City

Last November I posted a screenshot of a game I'd been working on for a while under a blog post called Exploring. I'd been working on it for a while, at that point, slowly adding things to it, but it wasn't long after that the project kinda died, as projects sometimes do.

Recently, however, with the release something activity going on over on the AGS boards, I thought I'd go back and polish up the first 5 rooms and release it as a demo of what I had envisioned. I'd always sort of considered it a rainy day project in my brain, and what better time to work on an old rainy day project than for a release something?

Thus, I went back and dug up the old files. Checking the very first scene I built for the game, when I was just starting off, I noticed that the day I started working on City was *exactly* one year from the day I started the Release Something thread, and thus thinking about working on it again, to the very day. With that delightful piece of synchronicity in mind, let me tell you a little about City.

The game started as a setting mish-mashed from a bunch of games whose worlds I loved. Deus Ex, and more so the sequel, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Messiah, even Metroid Prime to some extent, as well as tiny touches of Planescape: Torment. Though I've only played a bit of it, I'll throw Anachronox in there because the demo of that was an *enormous* influence on me as a young gamer, and I do mean to go back and complete it some day (along with Omikron, the only other game in that list that I've yet to play through).

What I wanted to do was to build a cyberpunk style city that still felt relevant to present day cities. I wanted to make it kinda mysterious, inviting to explore whilst still a little intimidating and strange. One of the major things I wanted to also do was to add lots of optional interactivity to the game, to give greater freedom to the player, and also to be a little bit more fun.

So, as I returned to the build of the game I had sitting on my hard drive, I had all these memories of the exciting concepts and philosophies in my mind... and how disappointed I was.

I got annoyed at the way the main character spoke. I got annoyed at the graphics, at the walkcycle (I spent a full day a week or so ago re-learning how to animate walkcycles, mind you), I was frustrated by the plot which felt shoehorned in because, hey, games need to have plots, right? The dialogues were tedious, uninspired and left me feeling that my game had been turned from a point and click exploration game into some cheap adventure game with a couple of extra gimmicks. Even the control scheme annoyed me. If the actual way you play a game annoys you, how is anything beyond this most basic element supposed to be fun?

And so, I went and I dug in the code. I've been touching up graphics, adding animations, bumping the contrast (I painted these scenes originally on a very poorly balanced screen). I deleted the second part. It felt like it didn't fit, and while I like a few elements, the whole of it didn't impress me at all. I had 17 backgrounds sketched out for the game... 12 of these I now consider unusable. I'm peeling back the fluff, the stuff that I feel is tacked on and taking the game back to how I originally envisioned it.

The plot? Gone. I don't even really know what the current plot is, actually, but the one I had before didn't fit the characters I wanted to create, so it's gone. I have a rough idea of how I can incorporate elements from the original storyline, but for the purposes of the demo, a small introduction, I am satisfied with killing the "complex" (cheesy, bland, uninspired) plot I had and sticking to basics. There's enough story to get you playing, but from then it's more character based that over-arching storytelling for the moment.

I've fixed most of the interface issues that bothered me, although I've still quite a bit of work to do there.

Most importantly of all, to me, I've gone back to trying to make a world that reacts to you as a player. There's more stuff to do, more stuff to find in this small 5 room demo than other games I've worked on. I have doubts that some of the things will actually be found by anyone, but I always get surprised at who notices what in my games. There are puzzles, and there is an end to the demo, but I hope that people won't stick to linearly trying to solve the puzzles. I want to go back to what made adventure games fun for me as a kid, which wasn't solving obtuse puzzles. It was interacting with a world, and seeing interesting things happen as a result.

I don't know if this will make for a fun, satisfying game. I don't know if I will have the energy to expand the game beyond a 5 room demo. But I am *excited* about this, it's reinspired me in a big way. After releasing ~airwave~ - I Fought the Law and the Law One I needed a break, and focused mainly on working on Blackwell Deception and a little bit of tinkering here and there on the second episode of ~airwave~. <3 was built on a whim, and started 2 weeks into the mags month, which is a foolish time to start working on a game, but somehow we built a game before the month was out. After spending a week or two doing Blackwell stuff (not much to do now!) and being a little uninspired in general, it's great to be back working on stuff that feels exciting and inventive.

The release something deadline is the 10th of July, so between then and now sometime, I expect to release a 5 room demo of City. It'll be something of a re-imagining whilst keeping the major things that I wanted it to be. After that, who knows? I don't know if I could ever sustain the energy needed to build a full city with the level of detail that I am trying to fill these 5 scenes with, and I have other projects I want to work on too. I hope you'll try the demo, anyway, and would love to hear some feedback.

I'll let you know when it's ready.