening of potential components, collectives are highly unstable. That said, the sum is greater than the parts, and wiring so many people so closely together lets them breach all kinds of barriers on their cognitive abilities and form a new entity that is vastly more intelligent than its individual members. These also tend to be really weird, both in the way that dogs don't understand human actions and because such complex entities are prone to destabilization and insanity without lots of filtering. It's frequently impossible to tell from their behavior whether they've gone mad or just have an alien agenda. AI also frequently absorb each other and join or create collectives.

This game is going to have a fairly intricate plot, but I'm making an effort to keep cutscenes and dialogue to a minimum as much as possible. Much of the character development will happen through optional side quests. If you play the game straight without doing any optional stuff, it'll make perfect sense, but you'll lack a deeper understanding of events you might have gotten otherwise. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'm not going to say more at this time.

I'm going to release this in chapters. If I actually manage to finish this and it doesn't suck, I may compile it all, add extra content, and sell it, but it'll be free up until that point. I'm not particularly planning on going commercial, but it's a possibility.

I'm not actively looking for help at this time, but at some point before the first release, I'm going to need someone to make me about three MIDIs: a creepy dungeon theme, a battle theme, and a boss theme. I'd like these to be done in a kind of futuristic-sounding electronic style. If you think you can do this, hit me up with some samples, although you may want to wait until I'm further into the development process. It's definitely not urgent now since I have some MIDIs that will work just fine as placeholders, and besides, I'm kind of a flaky asshole. Aside from that, feed me your ideas and bug me to work on this.

Spoiler: Artwork!!!!

Art by Me

Anneka. Moe's fanart inspired me to sketch her again, but the fanart is much nicer. One of these days I'll draw character art that isn't lazy, maybe.

Ten. Note that the helmet design has changed since I drew this.

Fanart

Fanart by the wonderful Moxie. :shades:

Fanart by the talented Makasu!

Any questions? I'll be happy to answer. I'd also love any ideas you have for the game, especially puzzle ideas. I think the gameplay mechanic I have is really flexible and has a lot of potential, but I don't have tons of specific puzzle ideas yet.

 

[Perihelion]

Reserved just in case.

 

[candle]

This looks really neat, Peri. I love your art style, and the idea of controlling two characters at once sounds like it might be fun. I'll definitely have to keep an eye on this. I'm assuming you changed the name because of FF13?

 

[Jason]

Oh my shitting lord of Jahova... (Lolwut?)

This looks and sounds great! Loving the screenshot, it looks beautiful, I also love Cyberpunk (Along with Steampunk ofcourse...)

Also

"Gameplay example! You have to get through a corridor, but the corridor is lined with nooks full of security bots. These bots will come out and attack you if you trip a sensor. They'll squish you if you try to fight them, but behind each one is a console that disables them, so you can lure the bot away with one character while the other runs into the nook and activates the console. Or, if you have the robot control ability, you can take one over and make it fight the others!"

This sounds really interesting... I'd love to see it in action.

A thumbs up for using Game Maker too! :thumb:

 

[Norkezz]

This looks amazing! I already told you in the screenshot treat/threat/triet (or something else) but I can easy repeat it again. Aw-some! Really good job! I wish now I could download it as an SNES Rom and play it via my SNES Emulator. This fit perfect in the classical SNES apple skin.
The screenshots are really nice! It shows an challenging/challanging (or something else) game with good gameplay. But that bar below is just perfect!
Go on like this, really! =D

 

[moxie]

hell yes

In addition to all the other stuff, one thing that's p nice to see is that you seem to have a good understanding of what you want to do with the plot & themes... but you're not going to shove it down players' throats either.

I wish more games would have subtle hinting towards the plot & setting implied through the background, or subtly through quests, rather than having exposition dumps and instructional npcs. Instead of "you WILL love my amazing storyline", it rewards people with more info when they choose to investigate.

well that was kind of a tangent

Everything looks great though! I'm really looking forward to seeing where this is going.

 

[Mundane]

This looks really neat, Peri. I love your art style, and the idea of controlling two characters at once sounds like it might be fun. I'll definitely have to keep an eye on this. I'm assuming you changed the name because of FF13?

The term Paradigm Shift actually refers to a theory of knowledge proposed by Thomas Kuhn. Square Enix is unfortunately not original enough to come up with a cool name like Mr. Kuhn. Either way, Peri, this game looks freaking amazing. The art style is easily it's most distinguishing factor, but I am heavily interested in how the gameplay is going to operate. Looking forward to seeing more from this in the future.

 

[Ares]

My god, peri this is amazing!
Magnificent art - but i bet everyone has told you that :grin:

Ever played the GBC Zelda games? Sort of like that, except you control one character with each hand
I have, and I loved them, so I am very excited about that.

The thread has a very nice lay-out. Even small things like those animated titles show you've also put a good amount of effort in the thread.
Maybe for puzzle ideas you could check out some parts of zelda the wind waker: in two dungeons in that game you have to control two characters too (although not simultaneously).
I hope to see more of this! :thumb:

 

[Ellie]

Very nice. I think a lot of people who go for super flashy battle systems underestimate how challenging a simple zelda battle system can be, especially with two controllable characters.

Love the graphics, no complaints about them at all. Just please get this finished :box:

 

[Perihelion]

In addition to all the other stuff, one thing that's p nice to see is that you seem to have a good understanding of what you want to do with the plot & themes... but you're not going to shove it down players' throats either.

I wish more games would have subtle hinting towards the plot & setting implied through the background, or subtly through quests, rather than having exposition dumps and instructional npcs. Instead of "you WILL love my amazing storyline", it rewards people with more info when they choose to investigate.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think plot is important to this game, but I definitely don't want to make it the #1 focus, or else it's Xenosaga and not a game. I think huge cutscenes are especially egregious in sprite games where there isn't a ton of eye candy and voice acting and whatnot to hold interest. It's better when you have tons of fancy spritework, but animating long cutscenes with sprites is like @_@. Besides, they're just unnecessary most of the time; you can do a lot with implications and letting actions speak for themselves. I think FF6 did an awesome job developing all of its many characters without huge cutscenes, so I'm probably going to be replaying that and studying the writing at some point. I'm not a Pulitzer writer, but I think I can probably do this. I've been writing out the first dungeon, and for every line and even word in dialogue, I've been asking myself, is this necessary?

Another thing I plan on doing with this is having an in-game dictionary that's sort of like a Web search. Like a funky word will appear in dialogue, and you'll be able to connect to the local net and do a search on it, and you'll get a few articles written by various people. All of these will probably be wildly biased, but if you read them all, you may be able to piece the real picture together. And it'll develop the various organizations and whatnot in the game at the same time. All of that will be a lot of writing, though, so it's a low priority atm.

@ Candle and Mundane: Yeah, FF13 is one reason I changed the title, the new one being more appropriate being another. But the phrase is pretty frequently misused and mispronounced (dude in my template thread thought it was paradiggum @__@), and while I think it's appropriate in this case as a societal thing, it's not the strict definition of the term. And I dunno, it just sounds kind of pretentious because of that frequently misused thing. I think the current one isn't perfect, but it's an improvement. Taking suggestions for a title change!

@ Ares: I totally would, but unfortunately I don't have a Wii. That sounds cool, though. Does anyone know of more games where you have to solve puzzles with two characters?

@ Wyatt: Yeah, I agree. You really DON'T need complicated mechanics to make a challenging and fun game. It's a matter of design. I honestly would love to make an sRPG, but that's 100x more complicated, so I went for this instead.


Glad everyone's excited! Thanks for the feedback, guys. If you want to see this happen, though, seriously, light a fire under my ass. Nag me on IRC if you see me lazing about there. I'm in a productive phase right now, but I'm super ADD and likely to wander away when I find something else shiny.

 

[Necrile]

My god...this game reeks of awesome..I'm really looking forward to seeing more about this combat system.

 

[Perihelion]

I think the very very first release is going to be a tech demo, so hopefully that won't be TOO far off, Necrile. The biggest obstacle I have right now is that I don't know how to use Game Maker very well. But I'm confident that it'll do what I want, and the gameplay is essentially very simple. But even I'm not 100% sure how the two-person action is gonna work practically, so I'll need to make some dungeons and see. Getting the puzzle difficulty right is going to be interesting.

 

[Prexus]

There are three ways you can do the two person control thing.

A) A Set of controls for either player (WASD for Character A, IJKL for Character B) This is unnatural feeling and will likely cause a barrier stopping people from wanting to play. It would work on a Six-Axis controller if you were using either thumbstick, but you can't enforce people to use a certain peripheral on an Indie PC game.

B) A toggle switch to change who you are controlling. In a puzzle sequence where you have time to think, this is fine, although in my opinion not very graceful. However in an Action sequence this causes an extra step and layer of thought that will make controlling your characters difficult, perhaps even more difficult than having to learn to control with both characters. It also lends itself to having the non-controlled character stand around doing nothing or

C) Using AI to control the character that the player isn't. This is probably the easiest and the hardest at the same time. It would work best, especially if you make it easy to issue commands such as Halt Action or Come to Me. But it is the hardest because developing a player AI is difficult, and much more difficult than Enemy AI. It is possible however, and the way I would suggest you do it. (You should still have the option to change who you are controlling, obviously.)

 

[Perihelion]

I'm gonna be mapping one character to WASD and one character to something else, probably PL;' for laptops and maybe 8456 on the numpad too. Then the abilities will be the left and right shift, or enter on the numpad. The whole point behind the dual-character thing was that it was a test of your ability to multitask and coordinate, so I definitely want the player controlling both at the same time. I used to have a really good plot reason for this, which is where the idea originally came from, but then I simplified the plot and it's not there anymore. I dunno, I'm really going to need to think about putting it back. It was cool how I had it before. Jesuschrist I am so indecisive. Anyway, I digress. When I said I wasn't sure how it was going to work out, I meant that I have a good idea of what I want to do but am not sure if the gameplay will work out like I think it will work out. I won't know until I try it. So I gotta knock up some test puzzles and enemies and whatnot.

I agree it seems a little awkward at first, but I think you'll get used to it. WASD and numpad are fairly intuitive, I think. But I gotta have an option for laptops too.

Oh, I'm gonna have an option to make one character follow the other around when you don't need both, which will cut down on some of the annoying.

 

[Prexus]

Yeah, I get that. But I have a cognitive problem that makes it difficult for me to manipulate both my hands at the same time. It only gets worse when I try to use my feet as well (Drumming, sadface.) and from what I know, it is fairly common. It would make for neat multiplayer, but I don't think one person is going to find it very enjoyable though. Prove me wrong though! I'd rather be proven wrong, thats for sure.

 

[Perihelion]

Well, that's why I'm gonna make a tech demo. If people don't like it, then I'll figure something else out. It's something I think I really need to have a working example of before I know exactly if it'll be fun. Sorry to hear about your cognitive problem! I guess this game probably isn't gonna be for you unless I redo the gimmick, then.

 

[Prexus]

Well like I said, I want to see this tech demo and have you prove me wrong because it looks great and I want to play it ^^;

 

[Necrile]

I love how all you have is a screenshot and a title screen and everyone and their mother flips a shit :P Still though, I can't wait to see more.

 

[Perihelion]

Yeah. Well, this has been in development for a while, and I've talked to a lot of people about it extensively. It actually has a lot of worldbuilding done already.

I'm gonna make another mockup probably in the near future. I have some ideas for more stuff to do with these tiles. Got some crits on PJ, though, so I'll probably be editing this first. Speaking of that, questions! Is the mirroring on the HUD obnoxious? Are the walls too textured? Are the pipes over the halls too cartoony or confusing or otherwise not attractive? Is the banding on the roofs ugly or what? Is the HUD centerpiece too distracting?

 

[Ace of Spades]

Honestly, I'd say leave the graphics alone. Everyone seems to love them, no one's pointed out any faults as of yet, and any mistakes someone can point out at this point is just nitpicking. You should develop things like gameplay (the figurative meat and potatoes), and leave things like graphic touch ups (the figurative garnish) until the end.

With that being said, this thread absolutely ignited. It's no surprise people are excited though, this does look fantastic. The graphics are a perfect throwback to the SNES era. The concepts and puzzles seem interesting, I'm excited to see this when it's a bit further along to see how things like combat will work.

The movement of two players is an interesting concept, but it's going to be tricky to implement properly. I think it'd be perfect if you were using an xbox controller, or a playstation controller with the two thumb sticks, but on a keyboard I imagine it being difficult.

Good luck, I'll be back to check up on this.