Hello, Dinofans!

It’s been a while since our last update, and we’re thrilled to share some major milestones, exciting progress, and a big announcement about Theropods! Let’s dive in.


We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve partnered with Dionous Games[www.dionous.com] as our publisher! You might know them for their work on Watch Over Christmas, and we couldn’t be happier to have their support.

When we started this journey, we funded Theropods through your amazing Kickstarter support and our personal savings. Thanks to Dionous, we can now work on the game full-time.

This means the project has clear milestones and (gasp!) a rough deadline in sight. While we’re not sharing the release date just yet (but it's most likely within 2025), this partnership brings us closer than ever to delivering the game we’ve dreamed of to all of you.

Since our last update, we’ve storyboarded every single cutscene for the game and started bringing them to life. It’s been a challenging but fun process.

Cutscenes play a critical role in our game, especially because Theropods relies entirely on non-verbal storytelling. Without dialogue, we had to tackle practical problems like:

• How do the Spaceman and Amazon communicate if they don’t speak the same language?
  
• How can we ensure players understand what’s being communicated through visual, emotive language?
  
• How do we deliver necessary expositional information important to understanding the stakes of the story?

Despite these challenges, we believe the cutscenes have added empathy, heart, and depth to our characters. They elevate the story in ways we’re really proud of, and we can’t wait for you to experience them.

Take a peek at our creative process! Here are some snapshots of our rough storyboards, from notebook sketches to Photoshop compositions.


We’ve also started playtesting! We’ve been sending the game to a select group of testers, recording their playthroughs, and analysing their experiences. This has been invaluable for adjusting puzzle hints and fine-tuning the difficulty.

As game designers, we are terrible playtesters of our own games, since we already know the solution to the puzzles we pose. Therefore, when we playtest ourselves, we tend to go straight for the correct solution of the puzzle, go through the motions and when we solve it, think the job is done.


Years ago, I (Kostas) worked on a beat-em-up game called Armed Prophet.
I playtested the game myself like crazy and decided that at times, the game was too easy. As I breezed through enemies and bosses, I nudged our programmer to have 2 game difficulties, easy and hard. Reduce the life bar, give players healing packs sparingly, etc.

When the game was released, I watched people playing and, to my surprise, noticed the game was insanely difficult for them, even on easy mode. They kept dying constantly!

That’s when it hit me: of course I thought the game was easy, I spent tons of hours on it! I was an expert on my own game. Poor players just got their hands on it. Being challenging was one thing, being stupidly difficult was another. It may seem an obvious lesson to you reading this now, but for me, it clearly wasn’t until I saw it happening.


Tim Schafer[www.polygon.com], the legendary game dev behind Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, talks about helping players solve a puzzle, you as a developer need to have the role of an older brother:
Designers should provide players with responses if they attempt a non-working solution, not just reject their answer to a particular piece of the puzzle. They should provide hints when players fail and rewards when players get close to solving a puzzle. Schafer likened the game’s role to that of an older brother, saying “You’re getting there. Keep working on it.”

Here is further proof that Tim knows what he is talking about.

One issue we are tackling at the moment is player feedback and nudging them towards the correct solution. This means starting to think in hints. Your character can always say ‘no’ to when something isn’t working, but if all they say is ‘no’, it starts getting a little annoying and not helpful.

Therefore, we need to create a few helpful, feedback animations for the main character to perform, accompanied by some emotive voice acting.

When we playtested a puzzle in the game, we had a very particular issue where players kept missing an important vine they needed to click on. To their defence, that vine was not present from the start of the puzzle and when it appeared halfway through, it was during a complex animation scene where other stuff moved around on the screen

So what did we do? We followed Charles Cecil’s advice[www.videogamer.com], another legendary game dev of Broken Sword fame. Mr Cecil spoke on ways of getting the players’ attention while making them feel like they made progress themselves, without anyone helping them.
“And I was kind of inspired by a game that really doesn’t inspire me at all: Candy Crush” … “The best thing about it,” Cecil says, is the “little sparkles” to look in a certain direction. “Yes! That’s the solution. But it was me that worked it out. I wasn’t told the solution, so we will also have little sparkles; just look in this direction.” He continues, “Hopefully, the player will know. ‘If I’m stuck, it is going to come along and help me’”

Pictured above: not exactly 'sparkles' but you get the idea. That blue donut thingy wiggles to catch your attention.

So we basically used our environment, and when the vine gets there, to draw your attention, a bright pink butterfly conveniently lands on the vine. Now, that draws your attention. If anything, you want to click on this butterfly, ending up noticing the important vine.

So we are going to coin the term ‘Critter Hints’(™) and use butterflies, lizard, flies and other little critters around the game to help you whenever needed.

We’re constantly tweaking the user experience and creating assets to make the game as polished and intuitive as possible. With every iteration, the game feels more cohesive and engaging.

Polishing is a long way to go, but we squeeze in an asset or two when we can. Just look at this beautiful fire by Matt, along with pretty UI items.


Here’s what’s coming up for Theropods:

• Compiling all puzzles into their rough form using existing assets.
  
• Iterating between creating new assets and programming.
  
• Finalizing cutscene animations and assets for the last chapters.

LOCOMOTIVE IS OUT!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1709880/Loco_Motive/

MYTHWRECKED: AMBROSIA ISLAND IS COMING OUT, DECEMBER THE 5TH!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2000210/Mythwrecked_Ambrosia_Island/

PRIMAL PLANET LOOKS FANTASTIC (not only does it have a ton of dinosaurs, but is also developed by the fantastic SeethingSwarm, our very first programmer on Theropods!)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2350270/Primal_Planet/

With Matt and Sarah juggling pixel art animation and programming, and Kostas focused on cutscene and animation assets, the team is working tirelessly to bring Theropods to life.

Thank you, as always, for your patience, support, and enthusiasm. We can’t wait to show you more soon.

Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments!

Kostas and Sarah

Hey everyone, Kostas and Sarah here! We’d like to share our progress over the last few months in this update and what we have next on our to-do list. Let’s dive in!

The core of an adventure game is its story and naturally, any great narrative requires a level of drama. Narrative tension is often conveyed through exposition, interactions between characters and setting high stakes from the outset, but it can be tricky to truly immerse players within the world when typical conventions around point and click games don’t allow for fast-paced gameplay or action scenes. So how do you communicate these emotions to the player?


Over the past few months, we’ve spent time creating assets and moving much of the game over to the new engine. With this work complete, alongside fundamental interactions, story and core gameplay, we were keen to turn our attention to the question that has been on our mind from the start - how do we represent action scenes within a point and click game?

Our initial idea was to simply lean into the curve and include a number of sequences that required fast movements or typical player action. These are uncommon within point and click adventure games, and we understand why.

Point and click games are typically enjoyed from audiences that appreciate slow, contemplative gameplay. When looking at the average computer specs for similar titles, performance can be limited, so it stands to reason that any level of challenge of this type would need to be appropriate.

Some action sequences in point and click games have been done before. For example, Full Throttle had a full minigame, which was of course impressive but players found it difficult to play.
Unavowed created a ‘sense’ of urgency, although it felt rather artificial.
After researching many other games, we decided that Canabalt best embodied the ideas we hoped to create for Theropods, essentially a one-click runner.
Action sequences fundamentally act as a departure from the core gameplay of a point and click game. When porting to consoles, we would further have to consider how to approach establishing a set of controls for exploration and a second set for action. This was not going to be feasible. So, what other options did we have?

Option 1: Action with a failure state could be communicated through quick-time sequences, but we would continue to face many of the issues above, even if the skill requirement were less extreme.

Option 2: We could perhaps allow for slow, methodical gameplay set against the backdrop of an accelerated soundtrack and visual cues such as action happening in the background or looped animations that appear to threaten the player.

Option 3: Replace gameplay with cinematics. Even though creating cutscenes was going to be a lot of work, it would be significantly less complicated and time-demanding than creating the action sequences. Action sequences also had the risk of not working at all and us having spent a ton of resources for nothing.

Check out these action tests we did:

Pterodactyl Action
Tiny Dino Action
Barbarian Chase Action
So this option we decided to go with, as it requires no frantic movements on the part of the player. It also avoids any issues in console porting, or in departing from the conventions of the genre. Cinematics also act as a reward to the player. It’s an opportunity to sit back in your chair and let something play out on screen in response to the challenges you have faced in gameplay. Through music, visuals and cinematic storytelling, we can communicate the necessary emotion to the player.

Additionally, creating a game where there is no dialogue and only one ‘fixed’ camera angle with no facial expressions from the characters was proving very difficult to tell the story. Having cutscenes would not only allow for better storytelling, but also more emotional since we are now able to get close-ups and look into the characters’ faces.
Adding cutscenes was quite a challenge for us; we needed to create new assets, such as backgrounds, animations, and sprites, and upscale each of these to fit a full-screen presentation. We decided to make cutscenes that match the art style of the game, but with a minimalistic style, in order to reduce the time required to deliver the game to a high standard.

Here are some examples of our options when we were deciding on a style for Theropods: Lunark has incredible rotoscoping and a strong colour palette, but it wasn’t the style we wanted to adopt.
Blasphemous also has crazy-good, detailed cutscenes, but it would take us a lot of time to complete scenes with this level of animation within our time and budget.
The Lion’s Song is a good anchor for what we planned for our game; a minimal colour palette and relatively simple animation.
Here is what we came up with!

Working on the cutscene art assets is our focus for the coming weeks. You can watch along as we complete this work over on Twitch[www.twitch.tv]! We’re streaming most weeks on Thursday afternoons.

As of today, the team has already finished the story and puzzle design. We’re currently working on the animations for the second to last chapter before they can be turned into pixel assets and added to the game. We feel like making the art first is more important so we can easily add the assets when needed.

Our next focus will be tied closely to gameplay as we create the next version of the build, minus puzzle integration. Once the concept is proved with this build over the next couple of months, we will add the puzzles, chapter-by-chapter before opening it up to a playtest. This is the opportunity to adjust the UX for the inventory menu since there’s still room for improvement - and of course then add the cutscenes into the game.

We’re actively pitching our game to different publishers, and it’s of course a challenging campaign for us, alongside making the game itself and working on marketing, with a little help recently from Acorn Games[www.acorngames.gg], no stranger to point and click adventure games. We aim to partner with a publisher aligned with the team’s vision, and that’s partly why it’s taking a long time for us to find the right one. As of now, the team is still funded by our previous Kickstarter and our own savings, we hope to find a publisher in the near future to help us with multiple go-to-market strategies.

That’s it for now. We’re thankful for your support, and we look forward to being able to let you guys try the game soon. See you on the next dev blog!

With love,
Kostas and Sarahl