Darkeaten Dev Diary - Dr Strangeblood or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Psalm

Hey! Another month another dev diary, and I got some big stuff to talk about today. The big topic today is my skirmish game project, now called Bleeding Sin. I went from concepts to releasing a full playtest version this month, and I wanna walk through a bit of my production process, and all the stuff I learned along the way.

So Bleeding Sin was initially envisioned as a skirmish game set in Darkeaten where you have to manage your blood and make sure you don't collapse under your own weight. I saw this idea of a game based around a sole mechanic and takes it to it's max, and while I think that idea was fun, I quickly realized this wasn't a very good idea. Getting the blood mechanic to not feel unfair or unfun was kinda a hassle, and I reworked it so many times in an attempt to give it more depth. I probably spent more time on that than anything else in the game, which is crazy to think because now it's just a little piece in a larger game. This is where I learned a valuable lesson, and if you're gonna take anything from this blog post it's this - The outcome doesn't matter, an finished product is always better than an unfinished one. I spent so much time deliberating over this stupid blood mechanic that I rewrote the entire concept of the game 3 times. No joke, I have 3 separate ideas and concept documents that I made over time because I just kept rethinking how I wanted to handle this game. Don't even get me started on the older ideas before the past few months, my google docs folders are a mess. 

To get back on track I've been increasingly getting better and better at the "stop adding stuff, just finish it" mentality. The game doesn't have to have every mechanic that you find fun, just put in the ones that fit together. This mentality applies to art, minis, writing, etc. Your model doesn't need any more edge highlights, just one or two are fine. You don't have to make every armor plate perfectly shaded, you don't have to make every barrel perfectly drilled, you don't have to make every mechanic perfectly fleshed out. After it all, you might find yourself wanting to remove stuff, actually. Which brings me to the next thing I learned while making this, that art is only reached when the cutting room floor reaches it's maximum occupancy.

Did you know that Darkeaten used to be a high fantasy setting with no vampiric influence and a disease of snake like creatures that rose from a pit of black tar called "The Pool"? You do now. I have cut and changed so much stuff in this setting over the 5 years it's existed that I had to look at old documents to even know what my original story was. I did all this without ever thinking about it, really, because it sort of just changed as I got older and my interests changed. So doing something like that in the short term was a lot harder for me. A saying that gets thrown around a lot in making art is "Trust the Process", and while I agree that most stuff doesn't look good until you put the finishing touches on it, it's also important to know when to cut your losses and start over. Some things are mistakes and need to be removed, and some things just don't fit with your new vision for the project. For me it's pretty hard to remove stuff from my work, because I'm always worried that removing it is going to take something away or require more work to rethink things, but as I've learned, if I really think something should be cut, it's probably better to. I had this idea for a team customization feature while making Bleeding Sin called "Afflictions". The basic idea was upgrades you would pay no points for, but would always come with some large downside. The problem soon arose that I couldn't make these afflictions feel unique and I couldn't find many ways to make the downsides interesting outside of just "take more damage" or "move slower". A lot of them just felt like needless extra difficulty for little advantage. But it took me super long to cut the idea because I thought it was cool. I'm happy I removed it, because if I didn't it would just gum up the team creation process way more. Maybe I can use that idea again someday for an rpg or other game, but for now it sits on the cutting room floor.

Here's what Thorian's Old Map looked like, it's very weird looking I know

Now that I've finished the playtest document for the game, now comes the really hard part, testing it. I've played a few test games on my own with a setup made of trash and random stuff around my dorm, but I have yet to test it with people. I plan to pretty soon, but I have yet to set up dates and work with people on that. The hardest part of any project is promoting it, because it's a step that only ends when you get a new thing to promote over it. I've been getting better with telling people about my work and spreading around the good word on it, but these things are hard. Promoting your work without seeming like a shill or self centered jerk is kinda hard, at least to me. I hope that before the next dev diary I have some test games under my belt, I've been working on a painting up little team of Fleshmelders with Sundered blood to play with, and that has been very fun. Ideally, after I finish the first playtests I'll upload some little battle reports onto here with cool pictures and artwork

This is my little rinky dink test game setup

As for other new things I've been working on, I've printed my zine! it's being done with simple printing methods and all cut by hand but it's been a fun learning experience. Lots of hours in the hot cutting room at my school and lots of paper taken from the computer labs of the art building. I've done a total of 10 so far and handed the off to friends. I don't plan on putting them up for sale yet because they're all hand made by me, and I just don't have the time to make and mail orders right now. Maybe some day though, as I'd love a more refined and produced version of them. The learning process of the printing and cutting has been very fun, and I've been learning little tricks to cut them faster. Currently, I'm printing them on a xerox printer as booklets through acrobat, then stapling each of the same page together on each of the edges so they don't slip when I cut them, then cutting it out so it's just the zine, then finally folding and stapling them together with a booklet stapler. Luckily I go to a school where everything's sorta at my fingertips in the art building, so I don't even need to pay for the printing or anything. It's been great really.

Here's what it looks like printed ft. my hand

I have a few other projects in the works, I'm working on some stickers based on the blood types in Bleeding Sin, each with a different design based on the blood type, which I'll hopefully be able to get made and pass them out at UTDFest in May for those who will be going to that. I've been posting the art for those over on my socials, but I only have 2 of the 4 done currently. I'm about halfway done with the 3rd but I have gotten a bit sidetracked with other art so who knows. The final thing I'm working on is new comics! One is a simple little 6 page thing based on the opening line on the zine, the "Blood Must Spill" quote, which will be more a test and smaller project to get me more into layouts and stuff for comics. The other one though is going to be a 4 issue mini series about hunters and pyromancers. That project is in super early development so who knows when that'll be done, but I'll have updates here as it comes out. The actual Darkeaten comic still isn't gone forever but I want to work on other things before going back, still lacking motivation to work on it.

That's all for now, these are normally supposed to be on the 15th of each month but I'm working on punk time this month. I'll be working more on Bleeding Sin and other projects, I've been feeling super motivated to make stuff recently and I hope to keep up this train of work for a while. Lots of fun stuff incoming! Expect posts on my socials and maybe even an additional blog post this month, who knows.