Drop Everything Studios

The world building Wednesday series shows you the world of Practicum in various forms. See the videos below.

We are doing a limited run of some t-shirts for the new game. Send me a personal message if you want one. I will be ordering them on August 1st.

Long time fans will know that we try to be honest here. Our posts about bad games that we have made say they are bad.

Right now, the website looks bad, and honestly, that is not going to change. We want to spend our time on games, not on websites. When we make enough money to hire a web developer, it will look better. Until then, you are stuck with this as your source of news.

Speaking of news, we have been at work in the 2 years since Encompassed coming up with something new and interesting. We will be talking about this a lot in the next few months, but for now, I just want to share the name and some branding:

Practicum.

In the coming months, we will have a lot more art, music, story, and gameplay to share with you all. We intend to do this in the following way:

On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram 3 times a week with tiny tidbits. We will post teasers on Reddit once a week (the sub-reddits are yet to be discovered). Those teasers will hint at the cool new things that are in our newsletters. You can subscribe to our newsletter (once I set it up.)

So, November’s game has come and gone.  And because I care more about making awesome games than typing about them, I have issues writing things in a timely manner. We finished Re:Volition 21 days ago, and the next game is already nearly finished.  At the end of the post-mortem I will talk a bit about the next game.

But for now, lets talk about the issues with Re:Volition. Re:Volition was kind of a disaster. It had decent mechanics, but they were nothing special, and honestly any platformer could have done more with less.

One of the largest issues with Re:Volition was its Art. Since this is the category of things that I was in charge of, I can take full credit for these issues. I have never animated a character before, and that was the biggest issue. I accounted for the time that it would take to learn how to draw a single character, but not for the time that it took to animate that character. This left so little time for backgrounds and visual interest that the game looked extremely poor. And even after spending nearly the entire month on animation, the character that was unacceptable. We had to make a placeholder that looked passable in the course of about a hour.

Time management is going to be a common theme in this post mortem, as you will see. The nature of trying to release an entire game in 4 weeks is that time is our greatest enemy. And since we are doing this project (Making a game every month for a year) we found ourselves trying to develop at our old pace. This was problematic, for a number or reasons. For example, Steve was still building core systems, including the menus on the last few days of the project. We had no time to do deep level design or nearly any QA testing.

So when it came down to it, a month is a lot shorter than we had previously anticipated.

For our December game, we made changes, not to the scope of the project, but rather to our own workflows. These changes will not solve all of the problems, but they will help us get within striking distance for December’s project.

December’s game will be another platformer, based on the previous system, but rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to tell a story, and evoke a feeling of peace. We will have more on this next week, with a full reveal, but suffice it to say that it has so much potential that we are considering making a full version of it in the coming years.

And I think I should leave you with one more thing, How about a name?

Felidae.

Re:Volition is out now, for free on Itch.io. You can find it here:

RE:Volition by DropEverythingGames

A short circular platformer. Made as part of our game a month challenge.

This is a very short game that we made as a part of our “One game every month” project. It fell a little short of our expectations, but it is a good start.

Next month, we will create a deeper game base on this game’s engine. It will be focused on evoking a specific emotion, and will be slightly longer. We will release more about this next week. Till then, make fun, have life!

So, Encompassed Released everywhere this year. You can get a copy for free just by messaging me at nick@dropeverythinggames.com, or if you want to support us, you can buy it 😉

But that left Steve and I with an interesting question. What now?

For the first few months we started work on a very ambitious project that we code-named Project Sphinx. It is one of the coolest things that we have ever come up with here, but it is also a tough nut to crack, and if we are honest with our selves (And I think that creative works demand a level of honesty) we are not yet skilled enough to create that game in any timely manner. We have shelved Project Sphinx for the time being.

So why am I writing then? To announce the goodies that we will be bringing you over the next 12 months! That is right, goodies plural! Because for the next 12 months, we will be releasing a game every single month! None of these games will be high quality, but each will have a technical skill attached to it that we need to learn in order to create Project Sphinx.

For the month of November, we will release a nifty little game called RE:Volition, in honor of the widely misunderstood Guy Fawkes day.

RE:Volition is a cyberpunk/art deco inspired game about overthrowing an oppressive regime through the use of parkour and explosives! We will give you twice weekly updates about this game as time progresses. For now, just enjoy this graphic:

Oh, and thank you all for your continued support.

Nick & Stevo

We put Encompassed Live today, and in so doing found an issue with the game that makes one level un beatable.

It will be patched out completely by tomorrow, but for now it will stay.

go, Buy, win! and comment when you get back!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/encompassed-vr/id1328006797?mt=8

I have decided to resume analyzing and playing indie games this year. The first one: Gorogoa! a puzzle game about a monster. In the first episode, I dive right in and get familiar with the mechanics.

Ya, so today I got stuck and did some minor editing. I swore I wouldn’t do that for this series, but no one wants to see me talking to myself for 10 minutes while I get unstuck.

That being said, I think I figured out the story on this run, either that or I am projecting a story on to it…

We finished Gorogoa, and it reminded me of a principle of art. That all art carries meaning. We will talk more about meaning in our Gorogoa wrap up on Thursday.