Fabrication (game)

Fabrication is the prequel to White Pearl, created by Harry Gill. It is a 2D turn-based RPG with 15-20 hours of playtime. Although the game is set in the same universe as White Pearl, the game can be enjoyed as a standalone experience. The game follows on in the same style of gameplay as established in White Pearl, but with improvements based on player feedback. Contrary to White Pearl, it is released as a commercial title.

It is a story-focused role-playing game which will feature a main story around 15 hours in length, with the world of Ottrea to explore in it's Fourth Dark Era, set before the events of White Pearl. The game was developed in respect to the criticisms of White Pearl, and Harry aimed for the quality of the game to be the same or higher. The turn-based combat system was reworked to include more real-time elements and action. There are some visual improvements such as weather effects. Crafting and trading returns from White Pearl, in an improved form. Additions include a quest log, fishing, 'fame system' and reputation and relationship levels. There is no world map in the game and it is semi-linear.

The game will feature a completely original story, like it is a new game and does not require previous knowledge of White Pearl to play.

Fabrication is set before the events of White Pearl, in an age of science and technology. A rebellion known as the Underground is formed, who seek to uncover the Government's agenda and gather together a revolution against the iron-fisted rule of the world of Ottrea. Crimson, a newly appointed member of the Underground, is sent to uncover the truth behind the Government's recent experiments. The player travels all over the world to the three districts: Ry'ner, Kolan and Terra, in hopes of inciting the flames of rebellion and discovering answers to their causes and woes. While doing so, the player discovers more about the main cast, villains and the Government's purpose. The White Pearl is also featured in the game as an important plot device - important figures like the Mythologist and Fortuneseeker also appear in Fabrication and play an important part to the story.

Initially developed as an experimental project during White Pearl's development in 2016, Harry restarted development of the game in 2018, from the pre-production stage. The game was announced at July 2018 and development of the game in the engine began around that time, while Harry was still producing major updates to White Pearl. The game went through a long, spaced-out development period, but it wasn't as tumultuous as White Pearl's. In a October 2020 development update, it was revealed that Fabrication will be released by the end of 2020 or early 2021. In November 2020, the Steam store page for the game was released, revealing a 11th December 2020 release date.

Locations

 * The Spirit Forest
 * Top Secret Library
 * Underbelly of the Lab
 * The Underground
 * Ry'ner - City of the Sky
 * Underneath Ry'ner

Development
In 2016, during development of White Pearl, the game was initially planned to release as a standalone title together with the release of White Pearl, but it would prove impossible to work on two games at the same time as a single developer.

After White Pearl was finished, Harry didn't want to work on another indie game by himself, but encouragement from family and friends led him to working on another game.

A few weeks after releasing White Pearl, Harry began developing Fabrication from its early concept stage in 2018. He moved over to RPGMaker MV after wanting to take advantage of the higher resolution and processing power, but decided that it would take too long for him to establish a distinct art style for the game in that engine. In order to make development quicker, he restarted the project using White Pearl's engine, RPGMaker VX Ace, in July 2018. After a few weeks following that, he announced the game. Because Fabrication was made using the same engine, he could reuse some assets from White Pearl but mostly everything from Fabrication is original because the game is commercial and many assets in White Pearl are not suitable for commercial use. He had to purchase several graphic and script liceneses for Fabrication.

As with White Pearl, Harry was alone in developing the project. However he had voluntary help by game testers that he had recruited and artists that he had commissioned.

When plans were first officially being made during June 2018, it was decided that Fabrication will be a commercial game. The game needs custom art and commercial viable assets and music which elongates the development process compared to White Pearl, but it felt that is was a necessary step he had to make in order to became a "genuine game developer". He estimates that Fabrication will take a little longer to make than White Pearl, despite him initially thinking it will release in 2019, it was nowhere near close to that goal. In August 2018, Harry asked his sister Holly to make art for the game since she initially designed the look of the characters in 2016. Holly started off with making art for all the main characters in 2018. In May 2020, Harry also asked his father Martin to make sound effects for the game to which he accepted. Martin was responsible for 20% of the sound effects used in the game, mostly in the animations.

June-August 2018 was dedicated entirely to pre-production, and planning the location and characters. The story plan was completed on 28th September 2018, which Harry has been using to follow through the game's story and main content to completion. Fabrication was made with the feedback from White Pearl in mind - making it more interesting to play overall with a story that is easier to make sense of.

When the game began development in 2019, it went through a tough development. From a lack of personal motivation, with the need to focus on other priorities, Harry said that development of Fabrication will be 'very erractic'. The game was initially scheduled to release in 2019, but then it was pushed to 'before 2021'.

Harry cited the development of Fabrication as "stressful" because of these new challenges like creating a sneaking system, combo system, that he decided to make. He wanted to undertake these challenges in order to create something new as a game developer.

Because Fabrication is a large game requiring a lot of elements to be designed by a single developer, the first two years in development was mostly spent planning the game's scale, estimated content, as well as creating story scenes, prototyping field mechanics like the sneaking section in Chapter 3, and mostly creating events. From March 2020 onwards, the game was in 'full-scale' development, this included designing every battle in the game, making the gameplay more deeper between Chapters, creating a quest log, adding items to the game etc. The main game development finished at September 2020. Apparently there was very little 'retakes' in Fabrication, since Harry could easily design good or high-level quality content in the RPGMaker engine within a day or a month, depending on the task. Consequently, this made later development and content checks easier since the content was completed far in advance and could easily be improved. The large gap between main development and release also meant enough time to bug fix the game, conduct usability research and giving the sound team enough time to finish composing the music and creating the sound effects. The main difference between two games, that Harry believes, is 'consistency'.

The game hit a production milestone in March 2020, with a majority of the game's planned story, characters and areas developed and existing within the game. Harry said that he will move into the "brainstorming design" phase soon, even though he has a plan for the design of the game, a lot of it is subjective and there is still a lot more ideas needed to build up the game. The milestone was regarded as the 'scaffolding' of the game, with the design, polish and final production to follow thereafter would be the 'building'. He said that, "even though it is impossible to put dates on a production of a game this sporadic and subject to change", he is confident that the game will eventually be finished "now more than ever". Not much of the game was developed in the beginning of 2020, owing to the sporadic nature of a hobby game development, but when he finished making the final town of the game, it forced him to look at the bigger picture and reach this decision. In March 2020, Harry also put official project management for the game in place, and created a working contract. More overall design plans were made for the game during that time, about the battle system and game balance. The final dungeon was also planned. The Chapter 6 story Harry struggled with, since it would have to involve retconning/changing events that transpired in White Pearl. The story was once going to make huge references and calls to events in White Pearl, but Harry trashed most of this initial plan after it failed to work well and involved a lot of exposition. The final dungeon was designed differently out of both time constraints and a design decision.

Another trashed mechanic was Feather Feet, initially uses were tied to this but it failed to work well in practice and got annoying. Relationship and reputation were going to have a big focus in the game, but this later got overshadowed by mechanics added late in development like fishing, trading and the spell exchange system. So special weapon exchange was tied to reputation instead. And a higher relationship level meant discussions between party members at Inns.

When designing the dungeons and field maps, Harry first took the feedback from a White Pearl player to make them more interesting and involved. Harry also researched how to make more complicated puzzles using the engine. It was planned for every main character to have a unique field mechanic, such as Crimson using bombs, Jack using alchemy and Jansen using lockpicking - but then it was narrowed down to just bombs and lockpicking. The side content in the game took some time to think of and implement in the game, and missions were hard to design/program in the engine due to the Underground being one single instance, as well as the game's story focus which prevented the player from having as much freedom as they did in White Pearl, and so this content was cut in order to reduce development time.

The overall story of the game was difficult to make because Harry had only a brief concept by the time of developing White Pearl, and even when a basic plan was ready in September 2018, it was still very basic and the story needed a lot more elements. He struggled with creating the villains' story the most, much like White Pearl. He finds it easier to make the story as he continues to create the game, expanding and explaining in many elements of the narrative that are uncovered. Even when most of the story was completed, he was very uncertain about it because it didn't "connect" with him. However tester feedback proved that they liked the story and thought it was enjoyable, so he decided to continue making it in such a linear way. Though the story did not go through many rewrites when compared to White Pearl, it had to be continually fleshed out and expanded. The story of Chapter 5 and 6 was also very difficult since it had to connect both games together, make fans and first-timers understand what is going on, while simultaneously telling a new tale. The end result is a string of cutscenes at certain points of the game, and there is a point at the start of Chapter 3 where the player has to sit through around 10 minutes of cutscenes in the game before they can finally play - this was a source of contention for a particular tester, which is why it was decided that you'll be able to skip cutscenes upon launch and no prior playthrough. But Harry was against cutting the story because the story was carefully constructed and everything that was said mattered; in White Pearl he felt that there was long cutscenes for the sake of long cutscenes, but in Fabrication it was more meaningful. He also aimed for a balance in gameplay (story & battles) and, with it being linear, he had to come up with new and interesting ways to make gameplay which was a main challenge in the development of Fabrication since it tested his ability with game design and the RPGMaker engine.

Fortunately, the game didn't suffer from exposition problems like in White Pearl. This was partly due to the world and driving forces of the game already being explained in White Pearl (since its in the same series), but also because Harry wanted to make the story easy to digest. He wanted to show more and tell less in the game.

Like last time, he made up ideas mostly by adding more things to the game and connecting dots together. He enjoyed on focusing on the emotional aspect for Fabrication, and was proud to create a narrative that was fully engaging. He felt that White Pearl suffered from too many characters and stories. Because all of the world-building was established in White Pearl, it was easier to explain the story of Fabrication.

The initial concept of the game was to be a non-linear game with emphasis on side content, but when the game started proper production, Harry found himself being drawn to make the game focus on the story. This was because he felt strongly about "telling this tale" and that many other aspects of development such as programming and design, were not complete until 2020, so the game's story naturally became a focus since it was mode first and foremost.

Because the game is linear, Harry didn't have to design as much as he did with White Pearl and the overall development was a lot smoother with less pressure and he could focus more on the quality - which allowed him to make different gameplay elements and experiment more with the RPGMaker engine.

Because the game is set out and designed in a different way from White Pearl, development was going to take around the same time (3 years), as well as extensive QA and usability testing warranted constant changes and adjustments within the game during 2020. Harry felt this was necessary in order to improve as a developer and is willing to take as long as he likes. He also wanted to push away from using copyrighted materials like he did from White Pearl and create a lot more original material for Fabrication - for example, the music and the art being the biggest tasks. He got help from several people for the music, being able to be used in a commercial setting and the art was initially drawn by his sister, but then he turned to game artists and fan-artists on Twitter and commissioned them for promotional and/or graphic art. With the in-game graphics (tilesets), Harry looked very closely and had to prune a lot of graphics that weren't suitable for use in a commercial game and so he was operating in a more constrained environment for Fabrication.

Towards the end of development in July 2020, he had to cut out a lot of development tools and placeholders in order to get the game closer in a release state. In that month he also made and completed 75% of the sidequests in the game. Missions and upgrading feather feet charges are cut features of the game.

At the end of development, Harry believes that Fabrication took a few months longer than he would've liked, but the sheer improvements he has made as a game developer using the RPGMaker engine are greater than he had anticipated and Fabrication is clearly a more polished and enjoyable experience, which he is very happy with. Despite initial development being tough personally, once all the initial stages were complete and only designing content was left, he enjoyed it the most then.

At the end of July 2020, the release date was initially revealed to be 5th January 2021, but then pushed to 26th January 2021 a day after the initial announcement for marketing reasons and to be spend more time quality checking.