A bit more about combat!
over 6 years ago – Wed, Oct 04, 2017 at 11:01:50 PM

Flynn: Son of Crimson is primarily a melee combat driven action platformer and we take careful measures fine tuning each and every frame of attack to make it feel as juicy and reliable as possible. ‘Game feel’ is our number one priority and we want to give the player a sense of satisfaction from the final blow applied to a huge boss monster to the tiniest tuft of delicate grass being uprooted by one’s self.

Early in development we had the idea of Flynn having several weapons (in addition to the ones that exist here) which included temporary leveling up and a myriad of upgrades that didn’t differ much from each other. After much deliberation however, we decided it was just too much and simplified things much more by having 3 weapons with a couple of upgrades each and have the environments, enemies and bosses force creative ways to use said upgrades.

Upgrades you say?? 

Upgrades! Yes! We don’t want to give everything away but here are a few different ways you can upgrade your arsenal:

As we mentioned before, we stuck with 3 weapons to keep things nice and simple, sword for medium damage and speeds, axe for slower yet heavier hitting and claws for weaker but faster attacks. Once you become familiar with the weapons themselves, you will be creating your own favourite combination of attacks to bish bash bosh your enemies into the ground.

Here’s an example:

Special Attacks (..Who said anything about special attacks??)

Well, as of writing this update, we’re still experimenting with them, they are in the game and you can see them in the trailer but they are still being tweaked. We are fiddling around with the idea of rewarding the player with a chance to perform one of 3 special attacks (depending on the weapon currently equipped) once the special meter is filled. Successful and quick hits on enemies is the key to building up the meter!

The special meter raises a notch each successful hit but is constantly draining slowly, once it reaches the top you have a couple of seconds to perform a special attack, if you miss it, don’t worry, just hit a couple more enemies to raise it again.

We believe this method of rewarding the player in a more temporary way incentivizes not only the use of special attacks (and not just holding onto it until the right moment) but also gives players a reason to dive right into combat without a second thought!

That’s it for this one, but again we can’t thank you enough for helping us with funding the game and it’s development process, you guys rock, cheers!!

 Fan Art!

We've received some lovely fan art from some lovely people recently. Every bit of fan art makes us shriek with joy, thank you! Look at Flynn being a real boy!

Another Kickstarter deserving of love! 

Do you like hats? Well we do! Go take a peek at King of the Hat, a fun looking hat-based multiplayer game! Give em a big ol Flynn hug!

History of Flynn: Son of Crimson
over 6 years ago – Tue, Oct 03, 2017 at 01:12:23 PM

After we released our second mobile title we became eager and craved the step up to larger scaled games for PC/Console and began brainstorming around December 2015. We now had a fresh canvas in all of our minds so where do you start? Well, we all have a love of the retro styled platformers (the likes of Megaman) and began there.

It wasn’t too long after that we had an idea of combining magic and manipulating weapons alongside some form of procedurally generated roguelike style of gameplay, sticking with this idea for a couple of months. In the long run things didn’t turn out too well and ideas were half-baked and messy so we took a different approach.

Our next decision was using melee instead of ranged for the primary form of attacking (still sticking with combining magic) and this felt much better with the way we had planned things out to this point. Keeping with the idea of randomly generated smaller rooms and a more ‘arena’ based game. Still though, we seemed to have a huge lack of actual planning on where we wanted to go with this idea.

I’m sure many of you are wondering by now: “That art style is completely different to what you have now” and yes you’re right, we had a different artist on board back then, the suave Swede Johan Aronson. Whilst we’re on the subject, let’s take a minute to fill you guys in with how and why the art direction changed quite drastically.

Firstly, Johan got offered a job at Mojang as Lead Pixel Designer back in the latter half of 2016 (and we couldn’t be happier for him), unfortunately this meant he had to leave us (For the main part, he still helps out here and there). With this in mind, we used this time to think hard about our art direction and where we wanted to go. This actually lead the 2 designers into sitting down and redesigning/planning the game from the ground up (and here we are!).

The biggest lesson we learned is that it pays dividends to really knuckle down with early planning on a game like this. We then knew and now know everything we need for future development which favoured our decision in simplifying the art style to really focus on gameplay and larger environments, we haven’t looked back since!

The biggest difference after the redesign was the combat juice as we spent a good while tweaking each hit and slam to feel as good as possible rather than it feeling like slapping your foes with a soggy trout.  

It’s taken some big changes and even bigger challenges to overcome but we feel we’re right where we want to be in terms of planning and management with Flynn: SoC and we couldn’t be happier.

A new tier: Design a quest!

Introducing a new top tier to encompass all of the preview rewards! Create a sidequest! Include your secret room and your NPC in this quest to make Flynn fetch a bucket of water, or to do 50 pushups, whatever your heart desires!

On the topic of tiers, we also raised the limit of the NPC tier from 10 to 15!

A fellow Kickstarter campaign to be hugged

This one's about Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark! A lovely looking story-driven tactical RPG, set in a fantasy world with a touch of steampunk. Go give it a look!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/153039232/fell-seal-arbiters-mark-classic-turn-based-tactica

Progression/‘Stage’ Layout (Process)
over 6 years ago – Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 10:32:14 AM

Hey all! Thank you again to everyone for all the support, Flynn just passed the 50% funded mark! We thought you guys might want to get an idea of how the game’s progression will play out in the final version, well lucky for you we also have a bit of an idea too (that’s good news right!?).

With the game itself being a fast-paced melee combat driven adventure (That’s a mouthful!) we wanted to add a sprinkle of exploration and the feeling of the world opening up around you as you progress, so we introduced ‘metroidvania’ elements which do the trick nicely, but that doesn’t mean we’ve confined ourselves to the “rules” of said genre, we take on a slightly more untraditional approach.

We had a good long think/discussion on how we wanted to layout each unique area so we jumped right into our fancy online shared whiteboard (Us living at opposite ends of the globe calls for such magic online tools you know!). With the idea of traversing some kind of large island in mind, we had many ideas on how to take progression, and so the scribbles commenced:

The first step was roughing out how the main areas would branch out from each other. Creating a hub not only helped with this but gave us a great foundation to build upon and a place ingame to do trading and whatnot (something we hadn’t planned at this point yet!)

We briefly took a step back from the first iteration and gave a slightly more linear approach a run through. We found many pros and cons with this idea such as environment changes becoming too drastic and decided to move on with a new idea.

Combining both the nonlinear and linear ideas above, we finally settled on (almost) what we have today with a couple of slight changes not shown here.

Then onto the Map design..

The above designs and colorful rectangles helped a lot to then get an idea on how we wanted the map to correspond to these area in the game. We found some areas wouldn’t work as well as we thought so we jumped on the ever so wonderful MS Paint and sketched out this:

This gave us a much needed view of what the island would look like if it was sliced right down the middle like a knife through a giant birthday cake. As you can see (yet still super early and rough) the above two images aren’t a million miles away in terms of design and placement, you can almost make out where things go, hurray!

We then took this sketch and neatened it out a little, creating a clearer (yet still rough) version of the island:

Finally, our concept artist Jaya Ply took all of the above information along with a sprinkle of magic and abracadabra, here’s the final design of the island:

We’ve learned in the past to really plan things out like this before going ahead and skipping steps as things usually always fall into place nicely. Function followed by form is what we generally stick with and it has worked out well so far.

Hope you guys liked our little design process shown here, if you learned something and/or want us to show more processes like this let us know, Cheers!

A friendly shout-out!

Have a peek at Dark Devotion! A lovely looking indie RPG-influenced roguelike, a fellow game on Kickstarter! 

Stretch Goals!
over 6 years ago – Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 11:37:26 AM

Hey, how would you guys like some extra content, consoles versions and other stuff? Sounds cool right? Well we think it’s time to introduce our stretch goals. We were initially going to wait until we were further into the campaign but as many of you are asking for it (specifically console stuff) we thought we’d drop these today.   

PS4 & Xbox Ports - $50k 

We’d absolutely love the game to be available across an array of platforms, so reaching this goal would be fantastic for both you guys and us. Starting with the more viable options PS4 & Xbox One.

Challenge Mode - $60k  

We feel that Flynn’s abilities and combat mechanics would greatly benefit from a mode in which you, the player, are thrown into an arena style game mode in which you take on waves and hordes of enemies. We feel ‘Boss rush’ and ‘Survival’ alone just wouldn’t cut it so we have combined both of them ideas and thrown in things from the main game such as rewards and purchasing upgrades as you progress through the stages. Endless & Limited (to a single weapon) would be options too! 

Animated intro by Studio Yotta - $75k

Flynn: SoC will feature a rich story and what better way to introduce such a thing than with a beautifully crafted animated intro by the talents of our friends over at Studio Yotta. If you haven’t heard of Studio Yotta before, they have worked with some big names such as SEGA, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and so much more, just check out their site:

 

More to be revealed..

If we manage to creep up to the $75k goal, we’ll be sure to reveal the next couple, we’re confident you’ll love what we have in mind if we do!

Games we want to kiss

Have you seen Indie Pogo? You should see Indie Pogo! Being developed by Lowe Bros. Studios, it's a platform brawler game for 2-4 players about bouncing, ricocheting, and pogoing your friends into oblivion! Just today, they announced Flynn as a cameo in game, just look at that cutie!

Check out their Kickstarter and support - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1642689247/indie-pogo

See you in the next update very soon!

First 24 hours & FAQ
over 6 years ago – Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 08:16:11 PM

Firstly we would like to thank everyone who has supported us so far through pledges and/or sharing our campaign and getting the word out there on social media (or even good old fashioned mouth words to friends/family!). We appreciate the help more than you can imagine as this is our dream and you guys are helping that become a reality, so thank you!

We realize there are a few areas we can touch upon (we will update the main page with them too) that may or may not help give you guys a good idea on the whats, whys and most importantly whens whilst being as transparent as possible.

Where the heckin’ heck is this demo you promised?

Don’t worry, the pre-alpha demo is sitting on the kitchen side cooling down like a hot apple pie that’s just come out of the oven, we will be rolling out the short demo as soon as possible.

When is the game releasing? 

We have a rough estimate of early/mid 2019, but this all depends on how well our Kickstarter campaign goes. If we are successfully funded then the game will for sure be out around that time. We are about 1 year into development and most of our time has been establishing the core gameplay foundations and styles. We have a ton planned in terms of level design, bosses, progression etc. Over the last 12 months we’ve also been carefully designing every nook and cranny of the game, from what ability Flynn acquires from stage 4 to the color of Yombal’s fins.

PS4, Xbox, Linux, Nokia N-Gage?

Okay, that last one might be a joke but we are looking into our possibilities on all platforms and would like Flynn: SoC to be available on as many avenues as possible, of course this takes time, money and patience so hold onto to your butts. Nobody in the team currently has a Linux machine to test/work with so this is hard for us to promise at the moment. As for consoles, we will roll out stretch goals very soon. Trust us, we want it just as much as you guys!

What will you be spending the money on if you get funded? 

What will we spend the funding on? The game you dummy! The purpose of a Kickstarter is of course to help us cross the finish line. We're very confident in the head start we have on the basics in design and development, with a lot of the core features already built and working. A large portion will be going to the art, allowing us to give our artists more consistent hours and maybe even hire extra help. Additionally, the sound is very important to us, so that will be a big investment as well.

Here’s a small diagram:

Is this your first game? 

First bigger scale game, yes. We have 2 other games we released in the wild on mobile though, which can be found here:

Samurai Blitz 
Raccoon Rascals

We also have a couple projects we have worked on in the past that didn’t quite make the cut (we all have them), but we see them as more of a learning process and who knows, we may come back to them in 50 years time.

What engine are you using?

We’re using GM:Studio 2 to knead together the bits and pieces for Flynn and the world around him.

Thanks again for your support so far, you guys are killing it! <3