Hello Grims!

Oak here...


We do want to have a launch sale at around -25% across all platforms as a thank you to our fans and early adopters! ^_^

Make sure to wishlist us if you haven't yet, to get notified when we release on 20th February!

To commemorate this special moment, here's a brand new trailer!


So, what have we been up to the past week? Well, mostly polishing, as one might imagine! 

To showcase this, we've also updated our demo! It now supports all common aspect ratios (16:9, 16:10, 21:9, 3:2, 5:4, 4:3 and I guess anything inbetween?) and the Twitch integration is available to be tested as well! In addition, the demo is now fully voiced! We have the entire voiceover for Fate done now, ready to be released :3


That being said, we're also very happy to announce the latest addition to our cast - Bonnie Bogovich! She will be voicing the inner voice, the perpetual companion to any Grim Reaper - The Conscience. You can find your Conscience in the game by looking deep into the Mirror...



I just finished cutting/mastering half of the dialogue with Conscience and it's really, really solid! Lots of fun, disturbing and lore-heavy discussions to be had with one's self, heheh.


Only one week to go. Intense testing and content polishing ahoy!

Oh... Also. We actually did get played by Markiplier. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK-I6jcNNtw


Crazy.

Absolutely crazy.

I guess this is it. One more devlog, one more week away till we are actually released.

Thank you so much to everyone for joining us on this weird and wonderful voyage across teh_interwebz.


Be seeing you.



Much love!

Death and Taxes

Hey Grims! Oak here.

So the last week has been pretty hectic. SO hectic in fact, that I forgot to do the regular Wednesday blog post. Oops!

So where are we with the project? We're just about to finish all the stuff! We just have the voice-over for all the characters to go and then we need to do a round of balancing and finish up the ending sequence. And then just polish as much as we can, haha. Ha. Aaaaaaa.... Yeah it's fun.

We've had some great things happen, we had a pretty big video by jacksepticeye (a pretty well-known YouTuber), which you can check out here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA9vsyPRncY


Loved his playthrough! And hopefully he'll play some more of it! Our original dream, or rather, Leene's original dream, was for Markiplier to make a video of the game. This might mean that we're one step closer to doing so? 

Leene said she'd break down crying if that happens (because she's a huge Markiplier fan). And, well, so am I. So I dunno, if you have nothing better to do, then you all could just tell Markiplier to check his e-mail inbox for the preview key we sent him? :D


Leene also made a nice infographic of the "DnD alignment" of the bigger YouTubers we've had playing our game and it checks out lol



The goal is to get Markiplier on board so we can fill out the Lawful Good section (he's such a sweetheart!)



That being said, there's still work to do. We're adding some fidelity to our ending sequences, like this one:




This is just a meme though >_>

I don't want to spoil any of the endings, so you'll have to see what happens for yourself in the full release!

Ooh, and we did get our Shopkeeper voice-over implemented! ALL OF IIIIT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8MoJZjULeE



That's it for today. URGHHH. Wish us luck! And stay grim!

Much love!

Death and Taxes

Hello peeps!

Oak here! As chief memelord and coder extraordinaire, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about our Twitch integration. I implemented a way for Twitch streamers to interact with their audiences in Death and Taxes, which involves a few checkboxes and a really neat little book.

QUICK REMINDER. We're going to be launching IN A MONTH (less than 30 days), so if you haven't wishlisted us on Steam yet, do so now! Then you'll get notified when we release :3

You can conveniently enable Twitch integration in the Options menu!




After that you can click on the book to vote! And when that's done, viewers can post messages in the chat to express their desire. You can also find us on Twitch when you're setting up your stream, as we have our very own category!

In action, all of it looks something like this:




If you're interested in getting your Twitch playthrough of Death and Taxes featured on our Steam Store page, then let us know in the community boards here on Steam!
We thought it'd be a fun way to just give content creators a chance to bring their audience into the game with them. All of this is completely optional, of course. This feature was something that we had been discussing mostly "as a joke" last summer, but the more we talked about it the more sense it made. Eventually, we laid down some facts on how we could use it, prototyped it, did some very basic UX design for it, and then Leene produced dedicated art assets to give it a polished and in-world look. We didn't want to sacrifice immersion for the sake of having a "gimmick" (so to speak). We're quite pedantic when it comes to worldbuilding, and I think in this case it played out in our favour.

Luckily, it's quite simple and only takes VERY limited coding knowledge, so basically anyone could do it! Our engine of choice for Death and Taxes has been Unity, and we're running on the 2019.2.10f1 version. It's not the latest, but it's stable enough for our needs.

The steps you need to take to set everything up, if you're using Unity:

• Go to https://github.com/TwitchLib/TwitchLib.Unity and download the DLL there, the latest on at time of writing is 1.0.0: https://github.com/TwitchLib/TwitchLib.Unity/releases/tag/1.0.0 (TwitchLib.Unity.dll)
• Import the DLL into your Unity project (literally just drop it somewhere in your Plugins folder)
• Set up Twitch credentials so that you'd have a bot who does all the heavy lifting for you (reading chat messages, essentially)
• Create a class that manages your Twitch connection
• That's it.

This list seems short, and that's because it's quite simple to do. You can set all of this up within hours. The longest time it took for me at any single point was the third, as I was waiting for a verification e-mail from Twitch for about 20 minutes. Other than that, it was super fast. All you really have to do, is follow IMPORTANT ----> this guide <----- IMPORTANT and you'll be golden. The most important place where you really have to pay attention to what you're doing is the "SETTING THINGS UP" chapter. Just follow the guide line-by-line and you will be fine. I won't transcribe or re-iterate on what the guide does. Seriously, it's one of the best guides I've read. It really takes you through everything step-by-step.

You can do a lot of neat things with the library, but our design needed something very barebones. We just needed our bot to read the chat messages and search for the phrases that would count as a vote. To that end, I merely had to register to a message handler, which the library provides, which looks something like this:




I have a very simple algorithm that the code is supposed to be doing:

• Check if a vote is in progress (clicking on the book starts a vote)
• Check whether the message contains the phrase that counts as a vote (which can be customized in the options menu) - and yes, I do realize that if you'd write both phrases into a single message then sparing someone would take the vote, but I'm writing code for cool people, not for trolls
• If there is a "vote phrase" in the message, register the vote
• If a vote by an user was already registered, replace it with the new vote (no multi-voting so spamming won't work)
• Update the visuals!

This is just scratching the surface of what you could do with this library. Fortunately or unfortunately, Death and Taxes does not really have many points of interaction for community engagement in the game, other than the main mechanic. Implementing all of this took me about an hour, with around 15 minutes of testing on top. At first, I didn't have the voting phrases customizable, but I asked our streamer friends on Twitter and they said it'd be a nice thing to have. Adding that on top took me another hour, with additional testing and user input validation.

On top of that, using this kind of library is safe. You can also program the bot to send messages to the chat, but I left that out, as some streamers would have to grant the bot extra privileges to write to chat, plus there is no real need for it, as the streamer can call out the vote on-stream and also there is a visual indicator on the screen (the red book).

Just make sure you come up with secure credentials for your bot and enable two-factor authentication. You don't want to be losing accounts.


Many thanks to the creators of TwitchLib, and Honest Dan Games for the awesome guide on how to get started with it! I hope that if you're ever making a game yourself, you found inspiration on how quickly you can add a neat little feature to share the fun!

And as always, thank you everyone for reading along! I hope you all have a wonderful day :)


Much love!

Death and Taxes <3


PS: *Release anxiety intensifies*

Another Wednesday, another blog post!

This one is written by Leene and Oak together :) (AWW SHUCKS <3)

We've been putting off making our gameplay trailer for a while just because we didn't have a lot of our gameplay scenes and sequences fully implemented. Having done some extensive research and looking at other games, both similar and dissimilar, showed that trailers almost exclusively focus on action.

Trailers are an important part of Indie Game Marketing™. But it might be a bit difficult to make one if you don’t have an action-based game with lot of flashy onscreen movement. Death and Taxes is a narrative-heavy-story-based-game (what is UP with those HYPHENS omg) and relies heavily on text and the players' imaginations, this is why we had to take a more creative way to show our gameplay. The gameplay of our game is fairly hard to understand without playing it yourself and there is a lot that is left to the imagination when you first see it.



We've seen some trailers on Twitter/YouTube that are quirky, funny and endearing (such as Frog Detective; Papers, Please also pops to mind), so we thought that trying to compete with games that translate to trailers super-well in a natural manner was an uphill struggle.

We knew that we wanted to make something that isn’t just an advertisement for the game but gives something (amusement?) to the viewer, even if they wouldn’t want to try out the game itself. We also wanted to make something that's still memorable and fast-paced but lacks explosions or any other traditional (or even campy?) trailer techniques. What we came up with is what you see in the video.



What we used:

• Eye-catching start to hook the viewer
  
• Quick-cut montage for pacing (kind of a youtube meme montage)
  
• Jokes
  
• A friendly soundtrack contrasting the grim content (visual contrasts as well)
  
• Music-synced montage to convey on-screen movement better (also, SO SATISFYING)
  
• Showed every single thing that moves in the game (since there aren't a lot)
  
• Full voice-over by the voice actor who we have casted in our game as well
  
• Informative sections also attempting to convey player emotion while playing

Obviously, the last point here is probably the hardest to achieve, because we've had some people play it on their YT/Twitch channels by now and all of them play differently. We ended up with a bit of an exaggerated version of what we could imagine our players would be doing.



Since this is one the first of these kinds of trailers we have made (ever) and it's obviously new territory for us but it just seems such an obvious pitfall to try and hit through with a traditionally shot and cut trailer (bam, action, bam, exposition, etc.).

The main thing we wanted to get across people was: how to play our game and show off some things that are included in it (and do that in one minute) For that we made a mockup of an oldschool VHS tape tutorial. This worked well for us and luckily we had all the assets needed for it (voiceover).



After all the planning, we just had to record the gameplay videos (removed some text for it) and put it all together in a video program. We used really cheerful elevator music our composer Adam did for the elevator scene. We were lucky that we already had something that worked, otherwise we would’ve had to make a complete new song for the trailer.

And there it is! Our first gameplay trailer!




Has anybody seen some cool non-action focused game trailers? Or maybe you have made your own? Share those with us, we are interested!



And as always: if you haven't yet, wishlist us on Steam!



Much love!

Death and Taxes

Leene here, this time talking a bit more about the visuals of Death and Taxes :)

Firstly I want to say how excited I am for the release! We're almost there, only one and a half months to go!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAA!!!

Ok got that out of the way...

Now to the topic of visual design for the game world:

I think that there is much to learn from the art history and I love games that take something from the past trends and make it new. So this is why I wanted to do something similar.

Games that employ a retro style, such as the Fallout or Bioshock series, look really cool to me because they use already worked out art styles and mix it up with new stylistic rules to make something completely new and fresh.

There are three main ways of choosing a visual style:

• Inventing a new visual style for your game (a really experimental and hard way, hit or miss. One can argue that inventing something new is impossible, everything in this world is a remix).
  
• Using a style from another games (usually this is used but won’t make anything interesting, some people like getting what they are used to).
  
• Mixing up old styles that are not from the video game world originally. These techniques can be mixed as well and it is usually the way it is done.
  
• Some developers do this automatically without thinking about if longer and stumble on something good but I really think it is good to think about this topic thoroughly and increase your chances to make something that stands out and at least feels new.

Death and Taxes is a melting pot of different styles, the main one being Art Deco (yes, like Bioshock). There are elements from the present time but also from ancient mythology - especially Egyptian and Celtic. We also incorporate elements from the 50s comic book style. Add a sprinkle of Mexican Día de Muertos to the mix and you get Death and Taxes!

To maintain a coherent style, it's really useful to choose what style will be the main one and not immediately mix everything. Having a specific style also makes teamwork with artists or musical composers easier. They could just look up a lot references on the set style, which makes the visual design document a bit shorter too.

You can also mix up some styles that don't naturally fit, if you think through it. One of the most crazy and stupid game jam games I made involved medieval soldiers in the 80 Disco and Vaporwave style. Not saying it is a good game, it was just fun to make and I like how crazy it looks. Take a look at it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/$58065

As I wrote before Death and Taxes is a melting pot of different styles, and I'll explain briefly how that works for us.

The main style we went for is Art Deco (YES, BIOSHOCK >_>)

• All the interior design of the main building is in the style, including most of the items the player can find.
  
• The main font in the game is a retro typewriter font.
  
• There are intricate golden ornaments everywhere.

There are some symbols in the game that are similar in almost all of the cultures

• Skulls -> Death (d'uh).
  
• Flowers for funerals and death - White lilies in the wallpaper design.
  
• We might add some coffins to the menu design too.

There are elements from the present time but also from ancient mythology - especially Egyptian and Celtic.

• The Raven and Morrigan from Irish mythology on the world's currency (we also have Crow/Raven cawks as sound effects).
  
• The Ankh symbolizes Life.
  
• You can choose to look like Anubis. (!)
  
• The cat has an Egyptian collar.

There are also some elements in Death and Taxes from the 50s comic books style.

• The black-and-white with some popping colors. From the times when it was expensive to print many colors.
  
• Speech bubbles and comic book cutscenes.
  
• There are several in-game references to Batman characters. (I won’t spoil them ;) )

With the aforementioned Mexican Día de Muertos, with its colors and flower-skulls, you get Death and Taxes! Of course, there are some other themed things in the game as well, such as the office paperwork or even pirate-y stuff in one scene. You can catch a glimpse of that from our screenshot reel on our Steam page here!

We wanted to keep away from the usual religious symbolism of death in modern society, for example, Christianity, with crosses or Heaven/Hell. I think that sometimes, it's a good idea to break free of some of the usual symbolism that's overused in mainstream media and take a look at how different cultures visualize different elements.

So that's it for this time! Back to working on the game! We are going to release the gameplay trailer too in the next few days, so stay tuned. :)



Much love!

Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! Oak here.

A little oops happened in our scheduling so I'm posting our (THIS YEAR'S FIRST) devlog a bit later than intended. Much, much later >_>

But it's still this week, so yay! This is our 5th consecutive devlog on Steam! And yes I do realize we missed a week inbetween, but it was the holidays, and we didn't have much to show... BUT ANYWAY


We've been busily working on the game with most features done! Just need to do some testing and finish up the rest of the content (mostly end-game related) and then work on balancing the game (yay.), and then we're done! It feels surreal to think that we're launching already next month...

So what's been up?

So far we've added:

The Chaos Globe (Threnody to Desolation)!

You can see how the world of the living reacts to your choices.. in cute snowglobe form!



We also added Twitch integration! Just use the Necrotelecomnicon (The Red Book for short) to commune with the Spirits of The Ether Realms.



So if you're a Twitch streamer who is eager to share their experiences, you can now do exactly that!

Most of our time starting from this week is going to be focused on marketing, so we get more eyes on the game, and to generate interest! You, too, can help us with this! It's quite simple.. all you have to do is just.. talk about the game! To just about anyone, really. Friends, family, acquaintances, anybody you wish. Every little bit helps us a ton. Of course, if people wishlist the game on Steam, it's even more powerful, so we can please the almighty algorithm gods to become more visible on Steam as a direct consequence. So, if you haven't done so already, wishlist us here on Steam! ^_^



That's it for this week. Stay tuned till next Wednesday to find out about our logo and character evolution.



Much love!

Death and Taxes

Hello, ghouls!



It's finally time for the writer to write something to this devlog. So,I'm the lead writer for Death and Taxes, and I guess I have a few words about writing. Unfortunately, I have little original to say. If anyone wishes to become an author of any type - novels,(screen)plays, video games - it still generally revolves around the same banal truths that almost every author will note:

1) Read a lot, and diversify. If you wish to write genre fiction, it's fine to read other works in the genre, but you really should just be reading a wide variety of books and topics. Besides, integrating techniques and styles outside the useful (but too comfortable) genre tropes may come in handy.

2) Write constantly. A lot comes down to getting into the routine of writing.One has to keep at it, every single day - when feeling good,motivated and inspired, when feeling bad and tired. At least get something down, even if it's not what you were supposed to write, but some sort of an experiment. There's always the fun of editing later!

Honestly,for a more in-depth and helpful creation guide I'd at least recommend listening to the Start With This podcast:

http://www.nightvalepresents.com/startwiththis

Or checking out Brandon Sanderson's writing courses, available on YouTube. It's all about the toolkit!

Writing is a craft, a skill to hone, not some sort of a magical innate ability granted upon you by Higher Beings. Writing is a GRIND. You grind at it until your fingers and eyes bleed!

Gamewriting is an interesting beast to tackle. Here I've got an example of how education matters - not "a specific education"; it's more a lesson on how you can't predict the future, and thus can't know what random things may suddenly come in useful down the line. I have a background in literary and cultural theory and, as such, I'm quite familiar with all that postmodern and poststructuralist theory- turns out, if you're already used to concepts like rhizomes and hypertexts and such, and have done a bunch of examinations of the inner frameworks of novels, learning a 'visual programming' text creation program like Articy Draft comes really dang quickly.




The way a game dialogue can grow like a rhizome (that you somehow try to control)... it's kinda like a practical application of initially far more abstract philosophical concepts. At the same time, you have an understanding of structures and restrictions. Writing in Draft clearly differs from writing in Word (or any other text program),because of how the blank page looks and feels - already this space structures text differently. Restriction are great for force you into being creative.




A dialogue in Draft is composed of fragments that fit a certain amount of text(you can enlarge any text box, but I'd recommend keeping it at some specifically chosen sizes, so you have a constant clear visual understanding of how much text any fragment contains). The fragmentary nature of the flow also creates its own rhythm. In a sense, it kinda ends up feeling more like theatre/screenplay writing instead of a novel.And... you finally get to export the dialogue into the game, which itself has a specific look and design for the dialogue engine/window... and you see that everything looks wrong. And then you give up and cry.




Until next time!

Stay frosty!

Grind those words out!

- tshiifMärten

Hi fellow Grims!

Leene here this time!

I think it is time to tell you more about where the name of Death and Taxes came from.



Naming an Indie Game is hard but I think that It is important to have a good name for your project if you want to put it on the virtual market. Name and logo is usually one of the first things a player sees about the game and first impressions are really important.

At first the project was named The Project of Death and I also called it Death Game sometimes. I really liked that the word Death was in the title because it communicates the main theme. But I didn’t really want to name it just “Death Game” so I had to figure out a better name.




First, I made a list of things I wanted the name and logo to communicate and rules they had to go under. I have a background in media- and graphic design so I took some of my knowledge from my studies and from fellow game developers and made up some rules to have a HOPEFULLY well-designed brand for the game. The list could be different for different genres of games but here are some of more broad rules.

These were the “MUST HAVE” categories for a good name:

1. Easy to pronounce
   
2. Not too long or short
   
3. No other games should have it
   
4. Piques interest
   
5. Tells you something about the game
   
6. Isn’t too “beautiful” or “cheesy” (if not an epic fantasy game)
   
7. Is google-able (search engine optimization) THIS IS IMPORTANT!
   
8. Looks good and balanced on a logo (Some titles are really difficult to make a logo out of)
   And these are the “good to have categories” for a good name:
   
9. Have something familiar that people recognize
   
10. Unique, no other companies/books/bands/... should have it
    
11. Is funny or a pun
    
12. Has a cool abbreviation
    
13. Goes together with the logo or contrasts it

Secondly I made up some names for “a grim reaper simulation game” and asked some friends to do that as well. There were over 50 names at first and I went over them seeing if they fit into my “categories”. This is the longest list one of my really eager friend sent me :)





So the name “Death and Taxes” fit almost all of my rules (except for 10 and 11). It also had the word “death” in it like I wanted.

I had to make a difficult choice because there was ONE BIG PROBLEM with the name. It is a part of a saying (yay, his is a good thing!), but some other companies have it as well (oh no, this is not a good thing!). So I found out that there was a book, documentary, movie, restaurant, many usernames and even a law firm called Death and Taxes. At that time, there were no games named Death and Taxes and I decided that we can take the risk and hope that we will get enough popularity to show up in the search engines. 

 A year after naming the game, Magic: The Gathering came out with a card pack called “Death and Taxes” and I knew that this could be a problem because now the name is in the virtual game market but at least it wasn’t a name for the full game. For a long time, googling or youtube searching for “Death and Taxes game” only gave information about MTG, not our game but we were lucky enough to get more popularity and now all the first results in Google are about our own game(yay!) so everything turned out well in the end.


So this is the story behind the name!

Feel free to tell me if you have some own rules for naming games or want me to go deeper in some of the rules I mentioned.

Thanks for reading!

Leene

Hello hello! It's Oak again.

Quick update on the demo situation: I fixed a small issue where the game wouldn't quit properly the first time you would try to do so. Nothing big, but still significant enough to note because it might have bothered you.

We've been working on mostly getting the content done by the end of the year. We have 2 weeks of the game done, with some additional days from Week 3 trudging along and a greyboxed version of the entire plot, which we will start testing shortly. Seems like our timeline is still going to pan out.

And last week we finished our elevator scene!



The Grim Office (the place where your desk is), as seen from the elevator.



And this is your room! Complete with a mirror where you can choose your appearance, like this one:



Yes, you can be Punk Cthulhu.

There are actually a lot of visual combinations that you can choose from with the mirror. If my math is correct (it rarely is), you will have 1152 possible combinations, out of 8 heads which have 6 variations, and 3 clothing sets which have 8 variations. Try and get them all!



Excel at your job, and you might collect enough souls to barter at the shop in the basement of the Office Tower!



Who knows what else you can find in Quartermaster Mortimer's Plunder Emporium! The ever-humble Mortimer will gladly part ways with their treasure, if you have the, uh, currency.

That being said, I really like to see how the game is coming together. I've been a part of many game productions now and this is usually the most stressful phase: to make sure everything comes together. Even though it can be stressful (it's surprisingly not as stressful as I had thought), it's wonderful to see all the cool stuff in the game, working, as it should be. It's very motivating as well, to say the least!

Our team is amazing, to be honest, and their work is about to hit the spotlight... Only a few more months until release!

If you want to say hi or chat with us or give us your feedback and ideas, join us on our social media! You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Discord. The quickest way to join in on the conversations is Discord, because we lurk there all the time anyway.

Till next time, and stay Grim, everyone :)



Much love!

Death and Taxes

Hi everyone! Oak here!

As a quick introduction, most of the presence you'll see around social media concerning Death and Taxes will be either by me (oakwarrior) or Leene (freakoftheyear). I'm the programmer on the project, and also a bit of a project manager, while Leene is the lead artist and also the project lead. I'll probably make a longer introduction about the team (we're about 6 people) in another post :)

I'll keep this week's devlog fairly short, just with a few updates on what we've been doing lately, and what you can expect to come in the course of this year. Also, uh, for those unfamiliar with the project, this is actually our 12th devlog, as we've been posting them on itch.io, but we're gonna start posting here as well!

First off: We've applied to the Spelkollektivet Scholarship Program! If you've been around on itch, following our blog, then you probably know that Leene and I have been living here for the past 2 months. We still have ~3 weeks to go here, and it's been amazing. We want to come back here next year and this MAY happen. If we get the scholarship it will be easier, but we will try and come back here no matter the situation.

That being said, you can check out the contenders for the program here: click me!
And the voting page is here: click me!
There are numerous candidates so be sure to check out all of them and vote for your favourites (not just us) :D



On other fronts, we've been cracking down on our roadmap, and we want to be content complete by the end of the year, which will be a hurdle, but it's still doable. We've finished the character customization system, which you can get a peek of here. We've been trying to hone our marketing skills as well, and I did some major data crunch on our visibility and demo performance here on itch! I posted my findings on reddit, and you can read the whole post (warning: LONG) here.

I'm finalizing most of the codebase for the the preparation of the full content of the game and I'm also doing some stability checks and cleanup. Our artists are at work to get all the sweet goodness of art assets in, and our writer is chugging along with the entire structure for the narrative of the game.



It's a monster, alright. It's all going to come together soon! It's extremely nerve-wracking and exciting at the same time, and we hope we can make something that's truly special and that our players will love.

Thanks for all of your support thus far and thank you for joining us on this strange journey :D

Also if you haven't yet: please wishlist the game! And tell your friends about us :)
The more people on this grim adventure, the merrier!

Much love!

Death and Taxes <3