Devlog 10 - Progress, Again.

I have more than just old game scenes in my reference folder, but I'm keeping my PureRef file to these for now.

No Monday morning test this week, because while I rebuilt my UI at the end of last week, the UX still needed a fair bit of work. So a good chunk of Monday was spent doing UX refinements. It's mostly a thankless task because UX is a bit like a font. You only really notice them when they're annoying, when they're done well they are basically invisible to most users. It also seems to be the consensus that the best way to get UX right is to keep getting it slightly less wrong through each iteration until it's basically not annoying anymore. So a lot of the day was the cycle of implement, test, adjust, test, etc. By the end of that development day I had everything feeling pretty good to me (although there's a tiny bit more vector math I need to do in order to get some timings right. Later, though - it's a simple enough calculation, I just have to stay focused on productivity so I can get this new UI in the hands of testers).

I finished off the day by re-learning how to use drawing surfaces & dynamic sprites in AGS. You can't say I don't know how to have a good time.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent building a second room designed very specifically to teach a particular idea, and on Thursday I designed another room to teach another aspect. Friday I was fixing, polishing and implementing stuff, not doing new things. Next week I plan on getting all of this gameplay working, polishing and tweaking and trying to make sure it feels good, explains itself well and if I can have it in some sort of decent shape, I plan to get testers looking at it again by the end of the week.

Where I think the project sits now:

I think it feels good to use your abilities. When I was testing the game before sending it off to testers, I felt the tedium of my own systems. When the tests came back reflecting this, I wasn't surprised. I don't think the whole thing is "right" yet, though it's a lot better. Still more to do, but I think it can be refined, honed, tweaked. I even expanded how the abilities can work a little, and I expect this will keep happening the more I design around them.

I think the mechanics can be used for some clever gameplay. You only have a few abilities, but they can be combined in interesting ways, and I already have a list of puzzles that I want to build. I fully expect some will work well, others will get thrown out, but this is my first time ever designing in this way, so that won't be a surprise.

I think I still need to find the fun. "Clever" doesn't necessarily mean "fun". I worry that the limited number of elements will make for repetitive gameplay - though of course aside from the things I've been building, I have the normal avenues of inventory items and dialogues with which to craft gameplay. But I have been very, very focused on the systems and the foundation are not the gameplay. On Friday I finally started to try to put the "game" in, as opposed to working strictly with mechanics, and I'm hopeful that it'll start to come to life soon.

The systems are not the gameplay. This was the topic of some extremely sleep deprived, late night, "I have to rethink how I approach implementing these ideas a bit" emails to a friend last weekend. Yes, of course, I have been focused on getting the systems sorted out. That is crucial. But once they are, the gameplay will not be a solved problem, in fact, it will only be the beginning of the problem. Designing a system does not mean that you've designed gameplay. It means that you've designed some tools. You then still have to design what you want players to do with those tools. My game is not fun yet because my focus has not been on designing interesting gameplay, it has been on designing a foundation. It's akin to making sure that it feels good to make Mario run, jump, shoot, fly first, and then you can design your challenges around these mechanics once they're right.

I think my game will look nice. I mean you all know what to expect from what my games look like now, and in drawing my own visions it's almost comical how quickly my style throws back in time a decade or more and I'm drawing the most Ben304 looking game ever. But I've looked at art a lot since back then, and I've honed my skills. I made a big PureRef file that you can see at the top of this post with some of the influences for the project, and the two scenes I painted for the game are scenes I feel good about. Even though I am plenty experienced at doing game art, it still takes a while to find the right direction for a project. I think I'm getting there.

Summary

In general, I feel good about the progress this week. My instinct is always to push forward, move ahead, feel productive, but the outcome of my last test told me how important getting this bit right will be. I've even changed one of the abilities slightly after having done some design around it, and this is what I think of as "the game telling me what it is". I can't promise that the next test will not be miserable for everybody too, but at least I'll know I've tried!