Okay, now that I’ve embedded Don’t Stop Believin’ in your heads, let’s talk about streetlights. And lights in general.

The September Patreon beta update is a big one — literally big, as in inflating the game by 100 megs. But for good reason! I finally sat down and did a huge overhaul to nearly every single background in the game, to add lighting effects and other subtle animation cues. Little things that bring the otherwise static images to life.

Today, let’s go over three scenes, and how they’ll be different under the new animation. First, we’ll look at the Funplex.

The Funplex has three main effects going on. The first, and most commonly used across all the revamped backgrounds, are glowing elements glowing brighter than before, with the extra glow fading in and out softly. It’s almost impossible to see unless you’re looking for it, but adds some life to the scene. next, the prize game at the bottom left has a shifting color scheme, to reflect the lights inside the game changing colors. Finally, there’s a simple animation of the UFO Catcher crane lowering and raising.

Next let’s go to Flotsam Beach, home of the Obligatory Beach Episode Where Everybody Wears Sexy Swimsuits.

The streetlights (in the niiiiiiiight) pulse, in a bit more obvious a fashion as this is an old Mid-Atlantic beach town under disrepair. Similarly, some of the tube lights in the arcade will flicker, showing the double tube bulbs before turning back on full strength. I considered a cloud animation, since the clouds animate during the daytime scene, but figured the lighting was more important.

Finally, let’s look at a scene from later in the game, which I won’t spoil beyond showing you this vague image…

Lots of stuff going on here — glitched out game screens, pulsating neon lights, error codes, and more. It’s a flashier scene, to be sure.

“But wait!” you might say, as I’m pouring the gasoline and getting the match ready. “What if I don’t want to be distracted by fancy background effects? Also, put down the matches, please.”

Not a problem! Here’s our revamped Preferences screen.

Not only did we improve the ‘Style’ option to show you what each of our three UI styles looks like, but we added an option for the background animations. It defaults to Slow, which should provide ambiance without being distracting — but you can turn them Off completely, or even make them Faster if you want something flashy and fun! It’s up to you.

As we finish up the story and start polishing up the game, we’ll have more new features to show you — including a pretty big one which we’re not ready to talk about yet. Let’s just say there’s a reason I had to crop down the Preferences screen…

As I was preparing last week’s blog post, which refers to The Pillars of Arcade Spirits, it brought to mind a topic I’ve been pondering lately — signposting success and failure.

One of the pillars of our game is clear signposting. We want you to make an informed choice. Maybe we won’t tell you EVERYTHING that lurks behind an option, but you should have a good sense about what will happen if you pick it. You’ll increase your Gutsey, Naomi will like you, you’ll pick one thing over another, etc. It’s never a vague mystery which then punishes you for not knowing you fell into a trap.

I liken it to LucasArts adventure games, versus Sierra On-Line. (90s kids will know this.) In Sierra games, you’d die constantly just for trying different things. The default method the game had of teaching you “No, that’s not the right way” is to kill you and force you to reload a save. But LucasArts did away with that — if you mess up, things simply don’t work, and you can keep trying until they do. It doesn’t punish you for experimenting.

I want Arcade Spirits to do the same thing — to have very, very few legitimately punishing choices, to allow you to experiment or run wild, and have the leeway to make a few mistakes without ruining everything.

But how do I signpost that…? How do I tell the player, “Hey, don’t fret so much about what you pick, you literally can’t fail this.”

For example, in our demo, there’s a point where QueenBee says “I hate seeing people get yelled at” and then looks sad. I have literally never seen anyone pick the option of telling her “Don’t you yell at people all the time?” which is a shame, because it’s got a funny response. They’re too scared of saying the wrong thing and ruining their chances with QueenBee, or think that you have to default to the nicest response because other games punish you for being even slightly jerky. As a result they get a fairly toss-off answer from QueenBee instead of a more interesting one.

Even if you do miss a “point” with QueenBee, the game is scored in such a way that when it comes time to choose your romance path, it’s VERY tolerant of failure. As long as you chose to spend time with a person and generally said things they agreed with, a few fumbles won’t wreck everything.

But again… how do I signpost that? How do I reassure the player that they can explore the game and not feel they have to take the safest, most cautious choices they possibly can out of fear of everything exploding as punishment? How do I do it without breaking fourth wall and telling them to just have fun with it and not worry?

Not sure. Not sure at all. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know. I’d love to hear your opinions on this. Thanks!

Ever since the PQube announcement, we’ve had new folks tuning in to see what Arcade Spirits is all about. Hello, new folks! We’ve got a blog (which we mirror to Tumblr and Steam), we’ve got a Twitter for announcements and arcade culture tidbits, a Discord to connect with other arcade fans, a Patreon if you want to support us on a deeper level, and finally a website. That’s a lot of stuff! Just pick your favorite way to follow us, and enjoy.

But also, I’d like to direct you to an old blog post you probably missed, which describes the pillars of our game, and why we made the choices we did when designing the game. To summarize so you don’t HAVE to go digging through the blog if you don’t wanna, we’ve got four guiding principles in telling our lighthearted tale of love and quarters…

1. We’re inclusive by not restricting player choice of romance. Be who you want to be, romance who you want to romance (or nobody at all). We’re LGBTQ+ friendly without specifically being a game about LGBQT+. Notably: coding in restrictions based on your preferred pronoun takes effort and we’re too lazy for that. But it’s laziness in favor of player choice, so hey!
2. We want you to be able to choose how to react to things around you. Player agency is sometimes missing in visual novels, so we want as much as we can pour in. We focus heavily on roleplaying and self-expression, letting you react as you like.
3. There should be clear signposts for easy decision-making. We don’t like blind choices, or needing to play with a FAQ open on your second monitor. We’re going to be relatively clear what each choice is going to mean for you — who you’ll spend time with and how they’ll react. You have some leeway, too, so you don’t have to scoop up EVERY point to get the ending you want.
4. One tale, with your own personal path chosen from beginning to end. We’ll say up front this isn’t about massively branching paths and multiple distinct endings. It’s about a personal experience that’s never exactly the same as any other player’s, thanks to the choices you make along the way and who you decide to be.

We’re aiming to deliver one heck of a tale for you, a story that you participate in rather than passively read, a story you can insert yourself into or play whatever other personality type you like. Play things straight, romance or don’t, get wild, be snarky, do as you want. And we hope you enjoy that story.

…

Okay! That’s our introduction out of the way. Let’s talk this week’s actual (slightly depressing) topic, based on Recent Topical News — specifically Nintendo squishing several ROM and emulation sites with legal papers. Pirated retro games are no longer quite so easy to find, thanks to their actions.

In Arcade Spirits we’ve added a mini-documentary hosted by Naomi which is all about building your own emulation cabinet. It’s pretty detailed on the hardware and software you’ll need, but one thing we skim over is obtaining ROMs — because let’s be totally honest here, Nintendo and their ilk have every legal right to say “Hey, uh, please stop giving away our games for free, okay?” You just can’t condone that sort of thing, not if you work in the game industry like I do. There’s no ethical leg to stand on.

But unfortunately, this also poses a serious problem for video game preservation efforts. Many of these games are a tangled mess of copyright holders, many of which are out of business or were sold again and again, to the point where it’s unclear WHO owns the copyright on a game anymore. Therefore, there is no legal way to play some of these games short of tracking down original arcade hardware and spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on it — and if that hardware is just flat out gone, cabinets junked and sitting in landfills, a game can be lost forever. Look at the movie industry, where the majority of films from the dawn of cinema in the 30s are simply gone, because nobody thought to preserve them.

Emulation and abandonware archives were one way to keep those dimly lit and flickering candles alive. Legal? No, but given the copyright holders cannot — or in many cases, will not — provide a legal means of obtaining the game, not many options remain. Even games which aren’t exactly in danger of vanishing can be withheld… Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a good recent example. It never had a physical release, only digital downloads, and as licenses expired it was pulled from digital storefronts. You literally cannot legally obtain this game anymore and likely never will be able to again, and because it was loaded on DRM-locked modern game consoles, any act of preservation runs afoul of the DMCA.

So… what to do? There’s really not a good solution in the hands of gamers. And again, I can’t and won’t condone piracy. It’s up to the companies involved to be willing to loosen their grip on these games, and many refuse to budge. As noted, they’re even actively fighting websites that preserve games. And thus, an impasse.

Hopefully we as an industry will find a way past this issue, to make these classic games available conveniently and without legal problems. Either that, or as fans of arcade classics, we’ll have to mourn the passing of more and more great games.

Welcome to the Arcade Spirits developer blog. Each week I post an in-depth look at some aspect of the game, or of arcade culture in general. Today, let’s talk about one of the slightly more obscure influences behind Arcade Spirits — the classic 1980s workplace sitcom.

As a kid, I grew up enmeshed in the world of the 80s / early 90s sitcom. Night Court, Cheers, Wings, things like that. “Must See TV.” I wasn’t really that interested in the standard family-based ones, though — no Steve Urkel for me. I like workplace sitcoms. There’s two key aspects to these, a sense of place, and a sense of belonging.

The place is obvious: wherever everybody works. An office, a bar, a courtroom, an airport, a diner, something like that. The locale is the same every week, and you get a feel for the flow of rooms and hallways, the background details baked in which make it feel unique and lived-in. Sometimes they’re populated by extras moving around in the background, going about their lives… customers, usually. It feels like a living, breathing location and not just a sterile living room or something. This is where you come back to when you want to be somewhere familiar. But it’s not a home, some generic suburban house; it’s got a flow and a purpose directed towards whatever the business is.

When you’re there, you belong there. You’re family, without actually being family. The television family consists of the friends who you’re close to, the ones you’re emotionally tied to, working arm in arm towards a common goal or just choosing to spend time together. There’s no typical drama from being stuck alongside a parent or sibling you hate because these are the people you’ve selected to be your family, rather than a coincidence of birth. (Shows where the family hates each other 90% of the time and all the drama arises from that are pretty much the opposite of what I want.)

I wanted those two things for Arcade Spirits — a sense of place, and a sense of belonging. The Funplex becomes familiar to you, and your character grows to consider it something of a home. The staff and the regulars are more than just co-workers and customers, they’re your friends, your family. Even the ones you aren’t actively trying to romance are close companions, willing to help you and you them. There are conflicts along the way, bumps in the road, but you work through them because keeping the family together and keeping the home intact is important.

The story is even divided up like television episodes, with each contained story being its own “Level” of the game. Unlike an 80s sitcom, though, they feed into each other serially, gradually developing character arcs and plots rather than being standalone piles of gags.

Overall, I want the world of Arcade Spirits to be something you want to come back to not just to laser-focus in on your romantic target and woo them, but to be because it’s a place you want to live in for a time. Familiar, friendly, warm, and inviting. And when the credits finally do roll, I want that time looked back on fondly. I hope I can provide the same feeling I had watching these sitcoms to you as a gamer.

Hey, gang! So by now you’ve probably seen the butt-kickingly amazing trailer and the shiny new Steam page out now which give all the details, but I wanted to pull our long-time supporters in for a chat to discuss our recent announcement and what it means for the game you all love.

On Twitter I’ve been doing a goofy series of countdown images, with “announcement soon” encoded in a Polybius square cipher because I am a gigantic nerd. It’s all been counting down to this — announcing a deal we’ve been working a long time on, getting Arcade Spirits published by a super awesome game publisher who will publish it in a super awesome way.

PQube are a London-based company who have published visual novels like Steins Gate, and community-powered fighting games like BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle. When we approached them about Arcade Spirits, no joke, they were 100% enthusiastic from day one and completely on board with what we were trying to accomplish. It’s been smooth sailing working with them since they really understand Arcade Spirits, and have plenty of experience with our sort of game.

Let’s go over a few common questions I know we’re gonna get asked — but if you have any further queries, just let me know in the comments below.

“What advantages does PQube offer you?”

Two major things — great marketing and additional game features.

We love making games, but we don’t have the kind of gigantic atomic-powered bullhorn you need to be heard above the crowd of other indie games and draw the audience you know would love your game if only they knew it existed. (That’s a ridiculously convoluted sentence, but you get the idea, hopefully.) PQube has that bullhorn, and are ready and willing to blow it to get the word out far and wide.

As for features, there’s a feature or three that fans have been asking us for from day one. I don’t like encouraging speculation but we’re not quite ready to announce anything yet. Trust me, we’ll let you know once we’ve got everything locked down.

“How does the Patreon fit into all this?”

You guys kicking in hard-earned bucks are the best — you’ve helped us guide the story to where it needs to be, find bugs, and more. But even before this deal was made, Patreon only contributed about 10-20% of our total funding. While we’re still majority self-funded, PQube is going to be able to help us push that extra distance and make this more than we could’ve hoped it’d be. So basically everything helps, all of it, and thank you for that!

“Are any of your previously announced plans changing?”

Not really! Everything’s ticking along like clockwork. $25+ backers on Patreon will still be getting a free copy, we’re still going to end up releasing on itch.io (and other platforms) and it’ll still be the game you love. We aren’t surrendering creative control or the IP or anything like that. This is entirely upside with nothing sacrificed to make it happen.

“What can we expect in the months ahead from PQube?”

For starters, we’re on Steam now! Plz wishlist and follow us. PQube’s been very helpful in arranging this! If you’ve been holding off on playing the demo, now you can play it with the push of a button. Please follow the game there and add it to your wishlists, it helps us a lot!

If you’re in Europe, you’ll be seeing them all over the place! They’re at Gamescom right now, getting out the good word of Arcade Spirits. And stateside they’ll be helping us open the right doors to bring our game to conventions in a big way. We’ve got a ton planned, and I’ll be sure to signal-boost their efforts, so keep a look out!

“When is Arcade Spirits being released?”

Current plan is Q1 2019, date and price point unannounced. So, nothing new there, that’s always been the case. Can’t give you specifics yet, but we’ll have specifics later down the line, don’t worry.

“Why doesn’t Gavin exist IRL and why isn’t he my husbando?”

THIS PRESS CONFERENCE IS OVER *kicks over podium* *jumps on motorbike and peels out*

—

http://www.arcadespirits.com / https://twitter.com/ArcadeSpiritsVN
PQube Media Contact: pr@pqube.co.uk
FFG Contact: stefangagne@gmail.com

At the request of Dauber in our Discord (we have a Discord, by the way!) let’s take a look at Hamza, a secondary character who appears here and there throughout the game.

Hamza is introduced in Level 02, where a private collection of arcade games owned by former 80s pop star Donna Michaels is being auctioned off. Since Arcade Spirits was designed to delve into various aspects of the arcade community, this chapter represents the “arcade raid,” where an abandoned trove of games is located and divvied up among collectors. Hamza acts as master of ceremonies.

His original concept was that of a jet-setting urban explorer, someone who’d be more of a Lara Croft of the arcade world, tracking down rare finds and sharing them with his friends. But as the writing went forward, I found his voice as something far more bombastic and ceremonial — more like Chairman Kaga for the Iron Chef series, someone larger than life and grandiose.

Befitting his status as self-made arcade royalty, we wanted his costume to be lavish and consist of a robe or cloak. Several designs were considered before we settled on his final one, a mixture of elegant detail work and simple broad shapes. He needed to be wide in his stance and clothing, large and in charge, without being too gaudy. (We’re saving total jewel-encrusted opulence for a later character.)

Writing Hamza was so much fun that he had to pop up in later chapters, so don’t think you’re done with this melodramatic goofball after Level 02 is complete. He turns up in unexpected places, invited or not — such is the iron will of Hamza!

Fist of Discomfort. Named such because it feels like a fun bad translation from Japanese. Also I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy. Let’s talk FoD today.

FoD is the ‘game within a game,’ a fictional eSports focused game within the world of Arcade Spirits. Since much of our lore revolves around FoD competitions, including possibly the story of a sequel, we wanted it to be easily recognizable and understandable. (Not QUITE sure if we got there but hey, if we do base a sequel on this we can rejigger things.)

Here’s the amazing pixel art by Justin Baldwin of Sleep Ninja Games, and what it’s meant to represent.

FoD is a combination of three games:

• The side-scrolling brawler genre (Final Fight, Double Dragon, TMNT)
• The fighting game genre (Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat)
• And the MOBA genre (League of Legends, DOTA2, SMITE)

MOBAs are played from a top down perspective, and have you fighting your way through NPC baddies and player-controlled baddies down three different “lanes.” At the end of the lanes are the enemy base, which you must destroy to win the game. Beating up NPCs gets you money, money gets you consumable items.

Fist of Discomfort is a two-lane MOBA, not a three-lane, because instead of team play it’s one-on-one. You can see the MOBA genre represented in the lower left corner with your current item stock (throwing stars, a scroll, throwing knives) and the lower right corner with the minimap that shows the current position of enemies. Heck, we even have the “enemy base” in the form of the wise sensei standing there waiting to fight you.

Actual fighting is done through a hybrid of brawler action and fighting game inputs. It’s similar to Capcom’s late stage brawlers like Dungeons & Dragons, where you have special moves similar to Street Fighter despite fighting waves of mooks and minions. Keeps the action light and arcadey despite being partly a strategy game.

Of course, this is all a fictional game design document, to provide what should resemble a fictional hybrid of modern eSports and classic arcade action. Fist of Discomfort does not actually exist.

But man, I kinda wish it did. Don’t you?

At the request of one of our Patrons, today we’re going to talk about the process through which we develop our characters! If you’ve got a subject you’d like us to cover in the developer blog, Patron or not, just let us know.

Let’s talk about how we develop our character art, step by step. We’ll use Naomi as our working example.

It begins with the “Inspiration” step. I search various art databases to find a character that mostly matches what I have in my mind. I knew I wanted a cute girl dressed for working in an arcade as an operator, and thankfully, I found a near-perfect match. Obviously too young, and the sailor uniform wasn’t what I was looking for, but it had the right FEEL and that’s what matters.

One design document later, and we’ve got our notes for the artist to draw from. If there’s a specific costume detail or physical attribute we need highlighted, we’ll include it here. In Naomi’s specific case we’d discussed that already in a messenger chat, so I didn’t include it here, but all I’d specified was that she needed an apron similar to this one with tools, and a skirt.

Our artist, the amazing Molly Nemecek, came back with a variety of sketches — different hairstyles and faces, different outfit variations, so we could mix and match the details that best fit our ideal Naomi!

Ultimately we decided to remove the D-pads and other console game references, since Naomi is wholly focused on arcade titles. Otherwise, this was right on the money, and the main outfit variant fit perfectly. For hair we decided the bottom middle worked best, since it was both messy (since she doesn’t care much about her appearance) and pulled back (to keep from messing with her work when leaning over a circuit board). We added the nametag from the variant outfits, which felt appropriate for her work attire.

With the specifics decided, Molly created a full final sketch. With a thumbs up on that, a flat color version was produced, to make sure it looked just right. Naomi’s primary color would be green, we’d decided, green like printed circuit boards — and matching the green text she used in-game. We want each of our core seven cast members to have a unique text color, which is represented in their artwork.

(All of the core cast had full-body art, even though in-game they only appear from the thighs up. This way we could use them on merchandise and signage at conventions and such.)
The final step was to animate Naomi, adding facial expressions, arm poses, and alternate art versions such as swimwear and casual clothes. Buuuut, to see that, you’ll have to play the game!

Overall, we value collaboration. We like to let artists play around, come up with variations on an idea. Often we get surprises that way which end up making it into the final art. For instance, we hadn’t specified a nametag; Molly came up with that on her own. While Naomi was largely defined going in, other characters we had few ideas on, such as Teo. Molly designed his 90s-esque dance outfit, based only on ‘some sort of hot dance clothing.’

By moving from inspiration to sketch options to final sketch to coloring, we refine the character, little by little. In the end, we get a wonderful piece of art that fully represents the character.

Hope you enjoyed this peek into the process. Let us know if you’d like any other tales of game development!

We’ve had some picture-y updates lately. Let’s try a word-y update today.

I have a tendency to think in trilogies. Anyone who’s been following my novel-writing career (normal-type novels, not visual novels) knows that. What starts as a one-off project soon escalates into a trilogy, or a quadrilogy, or… whatever the hell Anachronauts ended up being. I think the only books I’ve written which were proper one-and-ones were my earliest ones, Unreal Estate and Sailor Nothing.

(Those links go to free online versions of these books, sooo, if you’re waiting for Arcade Spirits to be released and need something to do… go for it. I also trilogy’d it up with City of Angles and Floating Point more recently. Plug plug plug.)

So obviously, I’ve pondered — what would a trilogy of Arcade Spirits look like, if this game is successful enough to merit another dip in the pool…?

Most of my trilogies center on escalating threats — they start small, with local problems to deal with, then scale up to national, then international or pandimensional. But I think AS is less about threats and more about communities, cultures, and aspects of arcade life. And I’ve already given serious thought to what games two and three might be like.

Each game would have a new protagonist and mostly a new cast of characters, but Iris would be thread that links them all together. You’d have an Iris in each one, since she’s tied to our game mechanics (the identity identifier system). Characters may guest star in future games, of course, and I can remember your decisions between games.

The first game, the one you’re all waiting for, is centered on running an arcade. Customer service, making management decisions, trying to ensure everybody has fun. You’re getting a behind the scenes peek few gamers get a look at.

“Super Arcade Spirits II Turbo” would likely be centered on the gamers themselves, notably in the professional bracket, people who make gameplay their living through streaming or team sponsorships. Pick your playstyle, build a rapport with teammates and fellow gamers, etc.

“Arcade Spirits III: The Final Quickening: Revengeance” or whatever it’d end up being called would be centered on game developers, trying to make the next big indie arcade hit. You’d be on a team of artists, coders, writers, business folks, etc. aiming to take the arcade world by storm.

Because it’s me we’re talking about, throughout all the games, we’d have a running plot arc in the background which builds and builds, until it reaches a climax in the final game… buuuut… to say more would be a spoiler.

All of this is pure and wild speculation. The future could end up completely different. If the game doesn’t pay for itself and then some there might not BE a future. So, if you want to see more Arcade Spirits beyond this first experience… well, you know what to do. Like, share, subscribe, smash that bell, hit the streets, shout from the rooftops, carve it into the flesh of your enemies, etc. Let’s make this future happen!

Here’s a peek at what’s coming up in the July Patreon build. Remember, $5+ backers get access to what’s now SIX full chapters of the game! And the temporary art assets are dwindling every day…

Here’s Ben and Matt, the nice couple that own the book store / doughnut shop next door.

And here’s The Demon, a legendary Fist of Discomfort player from Japan! See if you can guess who inspired us to make this character.

And here’s Donna Michaels, the hottest pop star of 198X.

Finally… well, who’re these two people?

We’ve got some big news over the horizon, once we get a sufficient amount of adulting done so it can be properly announced. Meanwhile, hang in there… awesome things are coming!