Full Quiet - A New Adventure Game for the NES & PC

Jumping In Water (A Quick Mock-Up)
over 6 years ago – Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 01:09:13 AM

Last update I mentioned the behind the scenes work we'd be doing for a while. We're hard at work getting our terrains in place so that we can start showing some of the in-game movement. Right now the focus is on the ladders and tree stands since they will be pivotal in the game. We're still using placeholder art for a lot of what we're doing right now so there's nothing fit for visual consumption at this point but we're getting close.

In the meantime we thought we'd share a quick mock up of how we plan to jump in and out of shallow water. In the below gif you can see our hero character walking in shallow water, jumping out and landing back in the water. 

While there's several ways to go about doing this our thoughts are to show the top half of the hero's normal walk animation (the top 16 pixels of height) and replace the legs (the bottom 16 pixels) with what looks like rippling water. This would be simple if he couldn't jump but since we want to allow jumping out of water we need a way to get his legs swapped in without it looking awkward that legs just appear suddenly out of thin air. Keep in mind that we use 8 pixel wide x 16 pixel tall metatiles for our sprites instead of 8x8 tiles. This is pretty standard practice and has some huge benefits, this is one instance where it bites you in the posterior. Had we used 8x8 tiles we could have added the top half of his legs (8 pixels) as he partially emerged from the water and then the bottom half as he fully emerged; then just do the reverse when he enters the water again. 

If you look at the slowed down gif below you can see what we're attempting.

When a jump is initiated a legless torso emerges from the water. To hide the missing legs we momentarily throw in a smaller ripple sprite and two splash sprites to distract the eye until the torso is far enough up out of the water that we can toss the legs in. Then we can just do the opposite when he lands. 

This is just a quick example of the things we do to make the game look better while keeping our overall sprite tile count in check so that we can commit more resources to detailed backgrounds and have a bunch of different sprites in the game. The real savings comes when we reuse the splash and ripple sprites for other things in the water. And if you end up knee-deep in muck in the bogs or swamp you'll see the same trick but with green or brown splashes/ripples instead of blue; another reuse of the same tiles. It can't be stressed enough, if you want to have a lot of detail, game mechanics and sprites in your NES game you gotta be super efficient with your tile usage! 

One of the things we love most is when we play our favorite NES games now we can't help but see how these sorts of things were done back in the day :)

Surveys & Lookout Points
over 6 years ago – Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 10:55:25 PM

Surveys - Surveys are being sent today!! Please fill yours out ASAP, especially if you want a Limited Edition cartridge. REMINDER: Kickstarter backers can just upgrade to the LE cart for $10.00, you don't have to buy a separate copy. As we stated before, there's a limit of one LE cart per person. If you want an LE and a standard edition cart you can upgrade to the LE and add-on another standard cart. We will be adding more goodies to the backerkit as they are developed. As always, Kickstarter backers get first dibs on anything we offer through Backerkit and your orders will be the first fulfilled when the game is released. 

If you know anyone who may be interested in supporting us please send them this Backerkit link: https://fullquiet.backerkit.com

Lookout Points - Below is an example of one of the lookout points in the game. When you come to one of these lookouts you will be treated to a view of the land. These will serve several purposes, e.g. to help orient yourself as you traverse through the different areas of the game, to give a quick survey of the lands ahead and as vantage points to monitor activities in distant locations. You may even get lucky and see something you want to snipe ;) 

We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and again we thank you for your support!! 

Backerkit "Smoke Test" Sent
over 6 years ago – Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 05:19:45 PM

Quick update to let everyone know that we finally got everything properly flown in and set up with Backerkit. We just learned that for campaigns with over 500 backers they require a "smoke test" to verify that the surveys are working properly. A randomly selected 5% of backers should have just received their survey, please fill those out ASAP so that we can send them to the remaining 95% of backers. As soon as we get enough surveys back to confirm the accuracy of everything we can send them out to everyone else.

Thanks again for your patience while we navigated this!  

Keep the Ideas Coming
over 6 years ago – Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 09:03:44 AM

Just posting a quick update here to show a few of the things we've been working on and to thank everyone for the ideas you keep sending to us. It's very cool to hear about all the things you'd like to see/do in this game. We also really love some of the controller ideas that backers have sent us and while most of them are beyond the scope of this project we are taking them into consideration for the future. 

For the next few months the majority of the work we do will continue to be behind the scenes stuff, in particular figuring out how to handle all the terrain types that we want to include which includes things like water, ropes and ladders. We're also mapping out some of the puzzles and working them into the backstory. These are also the kind of things that we can't post on here because we'd be spoiling elements of the game. It's going to be a fine line between keeping backers informed and not spoiling things. With that in mind here's two sections of the game that we're currently working on. As you can see in the swamp area we are attempting to have multiple paths which is another element of the terrains that we have to incorporate. 

The other thing we'd like to address in this update is the Steam keys for the Digital Collection backers. We're not quite ready to launch the Backerkit but if you do not want to wait for the surveys to go out and you want your keys for Haunted: Halloween '85 and '86 now just shoot us a private message and we'll send them to you. 

And in case you missed it, there's another new NES game live on Kickstarter! It's always awesome to see more new NES games being made and new homebrewers joining this great community. Please check it out here and show Ryan some love: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1075045484/tower-defense-1990-a-new-nes-game

Silver Cartridge LEs, Backerkit and Surveys
over 6 years ago – Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 08:54:21 PM

First, thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth at PRGE this past weekend!! It was really awesome to chat with all of you and to hear your thoughts and ideas about Full Quiet.

LEs - The silver shell sample is in and boy howdy does it look nice and shiny!! We're still working on the label design but the above images should give you an idea of where we're headed. We plan to get a nice metallic label to match the metallic silver shell. We'll post finalized artwork later once we have the LE box designed. These will be limited to one per person, just choose the $10 upgrade when you fill out your survey.

Backerkit - Due to the all-positive feedback we got we've decided to move forward with Backerkit. Since we're still very early in development we will be posting new things to Backerkit as we design them, e.g. T-Shirts, Posters, Stickers, Specialized Pancake Eating Utensils, etc...
You can add these items to your initial pledge through backerkit very soon, we should be all set up and approved next week. As we stated earlier, we will ship all Kickstarter backer rewards and add-ons first before we move on to other orders. 

Surveys - These will be done through Backerkit and should go out next week once we're set up. Please fill them out ASAP so we can get an idea of how many of you want LEs. Throughout the dev process please be on the lookout for updates about new items that we make available through backerkit. 

We'll make another update to announce when the Backerkit is live. Thanks for your patience while we get all this figured out!!