Devlog 6 - Occam's Razer

My sketchbook and design/writing notebook for the game. I like to be a little fancy!

An interesting week this week, friends. Well, every week is interesting at this end of a game, where every problem is a brand new problem, you're still working everything out and you haven't hit those mid-game doldrums of "I like being creative but this week all I am doing is things I already know how to do". Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to most of the problems being solved and the process of building my ideas not being a matter of solving 3 different problems every time, but there's also the fact that problem solving is satisfying and it feels good to walk away from a problem that you weren't sure how to solve.

Design

The first thing I did on Monday morning this week was patch up a few little issues that I knew about, and then compiled the project and asked Kelsey to take a look at it. Over the weekend I reached the conclusion that I wasn't going to be able to continue making improvements to my systems until I got an external pair of eyes on things to see how an actual player would interact with them. She's a perfect candidate for early playtesting because she is well versed in the genre, but won't approach the project like a designer, and is also both attentive to systems and not particularly interested in slogging through clunkily designed interfaces.

So, with a very limited build but with all systems working in the way I had planned them up until that point, I sat quietly and watched while she played, reminding myself that it's always awful to watch people play your projects, that it's normal for things to not be communicated well and for this to be frustrating to see, and that there were going to be bugs and that I could fix them. And... much to my delight, the systems all worked. There were a few little bugs which I could talk her through, and she asked some questions (some of which I answered, and some I remained quiet to see if she'd figure out the answer by playing), and I noticed some things that needed to be implement more clearly, but overall I was so pleased to see that everything worked more or less as expected, and that I think I have a good foundation for a game here. Oh, thank goodness. What a relief. That wonderful feeling of hey, this might be a solid idea after all. 

We had a discussion after she had accomplished both of the small goals in the build, I made some notes on things I can fix and improvements I could make and then I thought it would be fun to show her the system I liked the most, so I told her what to do and then sat back to watch my cool project at work. Of course, that immediately broke something. "Well," I thought, "it'll make for a funny end to this part of the week's blog post."

Troubleshooting

In the process of trying to get the project in a worthy state for someone else to take a look at it, I had written out a list of issues that I thought should be cleared up first at the end of last week. One of the harder to find ones was a strange bug in which sometimes my mouse handling code wasn't processing clicks. I have quite a few lines of code handling all of the mouse and interface stuff (somewhere between 500-600) and so it wasn't too surprising to me that I might have made a strange mistake, and I spent a good hour or two going through and cleaning all this up, making it nicer to read, and replacing some of the repetitive bits with for loops. No luck finding that bug. The next day I was playing some Skyrim (it makes sense, I like old RPGs, and old computers, and keyboards and mice without these glowy lights on by default - my mouse has started doing this fancy pulsing glow lately that just seems completely unnecessary) and also getting a little frustrated at some of the bugs in that game. Weird pathfinding, the mousewheel handling through menus is very strange, sometimes I'll be underwater and suddenly fall to the ground as though I'm in the air. Oh and sometimes when I go to cast a spell nothing happens.

This was particularly frustrating when I was clearing out a cave of tough bandits. Stupid game. I'm clicking the button but nothing is happening. Oh, wait a minute. I know where I've seen this issue before. Hang on, maybe there's a reason my mouse has started doing a fancy pulsing glow lately.

No, reader, I am not proud of how long it took me to make this connection. But I am pleased at the fact that unplugging my mouse and plugging it back in again seems to have fixed the issue. Occam's Razer, right? (Actually it's a Keychron but you know I had to). 

Programming

All that said, after Monday morning's playtest session I had a new feature I wanted to implement which immediately filled me with dread. I knew the logic behind doing this task, but I figured the implementation of such logic would be overwhelming in a very draining way. Reader, I'm happy to report that I got it working in about 15 minutes, and the delight I felt as I watched this feature triggering all of my test flags was so great that I let out an audible sigh of relief. It's like solving the best puzzle.

After that, I set about doing what I knew I had to do - I stripped out most of the hard coded functionality for the prototype I had sent and started rebuilding my systems to be more modular. This has been kind of a theme for this project, but it's an important one. One of my goals is to work with what I think of as "Attribute based design". Rather than each interaction being completely hand-coded, my aim is to give the player a handful of abilities, and then have the attributes of the items in that world inform how the world reacts to those abilities. Imagine if you were playing Loom, and got the draft that allows you to turn things green, and rather than only being useful in a handful of places, you can now turn basically anything green - it's just that this only has a "puzzle solved" effect in the appropriate places. This is more like the approach I'm trying to take, but I don't want to write this code individually for each individual hotspot in the world. Hence the constant refactoring.

One nice thing I learned about AGS in the process of setting this up is that extender functions can be passed with identical function names as long as the type changes. I vaguely suspected that this might be true due to the fact that we can call things like Character.Scaling(); and Object.Scaling(); despite the types being different, but I was still very suspicious on Wednesday morning when I typed my duplicate functions in and it just... worked. I had this explained to me nicely here when I posted about it, and what a wonderful feature this is. I then mentioned how wonderful this is to Dan G and he gave me a name for it - "Function overloading". That's the best thing about relearning programming by actually making a project - I immediately find an application for everything I learn. In any case, now when I put a new hotspot or object in my game, the default handling for trying to use your abilities on it is not "I can't do that" or no response. The character walks to the coordinate specified in the properties (not using the built in walk to coordinates because it won't work with my systems), faces the direction specified in the properties, and then checks the objects other properties and applies the ability or gives the response according to those properties. I think of it a little like The Incredible Machine but in an adventure game, except my machine is a lot more limited and much more credible. Or is it...?

Writing

Writing an adventure game is interesting. It takes a while to get to know the character and most of the lines require you to know your character reasonably well. So I'm not stressing too much about getting things correct just yet. I know my character's backstory and his goal, I know the setting and the plot, but the little things will take time. It's fine, I have time. It is interesting going through hotspot descriptions and interaction responses and seeing if I can give more details about the world and character through those, though. It's a little bit like setting all the design elements in place and then playing the game and allowing it to tell you what it is. 

This sounds kind of like nonsense but it's the same with any form of improvisation. Play a few chords on guitar and listen for what is good, what is bad. Make a few marks on a page and look at what looks good, what looks bad. Eventually if you keep carving all the things that aren't the head from the block of marble, the block of marble is a head. The quality of that head does depend on your actual skills to find the good and the bad, though, sorry, the first one at least will probably be a bit crap. At least I can erase my crap lines. Stone is a bit less forgiving. I once had someone try to get me to come and do tattoos for their backyard tattooing business after they saw my artwork. The ultimate form of "no undo"!

Summary

Okay, so I've proven that the system works, the interface has potential, and I've rebuilt it all to be flexible. My next steps are to build a small chunk of game and get a small group of people playing it, and seeing what they think. With all my heart I yearn to do cool animations, a detailed and animated interface and polish up the scenery, but there's no point perfecting something untested. So that's my next goal, I'm building a section of game with just a few small but diverse and reasonably intricate chunks of gameplay that will get the player to use all of their abilities (and hopefully teach them how they can work in unison) and then we'll find out if I have a worthy enough design on my hands to start building a proper game from this, or if I need to go back to the drawing board and rethink some things. I'm going to get people to do some regular playtesting - I've got another one lined up with Kelsey on Monday just to see how she interacts with the new things I added, how everything is working together. From there I need to write out a big todo list and then just get building.

Devlog 5 - Getting it Right

It's very nice to try ideas out in loose pencil before I actually start drawing on the computer.

This week has been a good week. There's always a feeling when things start working together in greater harmony where I think "This feels like an actual game now". This project has taken longer to get to this stage than normal, but I'm starting to get that feeling. It's a good one.

Writing

I've been very design focused so far, but I have finally started trying to write a few lines for the game, and here's another area where I am very rusty. But I also think, looking back at my old work, that I never had particularly high standards for my writing before. I did very little self editing, always wrote far too much, and often wouldn't think about what information I was trying to convey with each line. This time I'm trying to reduce the quantity of spoken dialogue that I create and increase the quality of what remains. After lots of tinkering I think I have the opening lines of the game in place, which seemed to take me forever - but I know some of my favourite writers rework their lines endlessly to get them right. I can also tweak background paintings forever.

It will be interesting to see if I still believe in the quality of these lines after having written more. At least I managed to name four of the characters already.

Programming

Your friendly learner programmer is slowly getting back in the swing of things. I can write a for loop now without having to reference the manual to remember the formatting. I have started using enumerated types for my functions again, the declarations of which I did have to look up in the manual but are thankfully as simple as I’d remembered. I wrote my first switch statement ever this week, what a wonderful addition to the engine since I last used it. And, best of all, when I hooked up a few different little systems that I had been building for a while and tested it - everything worked. It’s all pretty simple stuff, I am not building a ridiculously complex game, but to see things I had envisioned working properly was a delight. It means that I can build my ideas with my current knowledge. Time will tell if those ideas translate well to player experience!

One thing I am being careful about is not getting too worked up in getting a piece of code "right" at this moment. There are a lot of places where I know that I have a function working but I've done things in a very inefficient way, typing out things manually rather than handling them in loops, functions, etc. The honest truth is that my brain is still quite weak at following the logical processes of everything, so every now and then I will have something that I know I could do in a neat and compact way, and so I give myself one chance at doing it that way. If I can't get that working, I don't waste more time trying to get it working in that compact form, and just manually write it all out, which is quicker for me at this point, and leave myself a note to come back and try again when I am more fit for coding. I think it's okay to work like this for now - eventually I aim to be competent enough that following these chains of logic is trivial. But I would rather get everything working properly and try the features in game instead of wasting time trying to find the neatest way to write a function that I haven't even tested with everything else yet.

Art

I have everything in place enough now that the art tasks for this game are just my normal day to day "Here are the items on your todo list, make sure you're getting a bit done each week". This part I know how to do. It's still work, and it takes a lot of time as always, but in this case I have the confidence so that I am not really intimidated by these tasks, even the more complicated ones. Every font looks wrong, though, and I have started trying to make my own. It also looks wrong, but at least in this case I can keep fiddling with it bit by bit until it's less wrong.

Design

Here's the weird part - I can play some of my game now. Can even solve some puzzles with the player's abilities. There's no inventory or interactive dialogue in yet, but I know how to make those things, and it's the other stuff that I have been more interested in getting working. I know I'm being mysterious about this but I want to figure this stuff out more before I talk about it because while it's quite simple, the implementation means that I have to see it myself to know if it feels good, and if my ideas are strong enough to merit basing an entire game on them. It's really satisfying to be refining the things that don't quite feel right (it's amazing how much an animation playing or any kind of feedback are an essential part of design feeling wrong or right). 

On Wednesday night I was hooking in a bunch of the animations that will make the design feel better and playing around with the elements and my brain went “Wait, wouldn’t it be more interesting for the player if…” and I figured out another layer I could add - just a small one, but this sort of thing was my hope. Build a set of simple systems, make them interact, and then experiment with them and see what emerges. I’m not trying to build puzzles yet, as this start section is designed to let players figure out how to use the game’s systems in a limited, not too challenging environment, but I think this sort of approach will be a fantastic way of designing interesting gameplay once I am. I know Jonathan Blow has talked about this sort of approach in discussing how he designed puzzles for Braid & The Witness. And I think it ties in nicely with my idea that an adventure game protagonist can bring a set of abilities and tools to a situation and we can encourage them to use those in interesting ways, rather than relying on players finding the majority of their tools in their surroundings.

Of course, people might get really bored with using limited resources. But I never got bored of the simple panel puzzles in The Witness. I plan on showing a build around to a few friends once I have a bit more interactivity in place, in order to get some feedback - I’m sure they’ll have thoughts on all of this.

Summary

Overall, the results of this week's labours have left me feeling quite optimistic. I always have the feeling that things should be moving slightly faster, but also the feeling that I'm solving new problems to me, and doing so takes time. Even more time now that I am re-learning so much. That being said, I've discussed parts of the design, writing and even shown a bit of art to various people and the response has all been positive interest, and that gives me energy. Yesterday I looked at the programming task I had set myself for the day and I did not want to do it. Even the thought of making it work felt overwhelming. But I broke it into smaller pieces, rewrote it several times, and eventually got it working. It's the only thing I got done on the game in the whole day before I got to working on some end of the todo list Old Skies art. But I got it working, and the next time I need to solve that problem I know how to do it. That's a good feeling.

Thanks for reading, all. I'm off to set up my telescope to try and catch another glimpse of comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.

This is the second comet I've seen with this scope since I bought it.

Devlog 4 - AGS Is My Friend Again

Cripes, a new todo list. I have been busy!

Well, readers, several weeks in to spending a little bit of time in AGS daily and it's starting to feel comfortable again. I've gotten a lot of value out of just lurking on the AGS forums, reading answers to tech discussions and seeing the insights there, and just getting hands on time with the editor and engine. I'm also still trying to get the core Old Skies stuff finished up and ticked off, but of course the list magically grew a fair bit in the last month. That's the nature of to-do lists after testing. I'll get there. I'm slightly less tired than I was this time last week, but only slightly. I have enough dark chocolate (85%, the good stuff) to get me through one blog post, at least.

Design

It's amazing how much ideas change once I try to make them work in engine. I think some of the issue is that my long gap between making things come to life has made me forget what it's like to conceptualise an idea, build it, and then tweak it just right. Another issue is that I am probably trying to do things slightly differently both to what most AGS games do and what I tried to do in AGS in the past.

For example, after implementing one idea this week and trying it I immediately knew that it felt awful, and that I had to change things. This was a rare, happy occurrence where after I went for a walk I realised how I could change it both to remove the issue I was having and improve another element I wasn't happy with, but it did caution me - things that seem like fun in my head will not always be fun in game. Every little element of an adventure game probably has nuance to it, down to how we walk around scenes.

Programming

I am sorry to say that I have found myself to be very bad at mathematics now. In trying to do some maths based operations I found myself very quickly overwhelmed by fairly basic ideas. Because of this I am re-learning maths, just a little bit every day with my morning coffee, because I seem to have forgotten the vast majority of it. Sorry, Mr. Ford, who always encouraged me to be an illustrator and didn't yell at me when I drew cartoon owls riding strange tricycles in the margins of my calculus exam. I think you might have been onto something with the illustration thing, though. Happily, my old Ti-83 graphing calculator still works after all this time. I'm doing the long division on paper with a pencil, though, because I'm trying to get my head comfortable with doing it again - in short, I'm training to get fit for maths.

In terms of standard AGS stuff, though, it's going well. Here's a quick fire effect I built in AGS before maths class one morning. It can follow objects or characters or even the mouse cursor as seen here:

Time to build Flamethrower Quest

The background is an old one I had done a couple of years ago for a nice tribute series. I have a bunch of other effects and variants I want to build, but am limiting myself to a little bit of fiddling each day, which is the only way the actual work gets done.

Art

I've painted the first scene for the game. It looks good and I am happy with it. No doubt I will be polishing it in tiny amounts for a month. I had to change a bunch of stuff once I saw it in engine, and I decided to do a bunch of parallax effects and things because why make the first scene I've implemented in an AGS project in years simple? It probably seems funny to consider drawing a single scene a nice milestone considering how many scenes I've drawn for other people's projects but it still feels like a good one. I think this game will look nice.

Summary

Probably the biggest criticism I would have of myself this week is that my goal setting habits have diminished a little bit now that I'm trying to draw, animate, implement, test and tweak all at once. I tend to find my work practices a little more scattered and less focused. I think now that I'm getting a bit more familiar with implementing in AGS, though, I can probably go back to working steadily through a checklist and making measurable progress. My biggest criticism of myself last week was that I overextended myself, tried a bit too hard to re-learn AGS and didn't get enough sleep. The gig that I mentioned that I hadn't done enough practice for went great, but I was definitely a little over-tired and made a few mistakes that were just "Didn't get enough sleep, brain forgot how this part goes". I've been better about all of that this week.

I am still finishing up Old Skies, a bit each day, and I'm very close to having the fundamental stuff done. I know I've been telling people this for weeks but I keep taking care of all the extra stuff that keeps popping up on the "important things to do" list and that list is still nearly all done. Dave has been putting the trailer together (as opposed to the "teaser trailer" which already exists) and it looks good. I'd redo so much of my work on the project if I could. That's always true. I'm proud of my work on the game, nevertheless.

Thanks for reading. Wish me luck with the mathematics study. And send more dark chocolate, it's all gone now.

Devlog 3 - Relearning How to Use the AGS Editor

The current state of my todo list. See how many more checkmarks since last week!

The process of creating this game is an act of taking a number of hypotheses I have formed about what makes a game interesting in the last decade and putting them to the test, hoping that I can visualise a player's experience of my intent. I will inevitably be wrong about many things. It will be interesting (and likely frustrating) to find out what I learn I am wrong about during development and what I realise I missed after development.

Programming

Now that I have my basic functionality working in AGS, it's been time to learn how to use the actual built in functions that the engine provides. Quite frankly, I feel like an absolute beginner. Unlike the process of setting up my own functions, storing my own data and doing my own calculations, a bunch of the built in features of AGS have changed quite a lot since I last used the engine seriously, and a lot of things that I used to know how to do are different now. It's a little frustrating to find that I don't even know how to process a mouse click or move a viewport - very basic functions that I once took for granted. The important thing I keep reminding myself is that it's okay that I'm a beginner, to break my process down into individual steps and that soon enough I will know how to do all of these things again. It's okay to be unable to do basic things, it's just a matter of learning these pieces of knowledge bit by bit. There is no shame in inexperience, only potential!

All that said, I love the latest versions of AGS. Many of the changes since I last used this engine & editor are wonderful, and will help me facilitate some of my current ideas in ways that I couldn't have hoped to accomplish before, or would have required much more convoluted methods. What fantastic work everybody is doing on this engine. There's so much good stuff that I have to caution myself not just to tinker with these things all day, which I could easily do. I allow myself little bit of tinkering, and then a good chunk of actual making a game.

It does feel satisfying to be starting to build a game, and not just working on systems, too. One thing I am noticing is that I get a very quick feedback loop on whether something feels right or wrong, because I can immediately put things into the engine and test it. It's not like that when making assets for other people to implement.

There are also a few things that I want to put into the game but cannot get working right yet. I allow myself a few attempts at getting these working, and then instruct myself to move on. As stubborn as I am, I am aware that logical thinking is a skill, and I am very poor at this skill currently. As I continue to work on this game I hope that this skill will improve, and so will my ability to accomplish my ideas. Meanwhile, my to-do list keeps me honest and stops me from spending too much time in the tinkering mode.

Design

It's also satisfying to be thinking about design again. I've been talking to a bunch of different people about design lately, everybody with quite different opinions. I don't think anybody sits exactly where I do on the current state of adventure game design, which is probably a good thing. That likely means that I have something to bring to the genre. I also think people have very different ideas on what "Innovation" means here, too. It probably runs the whole gamut from something very simple like "The player character is an elephant" to "You have to dissect your own psyche in order to deconstruct your notions of the world that you perceive in order to apply these new concepts to your surroundings and progress" or something. It's been a while since I chatted to Igor Hardy but I have no doubts it's along those wonderful lines.

On my end, I'm looking at being a bit more thorough in my examination of the very basics of the genre and seeing what else I can get out of the systems that might be overlooked by other designers these days. I think a lot of players and designers have a somewhat fixed idea of what point & click adventure games do. It would be nice to try to expand that a little. There's a few sparks from things that inspired me years ago that are still smouldering inside me, waiting to be kindled into a fire.

Art

The latest page in the project sketchbook. "Rigid vigilance" is such a bad phrase, and so annoying to say. Turns out writing short descriptions of things is a skill, too!

I always jumped right into creating 'final' visuals for game projects in the past. I'm not doing that this time! That means I'm doing placeholder sketches to build with instead of trying to nail the game's art direction down, and almost all of my actual work on the visual side of the game has been trying to improve my character animation workflow. It's been going well, I think I have myself setup to make the nicest, most solid character animations I've done yet. I've also sunk a considerable chunk of hours into doing so - but that's game development. Sometimes the research into how to do things better just takes that long.

The actual worldbuilding drawing I'm doing is in the project sketchbook. One fun little trick I found to help the process of filling these sketchbook pages was to come up with "look at" descriptions for the ideas I am sketching as I draw them. This gives a sense of direction to the activity that sketching can otherwise lack a little bit. I'll have at least one full sketchbook of these pages by the time I have all of my ideas for this project laid out, and while many of them just won't ever get used, doing things this way means that I'm less likely to forget things or rush into drawing things before I've played around with the idea a little bit first. Hopefully I'll also remember how to write after I write a few dozen more bad look at descriptions.

Summary

As I slowly piece this project together, new ideas emerge on an almost daily basis. I've heard designers and other creatives talk about the act of putting the elements in place and then seeing how they work together, and letting our experiments with those elements bring fresh layers to light. I am definitely finding that is the case here. The more I work on this idea, the more I believe in it.

I'm also behind on my drawing work because I've been doing so much prototyping (although I did finish the last 'essential' character animation for Old Skies this week), I haven't been sleeping enough because I'll wake up early to write code after staying up late to write code, I only read one book in September, I haven't done my normal amount of guitar practice for my gig this weekend... developing my own idea and re-learning to program is life consuming in ways that I haven't missed. I'll put "finding a balance between this project and everything else in my life" on my to-do list, I guess.