As stated in the very previous entry of this blog, The Inquisition is always listening, the major issue of the demo we released is the stillness of the combat. In particular, many have complained about the lack of animations.
But what does animate actually mean?
Coming from the Latin word for soul, anima, to animate is literally bringing something to life.



For the Sine Requie: SnakeEyes art style we decided to look at the Italian 800' and 900' paintings. With the aid of talented illustrators Giuseppe Di Girolamo and Salvo Lo Iacono, we created those beautiful detailed characters and backgrounds. Unfortunately, it is really difficult to move figures made in our art style.

However, animating something has more to do with giving it the appearance of life than to just move it. We, therefore, decided to make some research, looking at visual tricks from various media. In many shots from Japanese animated series, there is no actual character animation: the camera movement and a smart use of transitions gives the sense of dynamicity.



This happens in many games too. For example, a game we really are not inspired by Darkest Dungeon.



So, we changed the camera movements and the images treatment to convey the idea of a gory brawl.





Not so bad uh?

“...quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens possit diruere.”

Dear brothers and sisters,
As loyal servants of the Inquisition, we passed these silent months listening.

We released the one hour demo for free on different platforms, reaching many players that gave us interesting feedbacks. We are now using those great ideas to polish Sine Requie: Snake Eyes. We collected feedbacks on three channels:

• comments on forums and social networks
  
• playthrough videos on YouTube and Twitch
  
• articles on blogs and magazines

The audience generally welcomed the title warmly: most of the feedback was positive, as players, in general, seemed to appreciate both story and gameplay. However, analyzing the data we could still find a few issues:

• the user interface of a few game features is difficult to understand
  
• some dialogues are too long and convoluted, giving players the feeling to be trapped in an infinite loop
  
• the combat system, while enjoyable, suffers from a lack of animations, that feels still and detached from the in-game action.

These feedbacks are valuable to polish the game, giving the development team a path to follow to make the game better.
Rejoice, we listened!
Tremble in fear, our answer is coming!

Greetings Hunters!
The Inquisition reports have been missing for a long time, but fear not:
our faith in the project is still as strong as before!
In this dev-blog, we will discuss the future of Sine Requie: Snake Eyes.

As you may have noticed, our development schedule had slowed down, and we are planning to release SR: SE in 2019 first months.
Truth to be told, this delay is due to the failed Kickstarter: we refused to cut anything from our most loved title. Therefore, we focused on other projects to sustain the studio and maintain the game quality up to our standards.

We are still working on the first video-game adaptation of the brutal Italian tabletop RPG, and, in the next few months, we will resume with our regular updates to show the exciting work done.

The Snake Eyes are not yet closed and the Inquisition has work to do!

In order to cater to the needs of different players, Sine Requie Snake Eyes features four different difficulty levels, each coming with added horror and despair.

"Story Mode" is for players who simply want to enjoy story and exploration without (too many) worries: the game will give you plenty of time for each chapter and your group will find plenty of resources.
The "There is No Mercy" difficulty level will slightly reduce time and resources, while playing at the the two highest difficulties ("Only Blind Rage" and "Death at Last") will mean that a single mistake might cause a dreaded Game Over.



Difficulty is about more than just time and resources, however: the save system will be affected as well. Up to "There is No Mercy" difficulty you will be able to reload your game from the last checkpoint, while "Only Blind Rage" will force you to go back to the beginning of the current chapter, and "Death at Last" will pull no punches, forcing you to restart the game from its very beginning.

Greetings, Inquisitors! This Devblog will give you some insight into Sine Requie Snake Eyes' different game modes: indeed, the game allows you to face the dangers of Sine Requie by way of two different game mechanics, both appropriately merciless:
Collegamento del sito web

• Race against the Clock
  
• Episodes

In Race against the Clock, your inquisitorial team has a finite number of turns in which to complete the main mission: you will have the option to do things quickly and save some time, or get deeply involved in the current situation. You will be the one managing your time.
The Episodes mode breaks the game into different chapters, each of them with its own limited turns. If your team fails to solve the chapter within the allotted actions, you will be forced to reload from a previous point.
Each of the two modes allows you to experience the contents under a different light, customizing the game and tailoring it to your personal taste and needs.
Rest assured, however, that regardless of which mode you choose there won't be much time for catching your breath. There is no rest in Sine Requie.

Only Blind Rage

Greetings, Inquisitors! At the end of our past dev-blog, we were left with the question: "Are videogames doomed to linear and unchanging stories?"
Today we'll tell you about the tricks and stratagems we employed to give as much freedom as possible to Sine Requie Snake Eyes' players. Normally, each state within a story represents a constant: a static element which can be visited by a player provided they make the right choices.



Let's take a traditional printed gamebook: each choice leads to a numbered paragraph, and each of these paragraphs is in fact a state-constant. When it comes to videogames, however, we can make use of variables that will allow us to increase the number of possible outcomes without having to generate an unwieldy number of states in our graph.


Photos are taken from the game book of Lone Wolf written by Joe Dever (1984). Photos owned by the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History http://mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=lonewolf1c

Game variables are elements that can change depending on several conditions, such as the hour of day, the group's health, or even previous choices that the player has made over the course of the story. Part of a state-consequence must be constant, but it can contain variable elements in order to better conform to whatever choices have been made by the player.



Let's take the following example, where the player selects Vilma and orders her to search a dark room in which a Dead is hiding. This action implies the drawing of a Tarot card. Let's say the Lover tarot has been drawn: the consequence created will be as follows.

"Vilma stepped towards the room's door, eyes searching the deep darkness. She had sensed a movement inside. Perhaps because of her tension, perhaps because of the noise caused by her companions, she noticed the Dead far too late: she had to fight. Vilma could only blame Rodolfo for this."



Most of this text is the constant part of this state, this never changes.
The text in bold varies based on which character performs the action.
The text in Underline is a variable too, and is based on the number of characters in the group.
The text in italic is a consequence of the Tarot drawn, the Lovers, which represents how another member of the group is responsible for the failure.

This operation allows us to tailor the game experience based on the player's choices, even for the darkest of outcomes: each character may die, but the story will still go on.

Over the course of the coming weeks we will explain how this method forced us to fix the possible Butterfly Effects that were created by alternate timelines, an operation named "Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Stuff".

Greetings, Inquisitors! We return with our dev-blog series on managing choices and consequences within Sine Requie: Snake Eyes's story. This time, let's talk about the structure of an interactive story.
Think of choices and consequences within a narration as if they were geometric shapes: consequences are circles (a bit like graph nodes, for those of you familar with math), connected by actions that can be represented through line segments (also called "arcs").



If we extend this structure to an entire zone, many will probably imagine this with a shape not unlike that of a tree: each consequence can lead to countless choices, which in turn bring us to further consequences.



On a purely conceptual level, this structure is not wrong: each new consequence will exponentially increase the total number of consequences, making it impossible to handle the complexity of a story lasting dozens of hours, such as that of a videogame.
In order to reduce the complexity of our story, we make us of "bottlenecks" which will prevent the narration from bloating into an unwieldy mass of consequences. Because of this, the story of an interactive game resembles a state diagram.



This technical limitation, which applies to every interactive story, forces us to face an ugly truth: our current technological level prevents us from experiencing true freedom of choice within a videogame.
Are we doomed to play through linear, immutable stories?
Yes, BUT some tricks and stratagems allow us to go beyond these limitations. Surely you'll be delighted to know that we will unveil these tricks of the trade in our next dev-blog: "Smoke and Mirrors".

Good day to you, Inquisitors!
This week our Dev-blog will not tackle the second part of our "Choices and Consequences" post, but rather engage in a little digression concerning the creation of game maps!

These days we are working on the map for one of the main locations in "Sine Requie: Snake Eyes": the city of Florence, where our true adventure will begin. We asked our programmer (which we suspect of being an heretic - take his statements with a grain of salt!), to explain the details of his witchcraft in an understandable way!

"Creating a map is a step-by-step process. First of all we decide on the actual layout of the area (this step was easy, since Florence is described in the book Sine Requie: Sanctum Imperium). Then we create all the locations that the inquisitorial team will be able to visit and explore, and each of them has a unique marker assigned to it. Finally, we create a network of connections that will allow the group to travel between locations.

Now, Florence is basically already playable! Well, it's missing the fancy graphics, but those are always the last step!"
Well then, we'll see you next week with our Dev-Blog "Graphs, Trees and Ineluctable Fate". Fun, happy stuff!

Good day to you, Inquisitors!
This week our Dev-blog will not tackle the second part of our "Choices and Consequences" post, but rather engage in a little digression concerning the creation of game maps!

These days we are working on the map for one of the main locations in "Sine Requie: Snake Eyes": the city of Florence, where our true adventure will begin. We asked our programmer (which we suspect of being an heretic - take his statements with a grain of salt!), to explain the details of his witchcraft in an understandable way!

"Creating a map is a step-by-step process. First of all we decide on the actual layout of the area (this step was easy, since Florence is described in the book Sine Requie: Sanctum Imperium). Then we create all the locations that the inquisitorial team will be able to visit and explore, and each of them has a unique marker assigned to it. Finally, we create a network of connections that will allow the group to travel between locations.

Now, Florence is basically already playable! Well, it's missing the fancy graphics, but those are always the last step!"
Well then, we'll see you next week with our Dev-Blog "Graphs, Trees and Ineluctable Fate". Fun, happy stuff!

Greetings, Inquisitors! In our past dev-blog we introduced a new subject: the way we handled consequences stemming from player choices within Sine Requie Snake Eyes's story.

Not all narrative games are the same: indeed, while many titles reinforce the dramatic tension of a choice, such as Life is Strange (Dontnod) or Bioshock Infinite (Irrational), others prefer to focus on the long-term consequences of a choice. The Witcher 3 (CD Projekt Red) presents the player with options that will reveal unexpected plot twists in the overarching story; that's why there's no "right choice" but a series of equally interesting paths.

Sine Requie Snake Eyes is similar to The Witcher 3 in its approach, heavily shifting the focus on consequences. You won't always be able to know which course of action is the best, or at least the less wicked. This choice was made to strengthen the horrific tones of the game: will you be able to survive your choices?