Genocron
Release date: TBA Developer: Rototoco
Genocron is an action platformer adventure inspired by NES classics but tastefully supercharged for a modern audience.
It strives to deliver an exciting and accessible challenge through polished controls and straight-forward thumb-operated gameplay. No grinding, looting, stats or complex inventories. You will spend your time fighting monsters, not dialog boxes!
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The development team consists of me and my brother Tomas Pettersson (a.k.a. DrPetter).
The project is currently not in development.
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My contributions: Animations, Environment graphics, Level design, Music, Sound effects, Game design, Menus, Logotype, Website design.
Custom engine
The game uses a custom engine that was developed along with the game. So if I for example could see a way to improve the animation tools, we would discuss the pros and cons of improving it in a certain direction, then changes would be made by Tomas while I worked on another aspect of the game. Once the changes were implemented, I continued with the animations and started learning the new techniques, optimizing the workflow one step at the time.
Initial art by Tomas Pettersson
Pixel art
Usually the workflow started with Tomas delivering a big sheet of pixel art filled with enemies and different kinds of machines and mechanical parts. My job was then to animate the characters for all their movements (frame by frame), cut and paste mechanical parts to create new modules to fit the whiteboxed environments and follow the style guides to create new assets when needed. This process also involved a lot of tweaking and iterating after regular feedback sessions between the two of us.
Everything was made in the in-engine pixel art editor with our custom made tools.
Level design
The game is centered around having a core loop of "running and gunning" that feels solid. The player is quite heavy and runs slowly, but can use a jet pack to double jump upwards and quickly move sideways. This makes for tactical gameplay that needs to be really tight in order for the player to enjoy it.
For me this meant that I played the game a lot and tried building levels with platforming and enemy encounters that would put the player in slightly chaotic situations (having to dodge bullets and shooting at enemies WHILE jetpacking between platforms gets the adrenaline going!).
Once all the gameplay elements were in place and the flow of the level felt good, I decorated the environments with modules and created animated assets to make the scenes come alive.
Music & sound effects
For some levels we wanted blood-pumping action and other parts needed a slower, more mysterious pace. The level design plays an important role there, but the music is really the key to setting the mood. I worked out a lot of riffs and soundscapes in different tempos and tried them along with different parts of the game and continued to work on the ones that fit the gameplay.
The game is inspired by the limitations of retro games – and while the graphics don't have any specific rules to follow (besides "Keep it limited and looking good") – we decided to go with the NES limitations when it came to sound, for the simple facts that we love the sound and enjoy working within the few channels that are available.
For this I worked in a custom tool called Nemus, which emulates the 2A03 sound chip and produces tracks that can be played back on original hardware. Nemus will be released separately in the future.
Small team development
During the three years of development I learned a lot of things. One of the biggest and most important lessons was how demanding an indie game project can be and how hard it is to handle everything with a team that is too small.
For example: We could encounter a situation where the game needed code and Tomas was busy with other full-time work, and since I don't have any coding skills except basic scripting, I had no choice but to focus on another part of the game. This meant that development on that part of the game effectively stopped until he was available again. This created situations where we either had to pause the project entirely or come up with new features for me to work on, which led us to increase the scope of the game in ways that wasn't necessary. This continued until we reached a point where I couldn't really make the game progress anymore, and with Tomas' situation unchanged, we decided to stop development until both of us could work on it full-time again.
During my time at The Game Assembly, I have been working in teams of about 10-15 people and it's been a very positive experience. The amount of work that can be done in a week with a team of talented people – all specialized in their respective fields – is astonishing compared to the time it would take to accomplish the same things on your own, where many of the steps would include the time to learn new software and many steps of iteration before all aspects reach the same level of quality. And just the fact that you can get to see the progress from other team members and get inspired is a great thing too. It's a positive spiral that makes both the project and the people working on it benefit by constantly improving fast!
What happens next?
The future of Genocron is not decided at the moment. The ideal would be to find a good set of extra people and assemble a team, partner with a publisher and start up development again. That way we could finish what has been started, but this time with a lower scope that aims towards making the tight and entertaining experience we originally aimed for.
Exactly when that will happen is uncertain at the moment, but anyone that is interested in getting involved are welcome to get in touch via info@rototoco.com.