The year is almost over, and yes, I know we haven’t show you a lot of progress in ‘Fleish & Cherry in Crazy Hotel’ but trust us, progress was made.

The problem is, as 'Fleish & Cherry in Crazy Hotel’ is a story driven game and we are approaching the end of that story, we can’t show you most of the things we are making without spoiling it.

And you’ve read it right, the story is almost over. Does that mean that the game will be released in 2018? We don’t know yet. We are still looking for a good balance between working on the game (with no budget and no revenue) and making a living and that can mess with the timetables but one thing is true: we will finish 'Fleish & Cherry in Crazy Hotel’, and that end is closer every day.

And after all that, what about seen some new rooms from the hotel we haven’t shown you yet?

Happy holidays and we’ll keep in touch!

2016 is almost gone, we hope you all are having a happy holiday season! This year has been one of a lot of hard work. In fact, we haven’t showcased the game as much as 2014 and 2015 because we wanted to focus on the development, and each time we take the game to an expo have to stop working on it to be there. Nevertheless, as we approach the end of the game development, we’ll be more eager to show the game, as far as our almost absent funds allow us, so more of you can play the game and give us your opinion.

Talking a bit about the game itself, Cherry has a new skill that has been planned for quite a while but has been finally implemented this month, and it’s a very useful skill this winter: Ice skating! Here you can see how she uses her newly adquired ability (mind the placeholders, the blue tiles are meant to be ice and Cherry will have her own animation when ice skating):

Happy 2017 and see you in the next progress report!

Introduction

This is going to be the last chapter of the “In Toonstruction” series, in which we wanted to show you, with a series of short articles and videos, how our creative process is going nowadays with “Fleish & Cherry in Crazy Hotel”.

We’ve said a lot of times in these articles how we’ve faced our rookie mistakes while developing our game. So, to put an end to this small journey, we are going to show you the different shifts the game have endured to reach the latest stage, in which we are currently immersed, and how we have survived, grown up as developers and become stronger. The development of our first game hasn’t been easy, but isn’t that the point? Learning while always moving forward. The game we are making deserves the commitment we have, that’s the game developer’s way.

From 2012 to the beginning of 2014

When we started developing Fleish & Cherry in Crazy Hotel, we were almost unaware of the size of our project. We started developing the first prototypes in XNA, in which Cherry was able to walk and interact with objects, and the walls weren’t hidden until Cherry entered the room. Over time, we decided to migrate the project to Unity because of all the advantages that the engine offers.

The first demo we made transmitted the feeling of a poor design without coherence: The game didn’t surprise, didn’t bring anything new; the only remarkable things were the art and the humor of the script. Also, given the ratio between the tiles, objects and characters sizes were not well designed, the demo was full of invisible objects that made frustrating just walking around in the game, because when an object that occupied half of a tile, the other half was also flagged as occupied and you couldn’t walk through a seemingly empty space. Another problem was the isometric view itself. The players really had a hard time moving around and interacting with objects and characters in the demo, something that needed to be improved urgently. Despite lacking a great planning, being forced to develop the demo in a record time of a week, was the perfect exercise for us to start understanding the game needs and the difficulties of designing a game… and really sweat in the process.

During that time we learned a lot; we could say that “Crazy Hotel” has been our somewhat treacherous video game college. So, there was a moment when we saw that fixing the bad design of the game was a harder task than starting from scratch, as for each problem we solved, three new problems arise.

From March 2014 until present, October 2016.

We decided to restart the development of the game, starting almost from scratch in many all the fields, like script, art, game and level design, etc. For almost 3 years we have been working very hard on this new design. We have gone to some events to show the “new” Crazy Hotel, also we have made a lot of playtesting to continue learning and polishing the game.

The changes made in this “new” Crazy Hotel, have been:

- We reconsidered the core mechanics of the game so the most basic graphic adventure actions flow better. We’ve also improved the inventory and how Cherry interacts with the items she picks.

- The story/script of the game was rewritten; this time we decide to narrate only the essential things to tell Cherry’s story leaving aside all that didn’t contribute somewhat to the story, no matter how funny or epic the scene was. In this process we discovered that by eliminating, we increased the value of what we wanted to tell. Thanks to this, the rhythm of the story is much better.

- The number of characters and scenarios has been limited to the requirements of the game. Before that, the hotel was riddled with characters and situations that contributed nothing to the evolution and needs of Cherry’s adventure.

- There were redesigns of characters due to the requirements of the new script. The most important case was our villain Mr. Mintz, who has been renamed Mr. Mallow. This is an example of how a character was born before knowing his goal in the game and not the other way around. It didn’t matter how much we had already established the old look of Mr. Mintz, the script demanded for this subtle change.

- The artistic style that drew so much attention in our crowdfunding, also suffered a change. We realized that the art of the demo was not so faithful to the era; it had too many straight lines and the objects did not seem to look like the organic silhouettes of the cartoons. So we adapted the “basic laws” of the classic black and white animation from the 1930s to our game. In these old shorts, they all had in common that the scenes, characters and objects that stay static in the background, were painted with watercolors and had barely a line, with shading and gradient, etc. However, something very different happens when we see any character or object has to move, in this case every element on the scene that has animation is drawn above the stage in a cel and with a different style, using line and filled with plane colors (when we talk about colors, we mean black, white and the gray scale inbetween).

These two principles are the core of our game, not only our game’s art but also the main mechanics, making any element of the stage that stay static drawn with shadows and gradients, and every animated or interactive object and character will have its line and flat colors, creating this way a visual language very comfortable that the player knows which things are interactuable and which are not.

- About the environmental puzzles that we find in the game, we made a deeper study to contextualize the puzzle elements with the script. Now the environmental puzzles are in harmony with the graphic adventure puzzles so it doesn’t feel like you are playing two different games.

- The relationship between the size of the tiles, the size of the objects and Cherry was reviewed, due to the clumsy navigation in the game.

- The objects that Cherry uses in the environmental puzzles has been redesigned to make them more useful. Before, we had six objects with six mechanics, now the mechanics have been summarized in two, so two objects do the same as five. We lost one mechanic along the way that it was removed because it did not contribute anything to the game.

What now? From October 2016 until the future.

Nowadays, we are in a process of only production, no longer creating anything from scratch, just working to finish everything what we planned. The script of the story and the characters are written, the puzzles are designed, we have drawn more than ¾ of Crazy Hotel scenarios and in programming, the only work is to implement all new features passed to clean or changed by testing.

From Red Little House Studios we confirm that in 2017 Fleish & Cherry in Crazy Hotel will be finished. However, we will have to find a way to translate the script of the game into English and find a way to finance it.

Hello you all, and welcome to our latest monthly report.

This month we bring you some good news: all characters’ scripts have been finished! But although the characters are the most important part of the script, the job isn’t finished yet as we are now studying our own world to look for the innanimate objects that Cherry should be able to examine, as they’re those little details that breathe life into this world.

Meanwhile, we are working on more tilesets for the different rooms you can find throughout the hotel which require artistic skills to make them look as old cartoons and at the same time, technical skill to make sure all the tiles fit together without noticing the seams.

And now, we keep working. See you next time!

With Halloween comes our latest Progress Report!

This month we’ve been adding more rooms to the game and here we’ll show you how we do that.

First of all comes the story, to know why we are visiting that room and what elements it needs to help the storytelling. Once we have decided all the things that go into that room (decoration, puzzles, inventory items…), we draw some variants until we find what we are aiming for.

As the sketch is a general view of the room, it doesn’t abide to the game engine rules, so then we make a map following those rules, that allow us to see if Cherry will be able to navigate the room without unexpected problems.

Finally, the art assets are created, both following the original sketch and the game rules, so we get a playable room.

See you in a month!

Hey there! Did you miss us last month? We just needed some time to rest, to return now full of energy. Also, we weren’t the only ones that needed some time off, Fleish and Cherry also wanted their vacation!

And here we are again, working full steam ahead towards finishing the second level while fully defining the rest of the game rooms that doesn’t have environmental puzzles, as the ones that had puzzles had been already designed (yes, all of them!)

See you next month!

Hello everybody!

July is coming to an end so here we are again.

The script is almost finished and it’s getting ready to be implemented in the game. Other than that, this month has been used to design some of the puzzles that would be playable outside the main story. These puzzles will be a lot tougher than the ones you will find during Cherry’s quest for Fleish.

On another note, you may have noticed that this monthly report is very similar to past month’s. That’s because, as we are full in production, there are a lot of things we can’t tell you as we would be spoiling all the fun to all of you who want to play the story. And that’s why we want to ask you: What do you want to read in these monthly reports from now on? From time to time, we expect to have some news, but not in a monthly basis, and still we want to keep you posted on the game progress in a spoiler-free fashion.

You can give us your opinion on the matter in the comments section, on our social networks or the mean you deem proper.

Until next month!

Summer is here! What are your plans for these months? Ours are to keep working!

June has been a production month, in which almost all the script has been written and a lot of sprites from the second level has been drawn. That means that almost all progress this month has been on these fields.

Meanwhile, in the design field, we'be been testing some of the second level puzzles to make sure they behave as we expected. And in the programming field we have reviewed the project to remove unused things, for example, there was a time when Cherry would get a hammer that she could use whenever she want to solve puzzles but we decided to remove it as it didn’t add enough interesting gameplay. Of course, the hammer was implemented and tested before we decided to remove it, and as it affected both Cherry and the puzzle elements, there were hammer code snippets scattered around the project that we missed to remove before. And like the hammer, there were other things that needed to be cleaned out.

So, the progress bars that this month go up are both Script and Graphics:

See you in a month!

May is over and we are here again to tell you what we have been doing lately.

There are two fields of the game that have been making significant progress this month. The game writers are doing a huge effort to finish the script soon, and by now, we have already written more than two thirds of the characters, all of them maintaining the humor and madness from the classic cartoons that the ones of you that have already played the beta have seen in the characters until now.

The other field that is firmly progressing is the final graphics. We have already drawn around a third of the unique scene objects you will find through the game. And that’s taking into account that we have to pause a bit this process to draw the new prompts that will accompany the tutorial texts.

Talking about the tutorial, we are pretty confident that we are approaching its final form, where we maintain the explanatory text we had in our previous iteration while adding visual cues to make it more interesting and clear.

And that’s all, folks! See you in June.