The Eighth Day is a 3D isometric strategy game that most gamers would not assume a small indie development team would announce as their first project. It’s a far cry from the 2D platformers one usually sees coming out of the indie market. In these first few blog posts, I hope to give some context to why The Eighth Day is the way it is both visually and mechanically by first delving into my past experiences with game development.

My name is Andre Hernandez and I’ve worked on several small video game ideas over the past few years, all of them being my own creations, but none of them ever got off the ground for various reasons. All of those failures lead to the eventual creation of New Chapter Games and the gathering of my current team, who are all amazingly talented and without whom I would be nowhere.

The first place I would have to start when talking about my video game aspirations would be my first video game idea: a Sonic the Hedgehog fan game called Mobius. Mobius, as I’m sure you all know, is the name of the planet that Sonic and pals live on. It used to be Earth before some crazy shit went down and changed it forever, causing furrys. My original idea was an isometric strategy RGP similar to Final Fantasy Tactics but with a focus on movement. This was important because Sonic’s whole deal is his speed, so you needed to approach the game from that angle for it to make any sense (unlike the horrendous Sonic Chronicles game (just my opinion don’t kill me)).

A lot of the special abilities for Sonic moved him from one tile to another while either dealing damage or some other environmental effect (leaving flames on the ground behind him). Once I made these for Sonic, however, I ran into a problem: no one could keep up. I was using Tails and Knuckles as allies at the time and they would simply be left in the dust. Realistic? Yes. Fun? No. So I had to figure out ways for both of these characters to catch up to Sonic in the event he rushed off into combat or another area. I gave Tails a hookshot that he could use on the environment or enemies to propel himself forwards, which helped a lot. For Knuckles, I did the fairly lazy “he digs under the ground forward” solution. It worked: every character was keeping up with one another. After working on these kinds of mechanics I kind of fell in love with the idea of them. Very few tactics style games have mechanics that move the character around while also performing an action.

The story of Mobius is stupidly complicated and bloated so I won’t even begin to go into it (maybe a future blog post). While I developed the plot in my head, I did not take any steps to incorporate it into the game as I was focused solely on the combat mechanics. The story would be told through cutscenes between levels, and gameplay would be interrupted only briefly through in-game dialogue. I feel that everything in the game should advance the plot, but that cutscenes and combat should be two separate things. The player should not view a cutscene and think, “I wish I had played that instead of watching it”. This meant that combat in cutscenes should be next to non-existent. I still feel that way today.

The main reason Mobius didn’t get very far was due to the fact that I was programming it in Dark Basic. This meant that the game pretty much ran like shit at all times and trying to do movement or animations caused the game to explode. This alone killed the game after several months of working on it, but I learned a lot about programming and a bit about AI since I attempted to write crude AI enemies (they did actually “work”, which was pretty awesome).

Below are some of the images I made for Mobius. All images were made in Powerpoint and then exported as individual images and then imported into the game. Powerpoint is pretty much how I do anything image related so you’re going to see a lot more of that in the future. Lots of people start uncontrollably laughing when they hear me say that, but I’ve found Powerpoint to be the perfect tool to create images if you have zero artistic ability.

Test Grid made in Powerpoint

Power Ring Menu Object

All text had to be made into images and then imported, I never found a way to just display text

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned next Friday for the continuing backstory of The Eighth Day!