Devlog 7 - Late to the Party

Some of the books I've read/plan to reread as part of gathering inspiration for this game

As work on the project continues, I am still probably spending a few too many hours figuring things out rather than just building, but the results of this week's Monday morning playtest were a success - the thing I thought would be annoying did, indeed, turn out to be annoying, and so I dove in and fixed that as my first task for the week, and then started working on the next room of the game. Everything is solid enough now that I believed I could get the whole next room playable and have that ready as the subject for next week's Monday morning playtest. I did accomplish this, as well as allowing myself some nice tinkering time. AGS 4.0 is proving itself most amenable to working with my ideas once again.

Writing

I didn't actually do much writing this week, but I did go and gather up some of the books I've been planning to read & re-read as grist for the mill of inspiration. I'm in the rather lovely position where many of the most inspiring books I've read came into my life after the last time I wrote a game, and so I have a wealth of untapped inspiration bouncing around my mind. With the intensity of juggling a range of things I haven't made any time for reading in the last couple of months, but that's changing now, and I'm currently working my way through M. John Harrison's Viriconium series. I've loved Harrison's writing style ever since I read Light, and I knew Viriconium would have a setting that suited the world I'm building here a little more closely, so it's a delight to dig in to this. Especially after making it through The Pastel City which pretends to be a very standard Sword & Sorcery novel with a nicer vocabulary for the first 95% of the thing and then turns into a proper Harrison novel.

I still can't find my old thesaurus, and boy do I need it. I was directed to Power Thesaurus by Nic Tringali and it's lovely, but I really do like to be away from the screen sometimes.

Programming

A nice side effect of lurking the forums and reading people's technical suggestions this week was that I learned about the function late_repeatedly_execute_always which seems to have been added since I last used AGS. This is a wonderful feature and allows me to be much more specific about when things happen in the order of operations. Within two days of learning about it I had already used it to get a couple of things done that would have needed really annoying workarounds otherwise. What a great feature, that I am quite late to the party in finding out about.

Another thing on my list is to relearn how to use drawing surfaces and dynamic sprites effectively. This can be a bit of a rabbit hole, so I'm putting re-learning how to do that sort of thing on my future todo list, once the more gameplay important stuff is done. It's also quite possible that what I have in mind won't be very performant in AGS, and it would be very funny but not very wise to build a 2D point & click adventure game that runs slowly. It's a little frustrating to be so out of touch with this stuff, but I know I can learn it all again, eventually.

In implementing the game's second area I found an issue with how I designed one of my systems, and I built a workaround that makes it work correctly, but it's an annoying workaround and I hope to soon be competent enough at code logic to not need it anymore. For now, it works, and I can keep building the game, and it will probably never get in my way, but it's extremely inelegant and it would be nice to have it fixed properly.

Art

This week saw me paint a single scene up, but it was a scene based around a gameplay idea that I thought would be challenging to sell effectively in AGS with consistent visuals. It was nice to see it working properly after all the elements come together - hopefully the illusion works as well to everybody else's eyes as it does to my own. Non AGS developers will probably think it's a fun, atmospheric scene. AGS developers will probably be annoyed that I got it working once they see it. Except Ivan who will smirk and say "of course you did this :')"

I had to, Ivan. You know this.

Summary

Yes, it's taking longer than I would like. Ugh, weekly update seven and I've only just put the second proper room in the game. I only put the first inventory item in today, and there's not a single dialogue tree yet. What kind of adventure game are you even making!? Oh gods it's not edutainment is it?!?!* 

It's interesting how much longer "Making an adventure game with some slightly more complex mechanics in AGS" takes than "Making an adventure game in AGS". That said, the bulk of that time was getting the systems ready for building the game with, and it was very important to me. I am happy to be making steady progress on my todo lists, though, checking items off every single day, and I have a strong foundation† built now.

Next week I will be putting the final piece of gameplay into the opening section and then tidying some things up, adding some extra animations, worldbuilding text and things, and then I think it's time to show it to people. I'm not sure if I can get it into the state I wanted it to be before showing everybody, but it will be close enough, and there's no point trying to get it perfect before I know how well the core works. Wish me luck!

*it's not edutainment, any learning you do while playing this game will be your own fault, unless I accidentally make it a bloody allegory, please god don't let me make it a bloody allegory I respect my players intelligence too much for that surely

†"strong foundation" says the guy in the same blog post that he expressed his frustration at having to use a terrible workaround for a stupid problem he himself created, nice