Orkastle Update 05 - Progress Report + Immediate Plans (Patreon)

This will effectively be half a blog, half an ORKASTLE update.

MOST IMPORTANT DETAILS

First and most importantly, while this year was made a little cringe thanks to mostly consisting of surprise stuff I didn't calculate into my initial plans (some due to basic negligence in estimations, and some just genuinely difficult to foresee), happy to say everything is going extremely well, simply put.

Literally everything that was difficult on this project in terms of art, design, or writing at the start of the project is now trivial, challenge-wise. Writing's only difficulty in the first place was just that I challenged myself with using Japanese as the first language of it, which initially had me revising a bit more awkward text than I'd normally write had it been English.

Looking back, it was actually pretty daring of me to bite off, but that can be said for a lot of aspects of the game.

I did that completely on purpose, as an excuse to push myself to the next level with my skill and consistency.

I let the lack of updates go on way too long. This one is going to be a little wordy, so I'll put the most important points here:

●The main focus right now is finishing the trailer, the bulk of which means polishing every single asset the trailer will be showcasing (there's a lot of them...)

●I've been sitting on a second (much better) battle demo ages now, it's just had several tasks with it that need to be wrapped up that got neglected for the sake of working on other priorities (typical solo dev behavioral pattern...). Generally speaking, prioritizing a specific vertical slice is less efficient than evenly distributing focus everywhere when the team is this small, but I want to get the second battle demo out close to when the trailer is done (maybe little before, maybe little after)

●I let myself get severely overworked, so I actually need 3 weeks from today of taking things slow and focusing on making sure my health/fitness thoroughly prepared for the mad rush that is going to follow actually dropping the game's first chapter (I will make SURE chapter updates are a matter of a few months only). It's unfortunate timing for this to happen after a period of infrequent updating, but it's actually not a coincidence (being locked in on difficult, time-consuming tasks makes updates harder)

●I will be working on and uploading clinics even during this short period of taking it easy (it will actually be easier to get those in during this brief period of reducing normal work).

In terms of coding, all systems are in place.

Now adding/changing stuff on the program level is easy and only marginally time-consuming.

People like to complicate things, but at the end of the day, a game really is ultimately just

-Storytelling

-Art

-Coding

-Music

Even you divide it into more specific categories like “game design” and whatnot, it still gets encapsulated by these four things.

So to have 3 of 4 completely in the bag and close to finished is a great feeling. As for the last of the four... (I'll talk about that a ways below).

HOW I'VE SEEN THE PROJECT

It's occurred to me at this point there's enough people genuinely excited for Orkastle at this point where's it's being anticipated as a serious product and not just “that thing Howard is working on,” like I had been used to thinking about it despite myself.

When things reach this stage, periods of silence look really bad, and are just generally not fun.

It's actually been a weird thing for me to get used to. I know I'm not the only creator that feels this way, I remember Rin Okamaoto writing in his Elfen Lied afterword for one of the volumes how it's a weird thought people show up every time to buy his stuff.

The difference between creator and most normal jobs is that you're a creator as a glorified bum typically for many many years before you're a creator for work. And when you do finally cross the line into “creator for work,” it can often be a while before realizing you're not still creating as a bum no matter how much you're actually treating it as work in terms of time and effort.

On the flip side, my understanding of what professional work is has solidified dramatically since the point of starting this project.

I'll talk more specifically about this in a bit below, but over the course of working on Orkastle, I've come to exactly what makes the difference between a thoroughly interesting work that supports its storytelling properly and just something that feels stale or amateur.

That also happened to come hand in hand with needing to stop and put far more time and thought into a few things I didn't initially except...

THIS YEAR'S MAIN CHALLENGES

There's basically four main factors that have made this year slow.

Audio

The first major one is audio.

Much like how I rely on my brother for quite a bit of heavy lifting with the art on the project, I knew going in I'd need to rely on an audio/music specialist to clutch the sound out.

What I didn't realize is that even with having access to such a person, a large amount of creativity and decision-making still ultimately rests on me

It's kind of weird saying this now (sounds obvious wording it like this) but, people who are good at music aren't machines where you tell them to make a soundtrack and you just magically get what you need back.

Quality of music is important, but even more important is how it fits in to both the storytelling and the overall UX (game feel) of the game. Unless you have a highly versatile, experienced, in-house composer who can fiddle with the soundtrack all day in between play testing the game, looking at the concept art, and reading the story, a composer isn't going to really know exactly what they should make.

It's honestly not incredibly different than if you were to call up a freelance artist and tell them to design the main characters.

Tsunako would literally iterate through dozens of options at times for a single character, and she's one of the greatest designers to ever live. You can't just commission that type of thing.

At any rate, while I did fully expect to have to do some rough decision-making with the composing process, the amount required out of me is a lot more involved than I planned for.

To put it simply, I need to roughly lock in the BPMs, most important timbre choices, structure, key melodies, and general abstract vibe/mood goals.

More tangibly, it basically means I need to do a prototype of most of the soundtrack myself before I can efficiently bring help on.

And here's where we sort of run into the ugliest aspect of (near) solo dev: needing to power through your weak points.

Music is my weakest skill by a decent margin (I both got into it the latest of my skills and divided the least amount of my time to it even after getting into it), but it's at a point where I can just barely squeeze out the vision I have given enough time.

Keyword is “given enough time...”

A single track can easily average out to about 50+ hours needed of iterating it just to get it to the point where I've definitely secured the identity and core ideas I wanted.

A more complex track can get into 200 or even more hours needed...

All this came together to take a massive steaming dump on my time this year, which is time I was hoping would be spent on finishing/polishing what little is left of the game's foundation and Chapter 1.

The good news is that the game is never going to ask for too many complex tracks.

The reason is because Orkastle is a horror game at the end of the day.

Take a listen to a soundtrack like Resident Evil 1 (the original version, not the “Clowns Farting in a Basement” Director's Cut one lmao). It's a great vibe, but most of those tracks are really simple.

That being said, Orkastle isn't the “dive right into spookymaxxing” type experience. The earlier content needs to walk through some more medium temperature moods with a mild amount of dull brightness in them.

Most importantly, this means the initial battle theme you hear for the earlier battles in the chapter need a more conventional melodic track.

After banging my head against it for much longer that I'd like to admit, this is the result:

I'm going to make further significant improvements before hiring a composer to refine it, but I have a pretty good vision for what those improvements will be.

Naturally, my musical skill was boosted quite a bit since the year started (part of how I know that is that my scores are improving quite a bit in various ear training drills).

Fortunately, chunks of the game can also be paced by simpler ambient type SFX, which is pretty quick and easy to do.

This one needs some obvious improvements but the general idea is locked in.

At any rate, most of the prototype soundtrack is finished, so we're over the hump, after much toil.

Advertising

The current market is extremely different from the one of 10 years ago.

The first glaring issue is the one everyone talks about all the time, the sheer amount of competition.

I remember when the Xbox 360 Arcade digital store was a thing and largely was responsible for the start of the indie game boom. You could pretty much put legitimately anything on there and get some kind of solid ROI for it.

Basically, since then, things have gotten more or less linearly difficult with each year.

However, there was a distinct turning point somewhere along the line where it's not just difficulty that increased, but the fundamentals of what goes into marketing a game switched around a bit.

Chris Zukowski is the modern guru on marketing indie games, and I only discovered his advice about a year ago.

While some of it was standard obvious stuff, a couple factors really changed the way I thought about showcasing a game to the market.

To summarize it as a simply as possible, the most important thing is building everything around big announcements that correspond to stages of the production and hyping those big announcements up as much as possible ahead of time and after the fact.

Having observed enough at this point, I'm extremely confident this logic holds, but the only downside is while things are in the earlier foundational stage of a project, it can be harder to know exactly what to show and how.

That's part of why I took some time out this year to try various Youtube formats in spreading awareness of the game.

While all of them yielded of some kind of positive result, some approaches just inherently worked better than others. As someone once said, if your product is interesting, everything you try in advertising it will work to at least some extent, whereas if it isn't interesting, nothing will work no matter what you do (which is sadly where the meme that marketing is the hardest aspect of indie dev comes from).

So fortunately, the market is confirmed interested in Orkastle.

We actually lucked out hard with how good the response was to just opening the Steam page. I didn't realize you're actually not supposed to do that without a trailer under conventional wisdom, but we ended up with an amount that'd be considered the “Diamond tier” on the Zukowski chart even without one:

What this means is that the Chapter 1 announce trailer can now be a separate event, and (hopefully) essentially mean we squeezed out an extra hype event.

Health

When I started the project, I was actually coming off of what was probably the single most unhealthy long term period of my life.

It's somewhat normal to hear creators taking on unhealthy habits while trying to make it pro, but I kind of took it to an extreme.

By the time, Orkastle was in what I consider “pre-production,” I had turned around a lot of these habits, but long unhealthy period gave momentum to some difficulties I've been fighting against the whole time.

Overwork catches up without you realizing it, and typically you're a few months past the line before you finally call it.

I was doing precisely 0 break days for a long time and even would commonly have days of wake up → work → sleep, and literally nothing else except eating.

This year I had to start implementing some breaks (1 day off a week at least and occasionally longer periods of rest), which has honestly been extremely frustrating given I'm at the height of my excitement for the project.

My brother has been experiencing the same thing at the same time actually.

Things are only going to get much more extreme from here in terms of what's being asked out of us once Chapter 1 drops, so that's why I'm making sure I focus hard on health and fitness for this period right now to overturn the bad momentum I've had with my health.

You basically need to treat yourself like an athlete if you want to really be on top of everything with creative work.

From now on, we're activating Performance Mode.

Preparation

Lastly, this year has had a few elements of preparation necessary to ensure the future of the project goes perfectly smoothly (along with making sure Chapter 1 can be efficiently polished).

First thing was just me starting to pick up a some daily drills to improve writing speed in Japanese (such as clozies). Sacrificing even a little bit of the day to this type of thing when it's already a slow year is painful, but the results were incredibly good, so the effort will pay for itself in the long run.

Other thing has been making sure we have enough design settei knocked out to make both coordination and design consistency on the project go smoothly.

Part of this process actually involved something kind of huge, in that I had to finally formally teach my brother exactly about advanced technical literary characterization while he was working on the settei.

Up to this point, we've used a system where I just mark in and modify what kind of characterization changes I want, but that system has a lot of really bad limitations.

Organizing this info has been quite a process but very much worth it. It also means I can organize everything in book form and hand that out in addition to the Orkastle settei (we're producing a lot of material while organizing the characterization science that can be used as educational stuff).

Here's an example of one of the Kannyo drawings before and after we went over the characterization stuff.

And here's an example from Enoch's.

The difference might be obvious to you or it might feel subtle.

But either way, the subconscious impact on the audience from having tight characterization makes all the difference in the world.

Which brings me to my next point...

THE IMPORTANCE OF CHARACTERIZATION IN AN AI GENNING WORLD

It's safe to say, that AI genned visuals have officially hit a “too close for comfort” point.

While on one hand, a lot of these online AI services seem not sustainable along with the fact that machine learning in the first place just has inherent bottlenecks that are simply impossible to get past, the sad truth is that serious creators are competing with AIslop in some shape or form, as it does have some kind of effect on market value.

But there's actually a silver lining to the whole thing in that it's trained the average audience's eye whether they realize it or not.

By extension of this, the current market can actually be seen as an opportunity to flaunt storytelling and, by extension, art that is imbued with the functional intent and design of good storytelling.

One of the biggest realizations for me over the course of working on the project has been finding out just how scarce a deep understanding of this generally is.

Even with the seeming endless amount of skilled artists on social media, the job of professional illustrator remains considered one of the hardest jobs in existence to get.

A not even remotely small reason for this is the sheer extent to which certain advanced techniques are esoteric, one of them being advanced characterization.

To put it simply, this has made me extremely confident in the inevitability of Orkastle standing out...

COMING UP

There's four major things to get done.

-battle demo (possibly multiple ones)

-trailer

-story playtest (basically a demo for supporters of like half the chapter or so)

-actual finished Chapter 1

I genuinely want all of them done before the end of the year, but to be completely honest, it's unlikely I'll be releasing Chapter 1 until early next year, if for no other reason than I want to spend some time hyping it on Youtube and such before dropping it.

So with all that said, huge thanks to everyone supporting me during this slower period, I'll be sure to deliver.

Stay based and otaku.