Introduction
Hello. If you wanna know more about Skullz, you’re reading the right thing. I’ll detail the whole development process a little bit in here, with extra focus on the visuals, the audio, the whole way it came to be and especially the story. There’ll be inside looks into the little black book that everything got wrote down in before any of the coding, early versions of a lot of the visuals, cut content, alternate versions of the story, the ideas behind a lot of the things in the game and a whole bunch of stuff like that. Oh, just so that you’re prepared, I have written this documentary like a person. Like, sometimes i’m tired and don’t want to do things, sometimes I’m overenthusiastic and sometimes a friend draws a silly picture in my bachelor documentary and the thought to remove it never crosses my mind. This was a journey for me and it’s cool that something solid came of it. Sincerely, Feliks
The Development Process: Before The Blackbook I really don’t wanna sound full of myself, but I think it’s safe to say that Skullz is no ordinary game. It’s not a game made to be what a game is, it’s the inner world of a person, interpreted as a game, and it all started one fierceful morning... ...with two doodles I did while being bored at work. Yendor and Yorik. They didn’t have names yet though. During that time I tried to teach myself how to code, so I made a little talk and blink animation for both of them and just tried to get them to display that in a game. I made a textbox, so that they had a place to say something in, which ended up being in the finished game almost completely unaltered. Then I drew a little intro screen, made a song for that, which ended up becoming Betamaxx’s theme way later, and after a day’s work, the prototype to a game I didn’t even know I would make back then was finished. Weeks later I struggled with an idea for my Bachelor Thesis. I knew I wanted to make a video game, but I had no idea beyond that. That’s when two and two came together and these two doodles and that quick senseless game became this huge project.
Originally, the game was gonna be set on Mars. I’m not even kidding.
The title screen of the prototype. It scrolled vertically, looping infinitely.
The Development Process: The Blackbook That Haunted Me Next, I grabbed a little black book I still had lying around from something else. Then came ideas. A lot of ideas. Most of which wouldn’t make it into the game.
The following pages will be dedicated to that book. It did nothing wrong, it only reminded me that I did. Anyway, Hope you’re good at reading bad handwriting!
Page 1 That was it, the start of my own video game. I could think of anything I wanted and nobody could tell me otherwise! There would be six skulls to be selected, each spinning around their x-axis, 3D-like when you’d have your cursor on them. They’d all have super awesome energy beam attacks in their respective colors.
The game would be a fighting game, but also an adventure, an RPG maybe, well certainly you’d be able to choose your skull. Depending on which skull you’d choose, the adventure would be different! Every skull would have his own world and...you see where this is going. That’s ideas that aren’t going to happen.
It’s very hard to stay realistic when you have the freedom to do anything you want, but it’s cool to dream. Anyway, I boiled it down to just somehow you’d have these 6 skulls and you’d be able to select them, that would be your entryway into the game. I already thought about the difficulty of having each spin in an
animation, too. Like, maybe eight frames per skull would be doable. The artstyle was also supposed to be really pixely to save time and also save me from running into any roadblocks, skill-wise. I ended the moment with a simple thought, the answer to the question: ”Why would anybody play this?”
Page 2 A passing thought, being able to control the game however you liked, scrapped as one of the many features that I would not have time to figure out how to do before the deadline hit. But, here came the first idea that would not be scrapped. It reads “Have one skull wear 3D Glasses and glitching be his thing, es-
pecially RGB-shifting style. Call him Beta Maxx maybe.” That was the right direction to go. Focus on cool ideas rather than big words like RPG or 3D animations. More random ideas came to mind: “Have someone go through his (cool “monochrome” looking) cellphone contact list and end up calling
himself. Great potential for a deep conversation here.” This one never made it very far. It was one of those ideas you can cut without too much regret, cause it’s so lifted from the rest of the game. Next came some kind of really good general thought that would lead all following thoughts into
the direction I wanted them to go: “Basically have the whole game be a fest of all kinds of super rad shit that never bores and constantly keeps you super entertained and amazed - amalgamation of all ideas I’m gettin’.” Then I sketched Joseph & Betamaxx and made a few notes on other possible skulls.
Page 3 Next came a whole bunch of random thoughts in an attempt to flesh out as much of the game as possible. Like the characters, the world in general, the style of conversations, the overall plot, a style for soundeffects, for the music, the visuals, the animations. Simply everything. Naturally, a lot of that was scrapped,
other things were kept in the game, but not elaborated on, like the fact that every skull has his own primary color that none of the others had. That would later be used to make it clear to the player which skull was talking when two were having a conversation. Every skull was supposed to have his own world, which was kinda
realised in the final game, but not as straight-forward as I had imagined originally. There was also gonna be a super cool intro cutscene with all the 6 skulls (one didn’t make it into the game) having an all-out fight and shooting their laser beams all about with them all clashing in the middle in a huge rainbow explosion.
There were a lot of things. Meanwhile, I tried to think of something to call me as a game developer for publishing purposes and eventually came up with an intro closer to the final product as the original idea of six selectable skulls and even got a little technical already by thinking about the intro restarting after x seconds.
Page 4 It had been a while and I was getting impatient. I wrote down a lot and had a pretty good idea of what I was gonna do, but I wasn’t satisfied with it. I also wasn’t eager to start coding yet, because I didn’t wanna start and then decide that I had to change the whole engine up. So I got pretty excited when i came
up with the genre, and at first I even felt like I had invented a new genre when I couldn’t think of any games from the top of my head that played like mine. But then I could think of a couple and I didn’t feel as smart anymore. Nonetheless, I finally knew what kind of game I was gonna turn all of this into. So I could finally
start without any kind of fear of having to scrap it all again. I didn’t, though. I wanted to do it right from the start, so now I suddenly thought about how I would publish the game, made a blog to post about it, a twitter, a place to upload the game and whatnot. Then I had another explosion of ideas, this time very directed
though. Like, they were all about things that I already set in stone, not crazy new ideas that would only complicate things further. Yendor was now supposed to be a guide to the player, not just one of the enemies, I even had a pretty clear picture of his personality in mind already, which translated perfectly into the final game.
Page 5 Maybe you noticed that on the last page it said “Turn Page� at the bottom, underlined fiercely. That was because of an interesting thought. See, when I had my genre down, I first thought of all the great games in the genre and was amazed to make another entry in that genre that really only has very little
good games in it. Then I thought that these good games were made by huge developer teams with lots of experience and was certain that mine was just gonna be another bad example of the genre. That’s why I urged myself to turn the page whenever I would read those enthusiastic lines again, to discover the warning on
the next page not to become another bad example. This was a very good idea, cause it furthered my will to just go my own way, like popular trippy video game developer Cactus, and not worry much about any conventions of the genre, which is what does most games in. Then I went a little too far down that thought-
lane and wanted to make the game like a collection of different genres, which gladly I scrapped because that would’ve just been a mess, I imagine. Anyway, apart from that, just a couple little ideas. Oh, and I never ended up looking back at those games I listed on the left page. I did play through all of them already though.
Page 6 Then came a bunch of sketches. One of the first scenes was supposed to be Yendor at the door of The Castle with Yorik talking from the inside. I wasn’t really satisfied with it, so I tried it from some kinda menacing angle, which didn’t really look any better. That door was also the first thing I realised digitally. For the
longest time, that was the thing I was showing to people when they asked me how I was doing with the game. Funnily, when I made the game, I had so many other ideas before I got to the castle, that when I was at the scene where the door was supposed to come into play, I redid it completely.
Page 7 That hole, I think, was gonna be the entrance to Joseph and Roger’s level, but I scrapped the idea so quickly that it’s one of the only things where I actually forgot what it was supposed to be. There are also a couple torn pages. Weird.
Page 8 My mom suggested to draw her. I didn’t do a good job of it.
Page 9 This was a pretty dark time for the project. A friend had just bought himself his own property and I helped out there a lot. That was actually where I wrote down a good portion of this stuff, but when I did these two pages, (on which I also carelessly left one of the double pages blank, again.) I kinda didn’t feel the determina-
tion I previously had anymore. I guess cause Summer was just ending. I barely wrote anything down, mostly just words without any meaning that were supposed to remind me of certain feelings. I didn’t like the sketches I did on these pages at all, I did come up with a couple things, but it just didn’t feel right.
Page 10 And it got even worse. This was supposed to be a sketch for the overworld, but obviously it looks like crap. Accompanied by a sketch of a fireplace that is so bad that I had to subtitle it. This page is important to me though, because it reminds me of when I thought I didn’t have what it takes to make a game all by myself.
Page 12 (Page 11 got ruined by markerbleed) Things were looking up a little again, but not completely yet. I tried to come up with something but ended up not liking the result at all. I tried to sketch out the castle, but I didn’t like that either. I was still kinda not getting anywhere and all around disappointed in my ability to draw or do anything at all.
Page 13 There we go, finally I’m back to also using the left page again, and there’s words and everything! So, here I’m telling myself to do the thing I was gonna do at Page 5. meaning I basically didn’t do anything since then. I got my head back into it and made an effort to progress, there’s first signs of the idea to not have the Castle
be the only thing to happen in the game, or at least not the first thing. But, at this point I should’ve been way, way further into development than I was. It had been over a month and I was still writing stuff down instead of trying it out. I did a bit of pixeling here and there, made a song or two, but not much else. I kept throwing
ideas back and forth that were already at the furthest they could be in theory, but I would only notice that while already in development. None of the ideas here weremeaningful at all, as they’re all about a state of the game that was so far from where I was, that they were nothing but a sign that I was scared of the open canvas.
Page 14 Then a friend drew me.
Page 15 Then another friend drew something else.
Page 16 Here I thought I had a great plottwist, but I didn’t. Especially not in light of the plottwist madness the final game turned out to be. I was still stalling, and not even the fact that my usual pen ran out of ink made me question what I was doing. No, I was still writing down ideas, the blackbook became my excuse not to start.
Page 17 I finally started coding and made a couple little notes. About two months into development I was still working on the developer logo and the titlescreen. Better yet, I was working on the third or fourth version of the logo. Just a couple more days and I would finally get to it though. I couldn’t keep making notes forever.
Page 18 Here we are. This was the day when the pressure got so big that I had no choice but to either disappear silently into the night or get it together and start doing the actual damn game. This scene is in the game pretty much exactly the way it’s sketched down. Not much else to say, it just felt right and got made.
Page 19 A couple random ideas, an attempt to draw Yendor in an angle like he was lying on the ground, which looks pretty bad, sadly. Then I built a table and didn’t have anything else to write on so I commited the terrible sin of having non-bachelor related things in my bachelor blackbook. This was two out of three months into
the project and I still wasn’t past the cliff scene. Don’t get me wrong, I did finally start to work on it, but it went very slowly and poorly. At this point I had less than a month left, a logo animation, a title screen, a little intro scene which didn’t amount to more than 30 seconds of gameplay, and a cliff.
Page 20 Another two weeks later, I had finally started coding and was well into the game. From the moment where I finally started, I didn’t write anything down anymore up until the final chapter of the game. These two weeks were where all the visuals and the music was made, and especially all the code. I used the
book as much as I used random pieces of paper or my hand to write down any ideas I had in the little time I spent not in front of the computer. Contrary to the 19 double pages used for the first three scenes in the game, the top left part of this double page is about the fight in chapter 2, the top right part of the page
is for the progression in chapter 3, and the little diagram with all the lines and arrows and x’s and y’s was for me to figure out how the player moved around in the cave scene. The bottom part was a few bugs that friends discovered playing the almost-finished game. This is the secondto-last page.
Page 21 A couple more quick notes on bugs and another picture a friend drew of me. A fitting end for a book whose purpose was as much a caricature of itself as the way I worked on this project. But it is what it is and as long as the final product is satisfying, I am okay with however terrible the way it came to be might appear.
The Development Process: Living In The Game Not all is bad though, cause when I finally started to code, nothing could stop me. The world evolved naturally as the player character moved through it. I would make sense of what just happened only after the fact and let myself be guided by the pillars of the world I was creating, namely, the Skullz. I designed the Skullz before anything else, save for a music track here and a background there, and posted them live as I was doing them in the relaxed forum named BYOB, which is also credited in the final sequence, and would often incorporate suggestions by the users into the design of the game. Every day the world would grow a bit larger and the story would progress a bit further. You would meet new characters and discover new places. And eventually it would all come together.
The first scene, in original size
BYOB was a great way to relax while still working on the game.
A couple of alternate versions of various assets.
Everything in my life revolved around the game during the intense two to three weeks phase of coding. I would somehow turn everything I did into some kind of benefit for the game. Either I’d take my camera with me and make pictures for the backgrounds, or I would scavenge movie’s plots for bits and pieces I could incorporate into the game, or I would incorporate interesting behaviour or funny responses into the dialogue of the game. No matter what I did, I was thinking about how to bring the plot of the game
to a good closure, how to seperate the chapters and characters from eachother, or how to seamlessly get the player into the next chapter or explain the latest unexpected event in the game.
An alternate version of the woods.
For the backgrounds, I heavily manipulated photos.
A photo I took while searching for mushrooms with my mom.
Often I would just make a thread and post a couple assets in there, like an animated background or a music track and take a break while waiting for reactions. Then, after the break, I would
apply changes based on the reactions as I would see fit and slip right back into work from there, having had a break without having wasted work-time and invigorated by the instant gratification.
Example of how the collaboration with BYOB worked (Yes, the entire forum is in comic sans)
For every finished asset in the game, there’s at least five earlier versions. On top of that, there’s a whole load of stuff that didn’t make it into the game at all. For every sound effect there’s a bunch of alternate and earlier version. Then there are so many music tracks that I even ended up making a tutorial just so there would be enough room for music. The Betamaxx OS
The first scene of the game
An alternate intro, complete with a digitized voice saying a couple sentences
An early Castle Entrance
What now? / Living The Dream In the end, I feel like I did an alright job at it all. As the plot stands now, there’s gotta be a sequel, cause there’s a bunch of loose ends that need to be tied up by another big story or else they’d feel insignificant. But that’s a common thing for adventures these days. They all get released in episodes. People seem to like that. I would personally love to just do this for a living. It’s not even that far-fetched. Crowd-funding is a huge deal nowadays, and a lot of video games get funded that way. Especially a lot of video games with just a couple developers behind it. I will try to use this project to get the foot in the door of video game developing to the best of my abilities. I’ll send it to developers to maybe just get a job in the industry like that, upload it to game portals to gain recognition and maybe even put a kickstarter up, using this game as an example of what I can do. Well, at least for me that’s the answer to: “What’s the purpose of your Thesis.”
Thanks for reading.
Here’s a couple excerpts from my personal notes text file: Quick summary of what was left to do: betamaxx’s place is still woods (yendor: we got a problem. we’re still in the woods) -> maybe glitches to woods while he says that glitches back to castle entrance / end of woods at the end of the world somehow then yorik with door entrance (and dungeon maybe or after roger) then joseph/rogers world through a hole in the castle or smth then castle/dungeon again, final world now. providence at the end of it after providence (like conversation and stuff ) maybe after defeat of providence ^like that it’s all in, but it’s also minimized to be realised in the time I have left. like providence doesn’t have his own world but still a very promiment and fitting part in the story Early version of the end of the story: yendor at end:”look, we’ve been doin this for years. for a lot of years. every time he reverses time and erases your damn memory. but not last time. last time you managed to snag his damn juel and you rammed it into my skull and I didn’t forget. but you forgot, and you didn’t believe me and I confronted him alone and it all happened again and again but this time I got you to come here with me and this time you have the jewel and this time it has to be different, I’m tired.” boss - “him” in this case is providence and then when all that happens after providence, there’s [REDACTED] Various thoughts about the plot: (all skulls don’t forget since you did what you did at the start of it all) game is about how all the individual skullz deal with the state of knowing that they’re in an endless time loop (that you’re creating - cause the main character’s gotta be significant) yendor is on his endless quest to solve all of it (yendor used to smile but doesn’t anymore because he’s grown so frustrated and disillusioned) betamaxx keeps out of all of it and fled into the digital world betamaxx says (in one of the next scenes I’m doing) We never chill anymore, yendor. ever since you’re on that endless quest of yours (you’ve been doing nothing else.) yorik obeys the master joseph went insane and then roger started living in his skull. the “reveal” starts with roger saying “Just because I havn’t been here from the start doesn’t mean I don’t matter!” roger also doesn’t forget because he’s living in one of the skulls and then the whole reveal of it all goes on in roger’s place, between that and betamaxx is a little yorik and castle stuff then roger, then the final part in the castle, providence, skull mother, the end at the end, it’s like “and in the end nothing changed. everybody is still doing what he always did. except that yendor smiles again.” Thoughts about a sequel: in the past, before the skulldude loop(working title for the timeline of the game), he does a lot of stuff with yendor and so on, (possibility for cool secret of mana-style 2p game) then goes to confront providence, kills him, is sent back to cliff, young. maybe in the last fight against providence here, yendor is blown out of the castle and lands on the cliff and joseph appears there - no, that’d be too coincidetal, I gotta think of another reeeal long and trippy mindfucky story that’ll put it all together by the end. like a chapter where joseph is actually reverted back to his old self grudually and then at some point ends up at the cliff by remembering yendor while losing all of his memory or something elaborate like that
Alternate versions of the happenings in the Cave: I can either tie the end of the game to reality, then the 100 years in the cave, then future and explain what happened after and before the plot of the game in sequels/ prequels so before the cliff and after the 100 years in the cave ^why not? or I can tie the end to the beginning (cliff to providence) and have it all be a made up story and explain what happened after and before the cave in sequels/prequels V V V ONLY WAY TO DO IT tie the end of the made up story (providence) to the beginning of reality (falling into the cave) and the beginning of the story (cliff, soon to be cave) with the end of reality (after yendor is done telling the story) -> which ends in the cave, but 100 years before maybe make cliff the cave, make the intermission happen after you go through the green door. then game happens up until the cave, you see yendor 100 years later. then back to present, player and yendor fall into the cave. they get out of the cave, they are thrown back into the cave the get out of the cave and are not thrown back into the cave, rest of game happens, yendor eventually ends up at the cave. the part with roger happens, maybe have another scene here, after the end of the game, where he talks a bit more with roger, has “finished his story”, which was the game, and then the player character falls in like in beginning of the game, 100 years in the future now. it’s a loop that is a made up story 100 years in the future by yendor, that ends with him falling into the cave, then has him lie there for a hundred years and starts back with the player falling into the cave. (a neat tid-bit. it’s not clear if it’s a hundred years, you just have what roger says to go on, that it’s been like a century or something) before the player drops in. make it clear that the whole game is just one of yendor’s stories to roger in the cave possibility for skullz 0, prequel about how he got into the cave, if this story is not true possibility for skullz -1, pre-prequel about how joseph got into the cave possiblity for skullz 2, sequel about what happens 100 years in the future, after the cave, if his story is not true erase the part where yendor falls into the cave after player and yendor leave erase the 100 years earlier part? make a glitchy time rift breaking effect when player drops into the castle cause that’s when the future is rewritten because of the player interfering make that be the providence twist, fourth wall breaking madness yendor and player arrive at castle 100 years later, yendor is trapped in the cave 100 years earlier, yendor and player are at the door, get in, yorik throws them in cave yendor and player fall into the cave player gets yendor and goes to the door, yendor falls into the cave yendor and player are at the door, get in, and yorik throws them in the cave quick and easy: have yoriks chapter be the caveloop have providence chapter be the grand finale credits with creditsmusic after credits, extra scene with yendor in cave with roger them exchanging a couple of words then playerdude falling in from the ceiling, taking yorik, running off.
Konzept und Dokumentation Entwicklung eines Videospiels mit Schwerpunkt auf dem Narrativ. Bachelor Thesis Studiengang Kommunikationsdesign Hochschule RheinMain Pr端fer: Prof. Tom Schreiber Prof. G端nther Klein Bachelorant: Feliks Balzer 9. Semester MatrikelNr.:165174 Kontaktdaten: Feliks Balzer Pestalozzistr. 1 35435 Wettenberg Tel.: 01729099775 Mail: Feliksbalzer@online.de