Fnife Devlog 07/22 - Emo Game | ShelfLife | Echo Peak
Kia ora! It’s been a while since we’ve done a devlog, or anything projecty updatey adjacent! The reality is, we are a small team of mostly part-time “artist types” learning how to make games as we make games - reinventing every wheel and taking a million years to do so. We’re particular, confused, busy and easily distracted. Great qualities to have team-wide!
In any case, this blog is going to a bit of a recap, a bit of a roadmap, and a bit of an explanation for where we are at with all of our projects as Fnife Games and what to expect from us going forward!
STUPID EMO GAME:
WHAT IS THIS? A PREQUEL FOR ANTS?
Stupid Emo Game - a love letter to myspace-era emo queerness and fanfiction.
What is this “Stupid Emo Game” and why does it look old / bad / confusing 🤔?
“Stupid Emo Game” (SEG) is a love letter to myspace-era emo queerness in small town NZ. It’s a GB Studio project (so it can be played on actual Gameboy hardware). That also means it has some cool but challenging limitations with regards to the graphics, UI, programmin’ and what-have-you. We were super inspired by Bedbug’s “Love and Everything After” music video and the itch.io game “Is It That Deep, Bro?” by maowling.
👁️What’s it👄 about 👁️?
Set the weekend before Halloween in 2007, SEG follows the story of Ken, a seventeen year old photographer / moper with a crush on his goofy, chilled-out best friend; Fergus. In the lead up to a costume party, Ken spends the day with hanging with Fergus, trying to confess his feelings while inventing increasingly elaborate lies to avoid doing so. Can Ken figure things out, or is he doomed to have depressing song lyrics as his MSN Messenger status ‘til the end of time?
Why’d you make this?
What started as a GameJam idea quickly got out of hand, and turned into a gay fanfiction meets walking sim meets slice-of-life Game Boy project. We started messing around with this in December 2021, dropped it for a Classic Christmas Hiatus™ and then picked it back up again around March ‘22 as a side-project. Conceptually, Stupid Emo Game has been a cool opportunity to explore some stuff we wanna bring to ShelfLife with much lower stakes. Plus, we’re really keen to release something. Shelflife has been an amazing learning experience… but trying to ‘fix the car’ while you’re still driving it is arduous, and we’re really keen to get something done. Essentially, Stupid Emo Game is our EP for ShelfLife.
👀 Ew, so when are you gonna finish this???
We wanna have this Beta’d by August ‘22 and released around NZGDC time to help alleviate our imposter syndrome (like a soothing balm). The script is done, the game has a complete horizontal slice (it can be played it from beginning to end - with lots of placeholder assets). At the moment it’s getting polish, some audio thoughts and prayers, and user feedback from cool peeps.
Where / how can I play this Emo Thing?
It’ll be released on itch.io, most likely for a pay-what-you-want price, and if people like it we’ll do some physical Gameboy Cart limited releases, too.
SHELFLIFE:
A SLOW-ROASTED ROADMAP
ShelfLife - a million years in the making but still as beautiful as ever.
What is this again?
The story of a non-binary art school student and their friends investigating strange paranormal rumours on their University campus. A walking sim / visual novel / rpg taking place across 15 days in 2012, at the Cruston School of Fine Arts in New Zealand.
⏳ How far along is this mess?
So far we’ve made a 50 minute vertical-slice demo. We’ve shot this off to our consultants / playtest team at InsideOUT and taken in a bunch of feedback to help us going forward. Alongside other support we’ve received from the New Zealand Film Commission, we were also lucky enough to have our project chosen for a writer’s mentorship, which actually eventuated in us majorly rescoping and rewriting pretty much our entire script! And yes, that does kind of sound like Development Hell™ but it’s been super worthwhile. ShelfLife has a more succinct structure, and we have a much better pathway to actually finish the thing.
What’re your plans going forward 🧟?
Um, basically we gotta make (remake?) the damn thing. We have all of our systems set up in Unity (dialogue, triggers, UI, quests, major locations, characters etc) and now we just have to plonk our entire rewritten script into this shell and polish it with oils and sweet creams. With our current trajectory things’re looking on track for our Alpha / Beta in 2023 and then we’ll push this baby bird out of the nest toot-sweet.
🔥 How can I play this ol’ ShelfLife?
You can’t yet! We’ve kept our demo closed. Our release plans are for mid/late 2023, and we expect we’ll be on Steam for PC, Windows and Mac at the minimum. We’d love to get the project onto Nintendo Switch, so that’s something we’ll be looking at as well.
ECHO PEAK:
SOMETHIN’ NEW ON THE HORIZON
Echo Peak, a new, weird, (short) project for us to start conceptualising.
🦆 What’s all this, then!?
“Echo Peak” is a slowburn side project inspired in part by escape rooms, back country trails and Umurangi Generation (and The Grinch, probably). In this first person narrative / puzzle game, you’ll play as a creepy creature living in a mountain hut in NZ, monitoring radio calls and helping wayward trampers as you uncover information about your peculiar circumstances. The idea is to keep it small, self-contained, with lo-rez graphics and a focus on audio.
Is it naughty to make another-nother project 📻?
We’re pretty naughty. Thanks to help from the New Zealand Film Commission, Echo Peak is just progressing from being a twinkle in our eye, to something more substanstial, at the moment. We’ve figured out (through a lot of trial and error) a much better pipeline and workflow that suits the limited hours and availability of our team through working on ShelfLife, and we’re definitely going to be applying that to this project as we slowly set its foundation.
When’re you gonna release this one??
Probably around 2024, we have slightly different team compositions and collaborators for each of these projects but we still want to prioritise release order to make sure we’re not having things drag on indefinitely!
Thanks for reading! Drop us a line if you have any questions!
-Fnife