Hello everyone!

This time I’m going to introduce you another character of the game. In the picture above these lines you can see some sketches of Mary Elizabeth; she is the Landlady of the Guest House in which the story takes place.

When we are making character designs, we usually try some variations of clothes and hairs on the same body base and then we decide which ones are more suitable for the character and also which one we like the most.

In the picture you can see different hair styles made by combining three different things: ornaments, different kinds of buns and lower half of hair.

The one we like is ME1, but if you have different ideas just let us know.

See you next time!

If we talk about the code we think in C/C+/C#/Java programmers who create the graphic motor, give a behaviour to the game elements, etc. but usually we don’t think in a game script, which is an element very usual in games nowadays. To make it clear, a script is another type of code that says how the game behaves in some parts of the execution. For example: when you enter the room X, trigger a dialog between characters A and B.

More and more games are based on script actions. Games, like World of Warcraft, are no more than a motor (a very good motor, that is) and a lot of scripts creating stories, defining foes’ positions, treasures and controlling the rest of the game elements.

The biggest difference between the programmed code and the scripted one is that the first one is compiled meanwhile the second one is interpreted. Compiled code runs faster and is directly executed by the hardware CPU in which the code is running (a PC in this case). Interpreted code needs to be transformed to compiled code in runtime and then is executed. Both things have their pros and cons but in a nutshell compiled code is faster and that’s why is in charge of the heaviest things like the graphic motor, sound management, etc. Scripted one is more flexible and it’s used to guide the story and create events in each moment.

Speaking in a lower level, the behaviour could be put in this way:

On the one hand, we have the code written in a programming language, let’s say C++. This code needs to be compiled to generate an executable file (a .exe file in MS Windows systems).

On the other hand, the script written in a scripting language we are using is in another file(s), which are read by the scripting motor at the beggining of the game. Later, when needed in runtime this scripting motor takes each line and associate it with an already written-and-compiled function included in the compiled executable which gives us a visible action in the game.

An example of an interpreted language is the well known SCUMM system used to create Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and Day of the Tentacle among others. SCUMM name is nothing more than Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (and developers used it for the name of the bar in Monkey Island). Funny right? Nowadays we can find an open source script motor for reading SCUMM written games called ScummVM, available for several platforms.

Another example, and maybe the best known, is the Java programming language which uses its JVM (Java Virtual Machine) as script motor. That’s why it’s said that Java is slower than C (interpreted code vs compiled one) and it’s true. But it’s also true that the same Java code can be run in every system with a JVM (like Windows, Linux, Mac or Android). This virtual machine use to be written in a compiled language like C for each platform. Need to point that Java files are preprocessed/precompiled to generate an intermediate language file between compiled and interpreted to reach a better performance, security, packaging, etc.

So, if compiled languages are faster why people use scripted languages?

Basically because once the game and its motor script (or virtual machine) is programmed you can make changes just modifying script files without recompiling source code. That way game designers can work at the same time that programmers while making the game.

Usually, video game studios with resources have their own software to make games and they use apps to create this scripts in an easy way so a game designer can make it without programming knoweldge.

In our first game, Luminaria, we use our own scripting language, a very simple one based on plain text files with functions like loadChar, loadBg, talk… which are preprocessed and packaged so the script motor can interpret them when needed.

If you are interested in how we designed and programmed the virtual machine bases maybe we can write about it, but that’s another story…

As a title, it represents very well the concept of the game. Knowing what a luminaria is, can tell you more about the game than maybe we ever could.

At first sight a luminaria is a lamp made of paper with a candle inside, some have sand inside where the candle is set. The one in the illust of Marc has a wooden feet with a hole for the candle. Luminaries are used as vigil fires in ceremonies, altar lamps or lately simply as decoration.

Other meanings of luminary refer not to the lamp but to the light itself. It can be a guiding light, or the light of celestial bodies. The darker meaning is when luminary is used as substitute of “fuoco fatuo” or will o’ the wisp, known as ghost lights that are said to attract travellers into dangerous places or graveyards.

Now you know more about what  luminary is and what our game is about ^__^

Hello! Long time without an update but that doesn’t mean we’re not making progress. I think in these time we had made more progress in everything than the past months, piece by piece all seem to come together (or so we think now lol) but there isn’t much about the game we can show by now, what we have is made of sketches and…well it looks kind of horrible (lol again).

Recently I started a series of concept illustration of the characters, the first one you can see it here, and it’s Marc, the main character. We wrote about him at the beginning, about how he is a young writer wannabe looking for inspiration and ends finding much more in La Mansión de la Rosa, where the game takes place. Now you can see his face (and maybe more if you look closely *evil lol* full size for better apreciation).

Hope you like it!

^3^

I would like to start the serie of posts talking about the making of with a basic graphical problem to solve:

Let’s say our game’s target screen aspect is 16:9 so we can show it in Full HD (1920×1080) or HD ready (1280×720) without problem, just resizing the image.

Most of the nowadays computer screens are Full HD, so this size seems perfect right? They would see the game like this:

But, what happens with the people using other screen resolutions like 1280×1024 or 1920×1200? Actually, the question you should ask is: what happens with the people using other screen aspect, like 4:3 or 16:10.

Then, you should think what do you want in your game: preserve the game aspect as you designed it or get advantage of the new screen size? Both are valid approaches but you have to choose one (or let the player decide with options).

Think about playing in a 4:3 format (using 1280×1024 or 800×600) and analyze the following image:

At the left image you can see the screen fully used (after a resize to fit the game elements in the screen).

At the right one, the game screen has been resized and adjusted to the center of the physical screen to preserve the original game aspect. This gives the game cinema bars, and it could be even an eye candy effect.

Which one to choose depends on the game type. For this game we chose to resize and adjust the game to keep the 16:9 aspect because we think that a game based on drawn backgrounds should be seen always in the same way; but, if we were making a tiled based game probably we would have take advantage of the full screen to give the player a bigger screen view.

The decision is up to you.

As maybe you have noticed we had some troubles with our web server on the past days. But even if we did, we announced the winner of our contest right on time via twitter.

The winner was one of our twitter followers: @EzequielZEK, and received his pack of games with the New Year. Enjoy it!

If you also want free games, stay tuned because we are giving more games for free! Just follow us on twitter, facebook or the blog’s feed to know when the next contest starts!

How about some new games in these holidays? Sounds good, doesn’t it? We are newborns and we haven’t games of our own yet but that won’t stop us from sharing what we love: indie games!!

There will be a prize for our followers: a pack containing some games for Steam and Desura, including Darwinia and Multiwinia, DEFCON and Uplink! The winner of this games will be one of our Facebook or twitter followers and it will be picked using random.org on New Year’s eve.

If you don’t have accounts for these social networks (you weirdo) don’t worry! You will be also eligible for winning the games pack writing a comment in this post

This is our first Christmas at Glowing Cat and our only wish is to continue sharing our love for games every Christmas from now on.

Sophie from Luminaria and our little Glowing Cat wish you a Happy New Year!!

With this post begins the coverage of the process of development.

Today I write about the setting of the game.

At the start of the development process, one of the first things we decided was the location in which the action takes place. At that moment we only had a rough idea of the story (and it changed in the end), but since genre and premise were the same we decided to keep that setting. And it was …

A Victorian House (yay!!!), this is where the main action takes place, and where the player will explore all its sceneries.

Deciding the type of the house was only the begining, we had to do a lot of research in order to understand these kind of houses: plans, architecture articles and photos, lots and lots of photographs for designing… In the end we finished understanding in a better way the Victorian Houses and, when designing the backgrounds we introduced some changes, using everything learnt, in order to adjust it for the game story.

We had many reasons to choose a Victorian House for the game, but maybe the first one was because we like it (what’s the point of making an indie game if you can’t make whatever you like?). On the other hand, we needed some kind of guest house and today most of the ancient Victorian Houses are. Last but not least we needed a lot of different spaces and this houses are plenty of room.

The images included in this post are a small selection from the research we’ve done.

I hope you found this interesting, and we will try to explain you more details from the Victorian House in the future.

See ya!

Luminaria is the name of our first game. With this game we try to blend elements of the gameplay from graphic adventures and the look and pacing from visual novels.

We are now working on it, halfway in the development process. Until we can release an alpha or a demo version and then the full game, we will write here about the game, showing sketches, illustrations, ideas of game designing and programming; everything involved in the creation of the game.

In this game you are Marc, a student who needs some time to think about his future. He wants to be a writer but his parents want him to do something different. With this idea in mind he goes to La Mansión de la Rosa, a Victorian Guest House in the woods near to a mountain village. He will find there everything but peace, meeting the people at the house, Mary Elizabeth, Sophie, Greta, Penélope and Oscar will immerse him in a world full of mysteries… and even magic. Sure looks like a lot of inspiration for a young writer but, be careful, there aren’t decisions without consequences and you will decide how this story ends.

We are Glowing Cat, and we want to introduce ourselves through this post as a new indie games developer company.

We enjoy videogames and we spent unforgettable moments playing them. When we realized that after those moments there are people working hard to provide new worlds and stories to enjoy, long time ago, we decided what we wnat to do in our life and nowadays we are making all our efforts in it.

Our target is making beauty and funny videogames (oh really!?) regardless of its genre.

If you want to follow our career (and we hope so!) you can do it throught this blog, where we will publish news about our games developement. Also you can make use of the social networks like twitter or facebook, where we live too.

And of course, you can know more about us reading here.