The Beginning

 

…and with a two-tone background, a four color sprite, and a little bit of code, the process of creating Tyre has been started.

The screenshot above is probably not the best way to start off this devblog, but it was the first ‘playable’ version of Tyre, and thus deserves it’s position.

However, before the blog gets into full swing, it’s probably best to introduce what exactly it’ll be talking about. In general, this blog will cover everything related to the game development work of Hedgehog Hugs Studios. Since Hedgehog Hugs is made up of precisely one lonely Hedgehog named Ian Sigsworth (AKA Sigz), he’ll be doing all the talking, at least for now… And since Ian is me, I guess that means I’ll be doing the talking.

…

Anyways, now that our pronouns are in agreement, it’s on to Tyre, my current project. Tyre will be a 2-D paranormal mystery game where the player hunts down dangerous supernatural people/creatures/entities and destroys them. The keyword in that last sentence is mystery. While there will be action, the focus of the game will be on exploration and investigation: gathering evidence, researching whatever ungodly thing it is you’re hunting, and figuring out exactly how you can kill it. Following along with this, the burden will really be on the player to figure things out.

Another major focus is on world and lore building – I want the world of Tyre to be interesting and original. And while that certainly means making it look nice, the real focus will be on creating around the supernatural element of the world that is interesting and original. While the player will most likely see some of the ‘standard’ paranormal things in some context – ghosts, vampires, werewolves, etc, there will be many more original enemies for the player to face. This is a mystery game after all – the player should be asking themselves “what the fuck happened here?” when they see a dead body, not “oh it’s a vampire, let me grab some wood and garlic”.

But most importantly for the game, I want these two focuses – on mystery/exploration gameplay with a strong lore – to work together. This means that the game is never going to tell you what it is the player is facing or how they’re supposed to kill it, no matter how many clues they collect – it’s on them to research into the game’s lore to find out. Of course, the player will have a lot of tools to help them, the most important being their character’s journal/encyclopedia. You see, the player’s character (we’ll get more into him/her later on) has killed a lot of supernatural beings in his time. I mean, a lot. We’re talking Pol Pot and Stalin combined-levels of  supernatural genocide here (okay maybe not that much but you get the point).

Over this time he’s collected and maintained a massive journal containing invaluable information on all manner of supernatural things, which will serve as the player’s most useful resource in putting the evidence together. Find some weird glowing gel on the ground? Search through the journal and see what kind of things leave glowing gel. The body was dismembered and reassembled backwards? Better see what kind of horrors out there mutilate bodies. Of course, this will require some reading on the part of the player (don’t worry, not too much unless you want to), which I’m sure turns some people off, but I’m okay with that. By the end of the game, I want the player to actually know something about the game world, and feel like they no longer have to consult the book blind – they’ll find a clue,  it’ll ring a bell “hey, I remember reading something about that!”, and then they consult their journal. And that would be perfect, because that’s exactly what the character would be going through. To me that is what immersion is really about, and it’s part of what I hope to achieve with Tyre.

 

More incoming soon,

Sigz