It's so nice to know what I'm making now. Having actual solid direction on what I need to do is great, although it means that my todo list has gotten both longer and more filled with stuff that takes me way too long. Sometimes I think how much simpler things would be if I would allow myself to just design a straightforward AGS game, with inventory and dialog and that's it. But I know my heart wouldn't be in the project, it would scratch my urge to experiment with gameplay, and I feel like I've made enough of those already to do something different. It's just that everything takes so long now and while I can feel my skill at working with AGS script improving literally every single day, I also spent 3 hours yesterday fighting with room overlays and I still haven't solved all my problems there and I don't know how much more time I can justify spending on learning how to use them right now while the rest of my todo list looms.
This week I want to shout out vga256's EXiGY project, which was announced last week. I've been hearing about this for around a year, and we've spent many hours talking about design ideas, development woes, and the usual things that two people working in similar fields always talk about. There's some blogging about the process going on over there, too, so if you like reading these, you will probably like reading those.
Graphics
The build I sent out had the scenes roughly painted up, but being unsure about the solidity of the gameplay I didn't spend too much time polishing them, so I've quietly been seething at myself for these half finished, amateur looking scenes while I try to remember how to make computers do what I want. Anyhow, with things working better I started painting the scenery up properly this week, and found solutions to some of the problems* with the scenes ended up being a bit simpler than I thought.
Of course, nothing in the scenery has changed at all. In essence they're exactly the same scenes, just now I've worked three times as long on them and am less dissatisfied with them. I expect some testers will struggle to notice even one difference between the 'bad' version and the 'fixed' version. But that's the way of the illustrator, I'm used to this. See the title of this blog post.
Coding
After my efforts last week, the last thing I needed to learn was performing a modulo operation in AGS. I know this is probably considered very easy but for some reason I have a hard time visualising how this works and so my three different effects that require this took me far too long to put together. At one stage I actually had an effect indexing through an array backwards. I'm a graphics person, right, I haven't done utility maths in years, so some of these operations I had to write out with a pencil, stare at them with my head in my hands for a while and then go "Oh, it's that easy? *sigh*". At one point James Spanos gave me some information on what will make the engine run slow that helped me understand the issues with something I had written which allowed me to refactor it, which was immensely helpful. Prior to that it was one of those problems where the issue was that I didn't even know what the issue was.
I have everything working more or less how I want it to at this stage, in terms of how it feels to operate your character's abilities in the world (with the exception of every single edge case that I *know* will crop up) and so after some more tweaking and adjusting I'm going to send out another build with the clarification that there's no more gameplay, I just need feedback on what's annoying and what's fun in my UX.
I have no doubts that some stuff that I think is really cool will be horribly annoying to some people. There's one detail that I know is inaccurate, but feels so nice to use to me that I hope nobody cares. I had thoughts on how to fix it but it involves another two modulo operations and I don't even know how well the fix would work and I need a break from maths. I also have no doubts that some of the fine details will not be noticeable at all. See the title of this blog post.
Design
There's a fun thing in illustration where you make a change to an image and you can't decide, so you turn the layer on and then off again. Slide the opacity up and down. Maybe it's somewhere in the middle, but 47% opacity feels like too much, 46% opacity feels like too little. It's a kind of ensnaring vacuum that eats hours of your time. I'm finding the same with design - I move an element to the bottom of the screen, I move it to the top. Not sure. Let's make a hardcoded element a variable now so I can experiment more. Every script in the game has an expanding list of things that were once hardcoded and are now variables while I tweak and test and repeat.
It's amazing the things that I've found myself doing in the background because a mouse mode didn't feel right, or something felt too static, or things just felt wrong. Sometimes I find the solution very quickly. Other times it's the sad understanding that all the endless tweaking isn't fixing anything, you have to throw everything out and start over. Some things that seemed like a solution to something not feeling good ended up making it feel even less good. I want the player to always know what power they're using, intuitively. I want the act of using that power to feel good, like you're dragging that power around the screen as you move your cursor. Some nights I have stayed up until 3am trying to accomplish this. See the title of this blog post.
Summary
Sorry for the long post this week folks, I was out singing and playing guitar for 3 hours tonight and so my usual editing process was skipped over. These are the ramblings of a tired man who is trying to do illustration, animation, programming, music and various other things all at once and I know everybody reading this will think "Yes, Ben, that's ALWAYS the way it is". I know. I know the person making pizza crusts has attention to details doing that I will never even conceive of, as is the person painting lines on the road, the person writing a book about moths, etc. It all takes way too much effort and time and it's not fair that making good things takes a silly amount of work. But I'm enjoying the process so much, despite all my moaning.
I'm also still playing loads of Jagged Alliance 2 because it's the time of year I always get sentimental about long sessions in strategy & RPG games over summer holidays. It's probably how I ended up here in the first place. And Jagged Alliance 3 is really good and I enjoyed it so much, but Jagged Alliance 2 is Jagged Alliance 2, you know?
Thanks for reading :)
*the problems, in general, being variations on "this looks bad and I want it to not look bad"
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