Heyo all! 👋 When I’m not working on games professionally, you can usually find me tinkering away on some sort of prototype… and about 99% of them don’t really get see the light of day… UNTIL NOW! *queue explosions* – So I figured I can call these posts “Prototype Corner” and dig up some of the prototypes that really got me excited, and maybe eventually tackle them again down the road! (if I’m lucky!).
So the first one I want to talk about is a fairly recent project called “The Vagrant Soul”. Before tackling “Chirp Chirp”, Vagrant Soul was most likely going to be the game I was going to try and bring to release… I’m happy Chirp Chirp came around though since the scope was much friendlier for the scheduling goals I have – But I hope one day I’ll be able to come back to Vagrant Soul and explore these ideas more! (especially the weird combat mechanics).
The initial inspiration for Vagrant Soul was King’s field meets turn-based combat. Over the last several years there have been some incredible King’s field-likes released (Lunacid being a highlight for me), so I wanted to try and add a different spin to it – and I feel like combat was the place to do it. So once I got the basic movement / test level setup, I implemented a fairly rudimentary narrative and quest system (whew one day I hope to build a proper system that I can re-use for future projects) and I was off to the races!
Then after that I took a *stab* (mwehehe) at the combat system – I wanted to bring some of the verbs from Dark Souls combat (parry, block, dodge, timing etc.) but make them “easier” to digest… not focusing on perfect input timing per-say (I’m not great at timing parries), but still giving importance to attack / dodge direction, with a rock-paper-scissors twist.
The idea was when the player enters combat state – it almost feels like you’re going into a turn-based battle (I am a big fan of JRPGs). At first I wanted to make it turn-based, but it made the combat feel too slow, so instead I chose an active-battle system that had a rhythm to it. The player (and enemy) would have 5 directions to choose from when attacking / defending / dodging, and the goal was to read the enemies movements to figure out the best timing to use your actions, and more importantly… which direction to utilize them in.
The above gif demonstrates the basic setup, but due to not having the proper animations for the enemy – it was hard to show off the idea of the direction based combat system. For example, if you block towards the direction the enemy was swinging, that would count as a block – but if you timed it correctly, if you blocked, dodged, or attacked… you could stun / parry-attack the enemy.
I had A LOT of fun building this prototype up for Vagrant Soul. I had a lot planned out for the overall arc and events of the story, the freaky characters you’d come across, the different types of combat puzzles etc. – but I also could see how heavy the scope was going to be, especially with wanting to release something within a year of development. Luckily I decided to do a quick weekend-game jam that helped introduce the more scope-friendly game idea that is now the project I’m aiming to ship early 2027 – Chirp Chirp… but hopefully one day I can come back to Vagrant Soul and really explore the possibilities with the idea!
That’s going to wrap up the first Prototype Corner post, I looking forward to sharing other fun prototypes I’ve worked on throughout the years… but for now it’s back to the Well as I work away on Chirp Chirp!
Take care!
– Jay