Post-Mortem: A Fading Melody

With my second fit-for-consumption game released, I thought I would do a Gamasutra-style post-mortem for anybody who is interested in the development process that went into A Fading Melody.  So if you’re interested in learning a little bit more about the development of this indie platformer, read on!

The Inspiration

A lot of people have pointed out the similarities, and yes, I will admit now, I did enjoy Braid.  While there are some comparisons that could be drawn between the two games (namely: artistic indie platformer with a story), A Fading Melody is not a clone.  I enjoyed Braid’s cerebral nature, but I don’t play puzzle games much, and I didn’t want to make a puzzler.  I didn’t even want exploration, this time around; one of the other games I played recently was Mirror’s Edge, which I felt was a great game when you were flowing and moving nonstop from place to place.  But when you had to slow down and figure out where to go next, I thought the game suffered, becoming more frustrating and less exhilarating to play.

So I wanted flow like the best parts of Mirror’s Edge and the artistic feel of Braid, but just as importantly, it needed to be my game.  I had to bring something of myself into the thing.

The one other thing I wanted was a story.  But I didn’t want Braid’s much-obfuscated, pretentious story (no offense intended to Jonathan Blow).  I wanted something you could immediately grasp, just like the gameplay.  The story wouldn’t be about figuring out what the story meant, it would be about figuring out what was going to happen next.

So I settled on telling the story of a coma patient, with the game set within her dreams, and decided that the story would focus on revealing how she got into the coma.  This opened up some interesting gameplay possibilities, which I will discuss in a little bit.

The Art

Something I knew would be very important for A Fading Melody from the beginning would be to have a distinctive art style.  One of the problems Core Fighter suffered from was that its art, while adequate to the task, was generic and unmemorable.  My next game would need something more–something that would draw the player in upon seeing a screenshot or video, or just popping into the demo.

I’d seen a few games working with silhouettes as sprites recently, like Patapon, and an indie adventure game adaptation of Les Miserables.  I experimented with it in my own spare time, and I knew that I really liked the style.

I also knew that I wasn’t a very good character artist, and that I didn’t have the funds to hire one; I can draw people, mind you, I just can’t animate people.  This was another thing that made silhouettes attractive to me.  Silhouettes aren’t necessarily much easier to animate, but I had a trick up my sleeve: Daz Studio. Daz offers lots of 3D models for cheap prices, and their software makes them relatively easy to pose and animate.  So I could go from this:

To this, without much trouble:

I extended that design into the background.  It would have a landscape and it would have trees, but both would be silhouettes just like the characters.  The trees I found as open license texture masks on TurboSquid, which I modified to my liking, saving me a lot of time.

While I had to do work on every art resource in the game, the only major part of the game art I had to make entirely from scratch was the tileset.  This I simply painted digitally–it took a lot of revisions to get right, but the end result, I think, was worth it.

There were two touches that I added toward the end of production: One, the game would start in black and white, and color would be gradually introduced as you progressed through the levels.  I thought this served as a nice (if slightly heavy-handed) visual metaphor for Melody’s gradual awakening from her coma.  I also added weather effects (rain and snow) and messed with the background a little bit to make it look like the sky was brightening toward the end of the game.  The end result is a boon to visual progression and variety, and a reinforcement of the game’s theme and storyline.

The Gameplay

I mentioned earlier in this article that I really wanted to make A Fading Melody my own, despite its obvious influences from games like Braid.  One of the ways I wanted to do this was to place a strong focus on forward movement.  The game would thrive on the simplicity of pushing the player forward through the level.

The first way I thought of doing this, and the idea that eventually coalesced into A Fading Melody, was to make the player race not just against time, but against something physically coming up behind them.  I thought maybe it would be somebody chasing them, or maybe it would simply be a void inexorably threatening to engulf them.  I dismissed the former pretty quickly, for two reasons: One, programming the AI would be a serious (and unnecessary) pain.  Two, it would make the urgency perhaps a little more competitive than I desired.  I didn’t want an adversary, I wanted inevitability itself.  Mortality.

That left the inexorable void.  I first envisioned it as a wall of darkness coming up behind the player, but in early prototypes, this just didn’t pan out.  Either the player would get too far ahead of the darkness, or the darkness would come up too quickly and would be frustrating.  I then tried making the darkness only get pushed back to the edge of the screen, but never farther than that; this was better, but it still didn’t feel right.  I wanted the level design to be open to both leftward and rightward movement, for one thing.  For another thing, it was just too difficult to balance the movement speed of the encroaching darkness against players of different skill levels.

Then I came up with the idea of gradually darkening the entire screen, like a fade-out in a movie.  I thought this would fit well with the story of the game–Melody would slip farther and farther into a coma, and to save her, you’d have to race against the darkness.  At first I tied it to movement–if you were moving left or standing still, the screen would grow darker.  If you moved right, it would brighten.  This was much better than before, but it still wasn’t quite right.  It felt like its only purpose was to punish players for not playing the right way–there was no reward involved.

Eventually, I hit upon the idea that made its way into the final game: The screen would always be fading, no matter what, but jumping on monsters would brighten it.  Suddenly, this added a risk versus reward element into the gameplay.  You had to keep moving forward, because if you stopped, you would eventually die.  You’d need to defeat monsters to live.  But defeating monsters would be a reward.  I added a bright bell sound when you jumped on a monster (sounds are a big part of game rewards, I believe), and caused the monsters to explode into clouds when defeated.  The final touch was that the clouds would then be sucked up into Melody’s head.  Fuel for her dreams.

In coming up with the level design for the game, I relied heavily on platformer tropes dating back to games like Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Country.  But make no mistake–this was to be a difficult niche platformer.  There would be many jumps, and most of the game would take place on platforms floating over the void, with nothing to save you should you fall.  While the player would have unlimited lives, one mistake would result in death.  I made it so difficult, in fact, that I wound up having to tone down the first two levels significantly to provide a better learning curve for players.  I also had to add two checkpoints per level, something I was initially resistant to.  In the end, though, it improved the game, and I’m glad I did it.

One thing I don’t like is unnecessary repetition.  It’s just filler.  Right up until the last two stages (which would be the most brutal and unforgiving), I wanted to constantly be adding new things for the player to deal with.  I introduced new elements in each of the previous levels, and tried to vary the level design as much as possible, so it never felt like you were playing through the same segment twice.

This probably made A Fading Melody feel a little bit short, but I think it improved the experience while it lasted.

The final thing I wanted to do was to remove menu screens from the play experience.  Everything would be gameplay, from start to finish.  In this, I think I succeeded.  Even the upsell at the end of the trial is a game level.

What Worked

• An interesting visual design that stands out a little bit from the Community Games crowd.
• Gameplay from start to finish–total immersion in the dream world of the game.
• A simple, clear story to reward the player from level to level.
• Varied, challenging level design which rewards platformer pros and doesn’t get boring.
• Classical piano tracks written by 19th-century composer Robert Schumann.
• A simple “fading screen” game mechanic to both reward the player and drive him/her forward.

What Didn’t

• Animations, especially for the player character, that wound up being a little awkward.
• Not quite enough visual variety–too much grey, blue, and green, and not much else.
• Difficult-to-learn controls.  Holding X to sprint while jumping, was, in retrospect, an unnecessary complication for too many players.
• Not enough depth or length.  Both the story and the gameplay could have been more fleshed-out.
• Some minor collision problems that didn’t get fixed in playtesting.

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