Scrapped Game Concept: The Toy Castle (Artist: Squeakyfriend) (FB Id: 34765)

29 Likes

The master post for art related to the Toy Castle can be found here: The Toy Castle (Artist Squeakyfriend) (Master Post)

This topic is made to discuss Squeakyfriend’s idea as a potential game based on the concept and art he created, and also in the hopes that it may be of inspiration to someone.

5 Likes

Maybe delete this image from the master post? It seems weird to have it both here and there.

Anyway, about the game. Some of the elements, especially the dolls, give me Ib vibes. Things suddenly getting chaotic after you do something important. And I imagine the vibe in the castle to be similar to The Witch’s House. The many things to kill you can be in the style of The Witch’s House too.

Although, the mention of blood being more visible on white fur makes me think of a simple health system, where Snowcone’s health is reflected by how bloody her fur is. And the more hurt she is, the harder it gets to survive. This would also suggest having places where you can heal, maybe at save points.

2 Likes

It may seem weird, but I think of this topic being a discussion about a game specifically. The picture itself however is also art, and thus I consider it part of the master post to show when Squeakyfriend drew it compared to the other art he drew.

Wonder how much Snowcone can go through. She definitely was one of the more interesting creations of Squeakyfriend (other than Crazystein, of course)

1 Like

Reminds me of the game ‘Corpse Party: Blood Covered’ a little…Especially the ways you can die.

1 Like

Hey there!

Oculus notified me of the new site and showed me this, and I think I can explain a bit more of this game concept!

Elias and Blibber3 are right to think of Ib/The Witch’s House/Corpse Party - there’s a lot of games in that “genre”, RPG maker games where you explore and navigate traps/puzzles. Of note is “Mario and the Music Box”, which had many game over sequences triggered by anything from getting caught by a monster, to going to sleep in a bad place, to trying to open a door, most of them accompanied by CG images which were saved in a gallery so you had an incentive to find them all. Since fluffies are infamously easy to kill, it seemed like a perfect fit.

FOALS:
My addition to this formula was the foals. There’d be a set amount of foals to find and collect throughout the castle (Snowcone would carry them on her back), and if Snowcone got hurt while carrying a foal, it’d hurt/kill the foal instead of her. To avoid this happening, players would be able to drop the foals off at safe zones/save points(fluffy nests).

The foals would also influence certain events! For example, the image mentions a scene of Wawa trapping you. He would stand on a button to hold a door open, but once you look through the door he’d run over and ram you through before the door closes, sending you tumbling down a set of stairs into a small empty room. Carrying foals at this time would kill them as Snowcone would crush them while falling, leading to a game over where she tries to get out until dying of exhaustion. But if the player had left the foals at a save point, they’d come hold the button down and free her. (This would also affect later scenes, as Snowcone would know Wawa can’t be trusted.)

SNOWCONE:
I think I later retconned her being a mom, in part to remove any foal favoritism, but it depends on what’d work better for the story. The basic gist is that after all the foals are taken, Snowcone suggests someone go save them while everyone’s arguing/panicking, but the rest of the herd is too scared to try and she kinda ends up volunteered for it. Since it’s trying or leaving all the foals to die, she agrees.

The mention of blood on her fur does indeed indicate how hurt/dirty she is, particularly in game over segments where she isn’t instantly killed. (I imagine she could only take one or two hits though.) It’s a good visual indicator for damage, but also for mud or anything else that’d slow her down or feel yucky.

WAWA:
So! As the post mentions, Wawa is implied to be cursed. When he found the wish-granting thing he was a scared unicorn foal, and so wished for the strength to defeat any monster. Thus, he was turned into a monster - an alicorn - and took on the name Wawa because… Well, water’s scary to fluffies, because he’s still gonna operate on fluffy logic. He’s trapped in the castle and actively tries to kill Snowcone/the foals because he’s afraid of them reaching the wish-granting thing and making the same wish he did. After all, if they did, they’d become monsters and be able to kill him.

As the main antagonist, I considered a lot of Wawa-related stuff. One was a boss battle where Snowcone has to open a water pipe to fill a canal while Wawa’s crossing it, causing him to be swept with the current. I also considered giving the player a choice between trying to save him or letting him drown, though I don’t know what the benefits of helping him would be since by then his intentions are clear.

Also he likes dance music.

OTHERS:
I think the plan was for the castle to be divided into a few sections, each having a “boss” at the end the player had to clear to move on (plushes, cannibal fluffy, etc). It had a bit of a dollhouse aesthetic, like someone just put an oversized children’s toy or bouncy castle in the middle of the woods.

As for the wish-granting being, I couldn’t decide on what exactly it’d be. Maybe something similar to Discord? Reaching it would provide you with a list of possible wishes (“want to leave”, “want to get the babies back”, probably “sketti” just because fluffies), all of which would lead to a monkey’s paw-type game over. The only way to get through would be refusing to make a wish.

The endings would have varied depending on how many foals you saved. Getting them all would get you hailed, while somehow not saving any would get you called selfish and horrid, with other reactions in-between.

That’s about all I can come to think of at the moment. If you got any questions, ask and I’ll see what I got!

9 Likes

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you find some new stuff to enjoy and feel no pressure to do anything more than you already have! Chill, relax, and enjoy us silly people :slight_smile:

1 Like

And what exactly dissuaded you of making this game?
Sounds interesting enough to itch my interest

A variety of factors! I was falling out of the fandom at the time, had a bunch of troubles with RPG Maker, and very quickly got bored of the visual style RPG Maker required me to use if I didn’t want to do every single background asset from scratch. I even struggled with getting the visual look of the cutscene graphics to look like I wanted, so they feel inconsistent and like some would need redrawing.

Plus, it’s a quite complex idea for a game. It’d take a super long time to develop, requiring a lot of graphics, writing, level layout design (a weak point of mine), script coding, and even custom from-scratch code to make the foal collection work.

It’s just all too much time and work required for a game that can only be advertised/sold to a niche fandom with a cruel and hated reputation.

1 Like

There’s a whole lot of work arounds for many of those things. If you’re using rpg maker xp, you can use different spritesheet sizes (mostly multiples of 32px per frame). You can hard code it too (I once was making a pony rpg using animations of 8 frames, abandoned the project when artists droped out).
Custom scripts are an easy thing if you know the language well enough (RGSS are pretty much ruby with windows’ c++ multimedia things given ruby isn’t graphic nor sound friendly. Both RMXP, RMVX and the one later use RGSS1, 2 and 3 respectively).
In my opinion, XP is the most custom script friendly.
I’m interested enough on this. Mind if I try my hoof on a technical demo?

Go ahead! And there’s no workaround for the graphics - it was specifically the shading that I found boring to implement, which means that no matter the size I would have to either draw everything from scratch in a less boring style, or do a whole ton of shading I didn’t like.

Honestly, I would love for the game to be made real, even if it’s not by my own hand - so I’d love to see what you could make! Feel free to use or expand on the sprites/sprite bases I started making, the novelization, and any other Toy Castle things.

You could also go Godot or Unity, if the shading thing is the biggest issue. Though I might have an idea. All well. Let’s see what I come up with in the next few weeks

I still believe there can be an appeal to the fandom beyond such a reputation. Though I agree that a game (especially an RPG like this) is a lot of time and work, especially if its done without monetary compensation.

I knew you’d comment on that. Remember that this was conceived during the Booru days, and particularly that when I disappeared there was like 98% abuse content. And specifically recall that I mentioned the reputation, which reflected that abuse ratio. It’s nothing I could have publicly advertised elsewhere without being ostracized and ruined. By the time this place appeared? I’d made peace with not making the game, so no reason to go and start from scratch on it again.

1 Like

I guess I’m less caring about my own reputation, kek. Alternatively, one can always have double accounts everywhere and keep one thing apart from the other.
Either way, I’m here to make more questions as I kept reading your story.
First of all (and I think the most important), would this game have a time limit? Seeing how the herd was going to leave by the night, it would make sense the game was timed. Of course, one can always meddle with the timer as events unfold (being knocked out cold or sleeping, is something I’ve been working on my own projects where having your characters sleep will heal them but also make it possible to miss out events). So yeah, are players against time? Or time will only progress as the player progresses, so if they stay idle in a section the time won’t pass?

I wouldn’t say there’s a time limit! It would either encourage save scumming or punish players for being careful.

If anything, it would be trap reliant (if you get stuck in multiple basement-like traps), but even that is a cruel sting in the tail since you’d only find out they’re gone in the ending - unless maybe Snowcone says something to hint it’s too late, like “been stuck fow tuu wong… hope hewd am stiww thewe …”.

In the story, however, it’s just part of the motivation for why she couldn’t stop and rest.

You can prevent save scumming with limited saves per nest, though.
Or could wrap up all the hard mechanics with harder settings.
Eh, we’ll figure things out later on.

Ah yeah, so, would there be actual items for an inventory system? Or just “key items” you pick and thus you don’t seem to have a limitation on your inventory capacity?

Snowcone only picks up like two items that aren’t foal-shaped, but I can imagine there’s a one item limit. Your back is for foals, and any other item you have to carry in your mouth. It shouldn’t make a difference since there’s so few items to pick up, though.

I’ve figured you can carry as many foals as you want on your back, though it carries the risk of losing them to traps or enemies if you get hit - but having a limited amount of back space might also work. Maybe if you run out of foal space, you can carry one extra foal in your mouth?

Incidentally, I imagine that when saving a talky foal you carry it in your mouth until you get to safety, which prevents it from being part of your health bar.

Alright, I’m working on the most basic form of foal inventory.
Still lacking the actions, but it already lists the foals. Gives you name, gender, race, if chirpie or talkie and if you’re carrying it, is in the room’s nest or is your companion talkie. Will have to add the mouth space, but that will have to be later. I am busy with a research paper right now, but didn’t want to leave you hanging and took my spare time to play a bit with rmxp

Lots of screencaptures

Initial map. The dude over there is for my debugging and calling the list

When you have no babbehs with you or in a safe nest, you should get a dialog (later will be fixed so it’s Snowcone’s) telling you that

Picking up a chirpie, represented by a chick, kek

List of available foals. Name, development stage, race, sex and position, in this case, fwuffy back means it’s on YOUR back

Letting the talkie join you. Using a rat to represent the shitrat

It follows you! This might come in handy in case you want me to let the player command the talkies around or make them wait you in a place.

Updated list. As you might have noticed, it puts your “companion” talkie first. There’s a predefined order on the foal list, being the first one you can check the companion talkie, and next up the chirpies on your back. Will code later commands to swap them between the nestie (in case there’s one) or even drop them if you think that would be a good idea for the game

So that’s it. What do you think this far?

1 Like