Happy Birthday Whiskey Stones!
Happy Birthday Whiskey Stones!
Hello everyone, when I released whiskey stones a year ago, I never expected the amount of love and attention it got. This year has been absolutely incredible for me and this game which may not be obvious because it hasn't been updated since launch, so I just want to use this post to go over whats been going on with the game over the last year, and celebrate the games first anniversary by releasing the original prototype made in a week along with some developer commentary/anecdotes to give more insight into development. Thanks for playing, and enjoy!
- New Update? -
This year has been absolutely hectic for me. It was the last year of my uni degree, so I basically had zero time to work on any non-uni related projects. But I have made some progress on the big 2.0 update! If everything goes to plan, it should add cosmetics and an achivement system- along with a whole new map and general game improvements. Now that uni is over, I should have more time to work on it- and I'll try to be more public about my progress with it this time around as well.
Even without any new updates though, whiskey stones has been places this year! It has been showcased in 4 different events, one of them being Freeplay: Parallels, which is a yearly celebration of the indie game scene in Melbourne. It was genuinely so surreal to see it there, and it was one of the best nights of my life. The version that was showcased in these events also contained the features from the update I'm working on, and I used some of these as a mass playtest to see what the game needed.
As I said, from now on I'm going to try to be more transparent about what's going on with the project, and posting more about it. You can follow me on bluesky @bonicle.bsky.social for updates, and join the discord server here!
- Prototype -
To celebrate the first year of the game, I'm also releasing the original and terribly unpolished prototype made in a week! Please do not expect anything too insanely different, a surprising amount of the game was set in stone from the very beginning. But it's there if you want to give it a spin! The next section is the developer commentary which includes small tidbits of information and anecdotes from development. If you want to skip to the prototype, its at the very bottom of the post. Thanks for reading, and enjoy!
Developer Commentary
- Game a Week -
The original prototype for Whiskey Stones was only made in a week for a uni class called "Game A Week". It was built on the theme "Gift", and was one of the very last projects I did. The class helped me immensely on figuring out what I want to do as a game developer, if you're interested in it I recommend giving it a shot.
- Original Concept -
The game was originally supposed to be a horror game! I wanted to make a game about a military drone exploring Santa's workshop after something horrible happened in it. While making the character controller, I bumped up the speed on it and realised it felt more like a shopping cart than a drone. And thus the idea of a shopping cart platformer was born.
- Slopes -
The most interesting tech in the game imo is while riding on a slope gaining speed based on how steep it is. This actually started out as a bug! I noticed it as early as the "drone controller" phase, and was very intrigued by it. When I redid the player controller later, I decided to reimplement a more robust and intentional version of it because at that point it had become a staple of the game to me.
- Majesty -
If you've played it, you will probably know that the entire project is just a big fat tribute to the song "Majesty" by False Noise. This was the plan, EVEN in the drone horror game days. My friend Fen (@milosoftfen.bsky.social on bluesky) had showed me the music video in the beginning of the week, and I was so impacted by it that I knew that the game I made that week had to feature it in some way.
- Nightmare Skybox -
For that hypothetical drone horror game, I wanted the ending to be the world ending/becoming a nightmare dimension as Majesty played in the background. (I was heavily inspired by the ending of End of Evangelion) The idea I had for how the sky would look like for that (basically I tried emulating an oil slick texture with 2 colors) ended up transferring to the general skybox that's used in the game!
- Going Backwards -
While I was working on the game, my friend Fen recommended that the player should go faster when they go backwards. I thought this was really stupid but also extremely funny and cool, so I put it in. Mind you, the original version did not have a rearview mirror, so you had to basically learn the map perfectly to use it.
- Backwards Acceleration - by Fen
[Voice recording with cicadas in the background] : Hi I'm Fen and I'm recording this in the backyard in 30 degrees (Celsius) Christmas and with 0% battery on my phone. I came up with accelerating while going backwards while Bora was working on an early prototype. I walked up to him and suggested [backwards acceleration] while thinking about the crazy movement tech in the old competitive game 'Gunz: The Duel'. I liked the idea of extraneous vestigal mechanics that were properly hard to use - but if you were good enough, were viable and available to you. I pitched it, and I thought it was a good idea, but I didn't necessarily expect him to put it in. And then he did, and it was very good. And we got to watch a speedrunner use it. That was very validating. :~). O-K.
- Whiskey Stones -
A lot of people have asked me, "Why whiskey stones?" and "Are whiskey stones a real thing?" and I have been surprised every time. I thought that whiskey stones were like a common thing everyone knew about. It's crazy!!! Anyway, the concept of buying everyone whiskey stones came from an old college humor sketch called "How To Pretend You Like That Shitty Gift". Everyone getting everyone else whiskey stones was absolutely not the point of that video but it's stuck with me for some reason. It's the perfect desperate nothing gift.
- Map Design -
The game was originally supposed to be a linear platforming gauntlet, but for some reason I started with a lobby area instead? The map design at the end basically consisted of three different linear-ish sections with offshoots. Because of the nature of the movement, if you know what you're doing you can basically go from anywhere to anywhere else- which I am extremely happy with!
- Rearview Mirror -
After some playtests, people absolutely loved the backwards driving mechanic but couldn't use it because of how hardit was to memorise the map. And they suggested adding a rear view mirror! This absolutely makes no sense but it fit right in with the game world. The main problem was though, if I was gonna have a rear view mirror that shows helpful information, I needed a player character to obscure half of it. (because it would be funny, surprisingly a lot of design decisions came from that)
- Jon Glorbo -
Enter Jon Glorbo. Sigh. What can I say about Jon Glorbo. This little head guy was a test sprite I made in a few minutes. I wanted the main character to be really expressive since I was playing pizza tower at the time and liked the idea of a character that was extremely abstract. It's tragic really, around November he had to be put down due to a witness protection program. Rest in peace...
- Ketamine -
Anyway, I later designed Ketamine! When I thought about who would forget about Christmas and have to get everyone they know whiskey stones at the last possible second, my brain went to a catboy who hasn't been out of the house or has showered in like 3 weeks. He's an unemployable, miserable, constantly tired mess and his name is Ketamine. Everyone loves him. [pictured is the original concept art for Ketamine]
- 2D Art -
I'm not really a 2D artist. I have some experience with drawing, but it really is something I need to practice more. While drawing the sprites for Ketamine, I intentionally wanted to keep them low-resolution to hide my inability at drawing anything too complex. The noodle arms were actually a side effect of me not being able to draw them as part of the body convincingly, but I think they ended up being one of the most important aspects of the character, since they let me move him a lot more freely. A lot can just be conveyed through simple math based animation when you know what you're doing! [pictured is the in game texture for Ketamine's upper body]
- Tutorial -
From the beginning, I knew that I had to include some sort of intro for the release version. This ended up taking the form of the linear platforming segment I was thinking of making all the way in the beginning, along with some narration to tell whatever story the game had. During showcases, a surprising amount of people thought that the game ended after the intro, and I just had to stop correcting them after a while to keep my sanity.
- Scoring System -
In the original prototype, the player gets 3 values at the evaluation screen: Speed, Deaths and Whiskey Stones. Of course, only the whiskey stone count mattered to the score and the other values did absolutely nothing. (because it was funny) I later just removed it, mainly because I wanted death to be a viable strategy for routing.
- Moving Platforms -
Towards the end of development, I also messed around with trying to implement floating physics platforms that are affected by the player. They ended up being extremely unwieldy in development and play, so they were cut. I am still exploring possible "stage gimmicks" to implement so a more refined version of them might possibly make a return.
- Bluey -
I'll be honest, i needed to make the map Christmas themed, and I thought that the best way to do it was to have Christmas props floating around. Now, you might be asking, "what does Christmas prop mean?" apparently to me at that time it meant writing "Christmas animal" in google images and making a mesh out of the best one. And of course that was bluey. I had to add the cat afterwards out of necessity to give it more variation. Most people actually don't recognise bluey and think its a penguin.
- Gachapons -
Originally, you would were going to collect the whiskey stones from the shelves around the map, but I found that it was a bit boring and I needed to have more obvious goals for people to head towards. So, I decided to put the whiskey stones in differently sized gachapons that are more obvious to see and collect. This actually worked pretty well in the end, and gave people something obvious to route towards.
- Impossible Golden Pons -
Before I refactored the movement system to make the slope glitch intentional, it used to be way more extreme. A bit of the map was made with that in mind, so a bunch of the higher up golden pons are basically inaccessible in the final game. If there was a way to get them through a horrible evil game breaking bug, I wanted that way to be a viable strategy and something people included in their runs. (I don't think anyone has reached them yet lol)
- Weather System -
For the skybox of the original game, I just had a few materials that I shuffled through based on how far in the song was. This worked well enough, but for the release I wanted this effect to be more dynamic and complex, so I got my friend Will Parkin (@icedcoff.bsky.social on bluesky) to make a custom tool for the game that let me transition between different material presets based on a timer and a curve, while also letting me edit the lighting, which made the game a lot more visually definitive i think.
- Editor Tools - by Will Parkin
Somehow Bora managed to tare me away from my then deckbuilding card game project to help him out with his crazy shopping cart game. Who knows how he managed it... I swear I'm not obsessed with building niche editor tools... And so two solid days of my life was spent creating an easy way of syncing background and light transitions with music. Apparently lerping between two textures for a background transition requires a custom shader. And I'm actually pretty obsessed with messing around with niche shaders. So all and all this project was a lot of fun. Not just anyone can drag me from the depths of programming hell, I salute you Bora!
- Horrible Code -
As the project went on, the codebase became more and more messy and fucked up. I am way more experienced now and whenever I look upon the hell of my own creation i am horrified. WHY IS THERE TWO GAME MANAGERS!!! Anyway, obviously this started as a result of the project being made in a week, but it just kept snowballing until the final release.
- Sound Effects -
Most of the original sounds for the prototype were taken from Ultrakill. This was mostly because I just didn't have enough time to find cool impact sounds in a week, and I already had them ripped for another project I was doing. In the end, I took most of the impact sounds from the source engine's library! They have a LOT of very good sound effects.
- Sound Design -
After doing the sound effects, I realised the game still needed a sound for the more abstract elements, like the ambience and the portal sound effect. I wanted these to sound more synth-y and technical to match with the music, and ended up finding an artist called Gregor Quendel on Zapsplat with an intensive designed sound library. I ended up mixing a lot of their work together to create the more otherworldly sound effects, my favourite one being the screen cracking sound which was a mix of multiple designed ice cracking sound effects.
- Deadlines -
After deciding to work on it more, the plan was to always release the game on Christmas. Of course, that was in just 3 months at the time. The final month of development was the time most of the new things were added, and the most challenging were the UI and menus since I hadn't tackled them before. In the end I think the menus turned out really good, though I definitely need to redo the system if I want it to be more robust.
- Practice Mode -
Practice mode was also a really late addition, and you only unlocked it after reaching B rank once. When I saw a lot of people just playing the game once and being done with it, I decided to just make it available from the get go. The implementation was also really scuffed, and I'm still very scared that its somehow possible to go to the scoring screen from it.
- Original Music -
I needed original music for the intro and practice mode, and for it I contacted a friend I knew from the A Hat In Time modding scene, Salutanis Orkonus. (@salutanisorkonus.bsky.social on bluesky) She had made a few tracks for another game I worked on, Dustpocalypse, as well and I loved her work on that so it was an easy choice! Be sure to check out some of her other stuff, she's absolutely amazing.
- Music Process - by Salutanis Orkonus
Bonicle randomly asked me about a month before release if I've "ever tried doing any hard synthy stuff?" I hadn't really, but it's not like I've still ended up doing any so far anyways. The first song I did was the ambience at the start of the game, the first draft got a "definitely the right track", but it was definitely too clumped together and needed to be spaced out. The second draft I sent after doing that got a "my jaw LITERALLY dropped" so, y'know, was probably good. Also, it was 1:50 in the morning, I don't know why I do this to myself. For this track I ended up making myself a damn awesome granulated synth piano preset that I definitely wanna use again, too bad you can barely hear it lmao. Then, a week before release, Bonicle asked for a DnB song. I had never finished a DnB or Jungle song before this, I did briefly attempt one but it was pretty short. The song is built on two main things: Some drums from Bomberman Hero (wow) and a pad I made by mutilating (lots of crossfading and paulstretching) the start of Seeing is Believing from The Polar Express.
- Curse of LMMS - by Salutanis Orkonus
Had a lot of fun making the music! I was using LMMS at the time, which was definitely a hinderance. That program sucks the second you try using more than Soundfont Player and TripleOscillator. Still had fun making the music, though. I've since switched to FL Studio. Thank god, I feel like I can breathe.
- Experimenting for DnB - by Salutanis Orkonus
Sometimes I open the project for the DnB song (which is used for the practice mode) and wonder what the hell I was doing. Why is the TF2 theme loaded in there? What was I thinking? All these questions and more. I guess first time trying something like DnB or Jungle just means a lot of experimenting heh.
- Song Names - by Salutanis Orkanus
The songs got named last minute, "The Absolute State of Things" sounded pretty funny for the intro ambience, thought of that quickly. The practice music took a minute to figure out though, not because I didn't have an idea right away, but because I didn't know whiskey stones were a real thing. Anyways none of this matters because Bonicle mispelled my name in the game as Ork"anus" three times so fuck that asshole <3
- Replayability -
I think the biggest problems with the game are focused around replayability. A lot of the reasons why someone would replay or route the game are internal, and while that's fine, I was always disappointed when someone played the game once and was done with it. The updates I'm working on currently should hopefully add a bit more external rewards for keeping on playing.
- Name of the Game -
The game was originally going to be called CHR_WHISKEY.ST2007S_MAS, I thought it would fit the game to have an unpronounceable and fucked up name. I knew this was horrible, and tried to find a better name up until the last second, but I basically failed and decided to just cut out the CHR_ and _MAS to make it easier to write. The name is still enigmatic and unpronounceable which I'm happy with! People have called it Whiskey Street 2007 before, which is extremely entertaining to me.
- Freeplay Parallels -
The game got shown in Freeplay: Parallels, which is a yearly night celebrating melbourne based indie games this year and it was absolutely surreal. We had a whole installation based around an overturned shopping cart and a custom controller made out of a milk crate, and there was multiple moments in the night when there was an entire crowd gathered around it, watching a single person play. Its still incredible to think about , and I'm so grateful for everyone who helped make it happen.
- Whiskey Stones in Real Life -
When I first got contacted to include my game in Parallels, the director Louie Roots asked me if I had ever shown it off in a shopping cart before. Mouth agape, I said "i did not know that was a possibility" and the idea for the installation slowly came together after that. He managed to source the shopping cart, empty whiskey bottles and made a custom controller, but I was obsessed with making real life whiskey stones as well. About a week before the night, I decided to cut up around a 120 small wooden cubes from old chair legs, polish and bevel every single one by hand, and then spraypaint them all blue to include in the installation. It really brought the whole thing together in the end I think, and I also got to run around in the city with a suspicious duffel bag filled only with small wooden cubes.
Files
Get WHISKEY.ST2007S
WHISKEY.ST2007S
TRAVERSE THE WHISKEY STONE DIMENSION
Status | Released |
Author | Bonicle |
Genre | Platformer |
Tags | 3D, Arcade, High Score, Low-poly, Retro, Singleplayer, Speedrun, Unity, weird |
More posts
- Version 1.1 Released (and the future!)Dec 27, 2023
Comments
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Love hearing the thought process behind creative stuff especially when this much thought goes behind a project. Please do this again for other cool future stuff! Happy birthday Whisky St2007s and RIP Jon Glorbo!