Hi friends. Progress is going ahead smoothly on the game. I've been filling my spreadsheet boxes, I've been implementing assets, I've been solving problems in code. However I've been talking about this game for long enough without showing anything, so today I am not going to talk much, I'm just going to show a few screenshots. Nothing is final, everything is subject to change, but you all know all that stuff already.
Here's a few shots of what the game looks like so far. Thanks for being patient while I mostly just talked about stuff, even though I know most people just think of me as a graphics man. I hope these graphics will satisfy some of your curiosity. Yes, there's a lot of Loom, a lot of Dune, a lot of that lovely mix of sci-fi and fantasy that captures my imagination in so much fiction. Hope your eyes enjoy!
We're finally here, friends. Production time. Okay, from here on out I know exactly what I'm doing, I won't waste any time at all. Familiar territory, I've been doing this for years, absolute efficiency. Except that bit today when I used the wrong operator in a for loop and got stumped for 10 minutes. And yesterday when I was running a physics simulation in Blender to see if one of my visual ideas was even possible. And, and....
Okay, but seriously. It's show time, and there is a secret to doing this and I worked it out ages ago. It's a very complex secret so please take notes. The trick to getting a game made is to: make a list of all the things that need to be done, and then do them all.
Seriously. That's it. Break it down into a small list that you know you can get done in a day, and then force yourself to do everything on that list that day even if you spent too much of your break playing Peglin. Do this every day and eventually the list is gone. If you only do one thing, that's one less thing to be done.
Art
The moment Dave read my doc last week and agreed that he's publishing it as the next in house Wadjet Eye game, I hit the ground running. Lists, spreadsheets, post-it notes like you wouldn't believe. Highlight all of the design/narrative issues we agreed upon and start trying to address them. Work out exactly how many characters, exactly how many backgrounds I need to make. Here's an example of how my backgrounds spreadsheet for the game's prologue (minus the scene names which would give things away):
Yes I use dark mode for my spreadsheets, I'm an artist
If you're curious to see what the "refs" or "whitebox" stages might look like, I covered that in a blog post here. If you want to know why I might use 3D for some scenes, it makes it much quicker to get the perspective and foreshortening on curved surfaces right, and it can simplify other stages that might be very difficult by hand. Mostly it's not anywhere near as much fun as sketching things out loosely by hand, but it can save some headaches in the long run.
If you want to know what the thumbnails stage looks like, here's the thumbnails for the first scene of the game!
If you're thinking, hang on Ben, is that seventh scene just a redraw of the life crystal room from the 1995 science fiction adventure game The Dig as painted by the Bills Eakin and Tiller and Adam Schnitzer well then the answer is absolutely not I have no idea what you mean I was just seeing how the composition felt okay the final scene ended up being WAY different hmph!
I looove this method, it's so nice and fast and free and you can get an instinctive feel for whether a scene works for you or not VERY quickly. Paint em zoomed out, big brushes, as few details as possible, as little actual effort as you can get away with. So, yes, like my "finished backgrounds" from 2010, thank you very much, no need to point it out in front of everybody.
Animation
The "best" part about being at the start of an adventure game project is that your character needs to walk and reach in every direction and currently they can't walk or reach in ANY direction. That means you get to animate lots of thrilling animations which are basically just picking things up in different directions and heights. I build an extender function each time I put one of these in the game, because I want to be able to call the animation without thinking which animation number it is, I want the character to face the right way before it starts, reset to the correct talking direction when they finish, I need the offset that I use to calculate floor shadows and reflections to adjust automatically so I don't forget to set it/reset it each time, etc. And so I have a whole script module of just this. You can see by the script header that it's an absolute delight of reaching in different directions:
I thought this was an adventure not "reaching for stuff simulator"?! Where's the space whales and trombone blowguns?!
The best thing about being the one in charge of the project is that I can make the very firm decision that there's only one player character, with only one outfit. That will save so much work. Seriously, imagine making a game with multiple player characters, or outfit variants, or time periods? Whowoulddothat,man?! Not me, that's for sure. In my game we wear one thing, we play as one thing, and we like it. I'm a man over the age of 35, anyway, I buy 7 pairs of jeans and t-shirts at a time and that's my outfit every day for the next 5 years. So it's realistic.
Design
Whenever I think I have a good puzzle, I try and add another layer to it. That's all I have to say for now. I know I'll get it wrong for some people but I'm genuinely trying to get this to at least be interesting.
Programming
Most of the programming is pretty straightforward now that I have my main foundation down. The way AGS uses overlays now allows me to do some of my old visual tricks much more nicely, and I'm a little tidier than I was in the past, but mostly AGS is built to handle everything I want to do out of the box, and all of the custom gameplay stuff I want to do I built late last year when prototyping. On Friday I took my lumpy old project file, stripped tonnes of crap out of it and upgraded it to the latest version of AGS 4.0, and after a few issues had a nice, neat project file set up, and so mostly everything has been straightforward.
I allow myself one (1) "tinker" project each day, though, because otherwise they will build up forever and I will never get any of it done. Today's was making an icon of the inventory item you're picking up swoosh from the spot you pick it up at to your inventory in whichever slot it's destined to fill - after I was unimpressed with the visual feedback of picking up an item while playtesting. So now my function calls for picking up an inventory item will use this instead of the default AddInventory() function:
Because the game is still in the early stages I check the offsets and element sizes to perform the calculations, which should save me from having to adjust this later on if I move things around or resize things. Might as well plan for it!
Summary
I feel great. I've been wanting to build a game of my own direction and vision again for literally years and it's fantastic to be doing it again. I know the boring parts, the annoying parts, the awful "players hate this bit and I don't know how to fix it" parts are coming, but at this point I'm having the best time and making good progress.
The last time I posted here was the end of May, and I was just transitioning from the phase of "collecting all of my thoughts" to "turning this into a game". I spent the 6 weeks between then and now forming a massively jumbled set of ideas, places, characters and gameplay elements into a game script. Indeed, yesterday I handed in my design outline to Dave G of Wadjet Eye Games, and crossed my fingers that I had explained myself well enough and that my idea was good.
Don't get me wrong, I thought the idea was great. In my head it's the most lively, original, heartfelt thing I could make right now. It's over a decade of built up dreams, hypotheses, little philosophies all rolled into a huge ball, with the fat trimmed off it mercilessly and as well rounded and cohesive as I could get it in 6 weeks. It's 24,000 words, 56 pages of what I hope is the best I can do. But of course there's still that nagging feeling - what if I can't see the problems? What if I missed something big, aside from all the big stuff that I had missed then caught and fixed? What if it's too weird, too silly, breaks too many unspoken and spoken rules of the genre?
It's natural for any writer to be anxious while waiting for feedback. I should know. I'm a writer now.
You might remember this post going around a long time ago, about the funny ways ladies have died in literature:
All your writer friends will have laughed at it because it's so stupid to die from "Too many pillows" or "Missing slippers" or "Pony exhaustion". Some writers will tell you that the funniest one is "Someone said "No" very loudly while they were in the room" because that's a very stupid thing to die from, and then we can all feel very proud that we would never write something so stupid, isn't it a good thing that we're modern writers and not stupid old writers.
But next time a writer is in the room you're in and asks if you liked their work say "No" very loudly and watch them literally die. That's proof of what we all know - that writers are just people who will tell lies for attention and money. Trust me on this, I'm a writer now. I wouldn't lie to you. Not even for attention and money.
In any case, Dave Gilbert didn't say "No" very loudly, and so I have survived. He said this, in fact:
That's an awful lot of praise and I'm very grateful! I'm going to warn you now that some people will not share his opinions here, some of my friends will hate this game, that's okay. We can still be friends. You don't need to like my guitar playing, either. But it's a good outcome. I took lots of ideas, I designed the best gameplay I could around them, and then I wrote a game around that. The design stuff still needs a lot of work, of course. The writing stuff will too! It's ridiculous to think that a 56 page document with 27 characters and 73 backdrops will make it unscathed from document form to game form. But nevertheless. I'm a writer now. I haven't forgotten how to do it, and now I can finally, finally start actual production on this game that everybody is bored of hearing about before I've even shown a single screenshot.
If I had to be really honest, I would give the classic answer that I didn't really do much writing. I came up with the setting, I came up with the general thrust of the plot, and I came up with some fun characters, and then the game just kind of wrote itself. You know how your friends will react to weird situations, so if they're your imaginary friends and imaginary situations then that still counts. Not all of them are my imaginary friends, some are imaginary bastards. I should know, I've been stuck imagining them for weeks now. But that's how the game got written, I threw all the bits together and it wrote itself and mostly I just spent dreadful, agonizing hours editing and lamenting that I had read this too many times to know if it was actually the most boring thing to read imaginable or if I was just burnt out on it. I do maintain that taking out two pages of quantum physics was probably a good move, however.
And look, I could have shown screenshots. I know people like my illustration work enough that I could ride that wave of "x amount of people already like your drawing, and will probably buy a game because you drew it". I really appreciate that. But I wanted to sell this game to Dave based not on my drawing, but my writing and design, and I'm pleased to say I did that.
Oh, and how did I distracted myself from overthinking everything while waiting to hear feedback about my document?
Hi everybody. This is a long post but you don't have to read it. If you just want to see some pictures you can scroll down and see those. Then you can go and spend your reading time on someone who had an editor. Gene Wolfe is good, but there are plenty of others too.
It's been months since I posted any progress on my own project, but as you may have gathered from my last blog post on here, I had been rather busy finishing up other things, and then it took me a while to get the momentum back up on my own work. Releasing a game is quite distracting!
Nevertheless, I am still working on this project, and progress is going well! The stage that I was blogging quite intensively about at the end of last year was very much the prototyping phase, as well as re-learning how to use the scripting language and the new tricks of the AGS editor. I emerged from that period with a prototype that took my original ideas and simplified them enough that my testers enjoyed using them, and I still felt like I could make intricate, interesting gameplay with, and a system of implementing it all that was functional enough to be usable over the course of constructing a whole game.
In short: I knew what I was going to build, and I knew how to build it. This might seem like a simple matter considering that I'm making a point & click adventure game (which I've made before) using AGS (which I've used before) but it wasn't quite that simple because I am going for some slightly different mechanics. I imagine it took Brian Moriarty a while to figure out the "what and how" phase with Loom, for example.
In any case, now that I have that decided, I have to try and lay out a rough course of action for the project where I take mechanics that I like and build a game from it. That's what I've been doing, and a lot of it is sketching, writing, building, testing. I try to write down or sketch out every idea I have around the game/setting/world/characters, whether they're good or bad, and then I refine things or cut things when I've developed everything else a little more. Sometimes I have what I think is a fun bit of gameplay, but can't make it fit the situation. This classic "There's a puzzle here because adventure games need puzzles I guess" scenario is something we've probably grown familiar with. So maybe that puzzle can be lifted and placed somewhere else where it can actually integrate nicely with the setting, or maybe I can come up with an adjustment to a character that makes it feel more natural.
I also have to give the players problems to solve - not just in terms of puzzles, but motivations. You need a reason to be setting out on this task. The character I'm controlling should feel like they have to complete this task in order to get what they want, whatever it is. I haven't written a game in 10 years, and frankly I never felt like I gave my early projects enough opportunity to allow this to develop, and so this time I am trying to develop that out much more. In addition to notes typed into text files and post-it notes, I also keep a big notebook that is now about half full, and a sketchbook in which I've been slowly developing the setting - at first just jotting down ideas in order to not forget them, but lately it's because I have a specific part that I want to show and I want to try and establish or develop a concept for how that might look.
I finished this bottle of fountain pen ink writing notes out last week. It's not at all necessary to use fountain pens or nice notebooks to do anything, but I enjoy it and therefore it makes the process of making a game more enjoyable for me. People are suspicious of how long it takes to do nice headings and things in fountain pen and sometimes question me about it but it honestly doesn't take very long. I posted a video the other day of my handwriting the other day and while it's not fast, it's not dreadfully slow either. I can write a lot faster than I can think, I assure you. The title I was writing out is the name of an Infocom text adventure I've been playing. I've been playing lots of those lately. They're really good!
So that's where I'm at. Things are coming together. Last night I finished my first worldbuilding sketchbook for the project and uploaded a video of me flipping through the pages of it. No music or talking, just the sound of rain in the background and pages turning.
Because there's no talking in the video, I've a few comments to add here about how I use my sketchbook. I use the bulldog clips because sometimes with a hardcover sketchbook the binding means the pages don't lay as flat as I'd like. You can buy a ring bound sketchbook to solve this, but I prefer this format, and bulldog clips are cheap. The ones I use now are old Waverly clips that I think my local office supplies store found in the back room when they re-arranged their store for the first time in decades and put out on discount, so I bought a big old dusty bag of them for very cheap. They work fine even if you can't fold the arms flat like the wire handled ones.
I use different brands of pencils for my different hardnesses because I don't want to have to read the label to see which pencil I'm picking up. It's much nicer to go by the colour of the brand. You can find the details of the pencils I use in the video description. I think most well known pencil manufacturers make pretty good pencils - these are all nice to use. Don't buy generic pencils branded with things like "Artist's Pencil" or "Professional Drawing Pencil" or something though, cheap pencils don't sharpen nicely and either the wood lets you down or the lead lets you down or both. Pencils are cheap so don't buy cheap pencils. But you also don't need to buy a Blackwing or a Rotring or whatever just to sketch a melancholy mushroom guy. Staedtler or Faber-Castell or anything is perfect.
I usually lay out the very light foundation lines with the 2H pencil, it's easy to erase and even if you don't erase it and leave construction lines in with it they don't get distracting. Then I go around with my 6B and delineate the key forms from the mess of 2H scribbles, as well as filling in the large areas of block shadow. Then my 3B is kind of my general purpose detailing, refining and shading pencil within those forms. The mechanical pencil is just used for writing the text because otherwise I have to sharpen my pencil constantly.
I use three different types of erasers because they're all useful in their own way. I managed without a retractable eraser for ages but in specific cases they're great. These Leuchtturm sketchbooks are great. The word means "Lighthouse" in German, it seems, and lighthouses are awesome. If you think they're too expensive just remember it will take you probably 147 years to fill it and so broken down to a daily cost they're actually super cheap. George Broussard recommended them to me. Thanks George! I never expected to be getting art supply recommendations from you back in the day when I was blasting cracks in walls with Duke's rocket launcher.
As for the content, most of this stuff probably won't get used directly. A lot of it is just "oh that's an interesting idea, I'll jot that down" and it's easier to put certain ideas down in sketches than notes. Adding little bits of text helped me so much to describe what I was trying to show with the image, to get used to putting words together and being descriptive without being annoying (some of these are definitely annoying, it's fine, I don't mind if you want to tell me that) and it helped everything to feel like it was a part of the whole theme & project. Having uniform text box designs helps the book feel consistent throughout despite different styles & different levels of effort per sketch. Adding little corner framing elements was fun just to give the thing a visual theme and to make something that I felt was designed & nice to look at rather than just "some drawings".
A lot of people say you should allow your sketchbook to be messy and not worry about quality but I don't think that's entirely true. When I'm proud of something I want to work on it more. So currently I run two sketchbooks, one that is messy and ugly and I don't care about it, where I work on things that are hard for me and I'm not proud of it and don't show anybody, and then this one which I don't necessarily work harder on, but I don't use it for study or practice, I just use it for developing concepts for one project. The messy one has about 6 pages left, also, so having this book hasn't stopped me from being messy or free. But I hate flipping through that other book and I like flipping through this one - often I'll see an old idea that I'd forgotten and think "Oh, I really like that, I should revisit that".
You only get to make so many things in your life so it's a good idea to give yourself both the space to make things that you don't ever want anybody to look at and also space to make things where you can go "Yes, here's some stuff that you're allowed to see!" for people who are curious.
Anyway today I peeled the plastic off a brand new sketchbook and filled the first couple of pages and so nothing has changed, hitting a milestone like that is meaningless, it's just it was the boost I needed to finally update this blog.
Hi all! I know I’ve been quiet. It’s been a busy time, with lots going on - and it’s actually stuff you can check out, if you’re interested.
Last month the new Inkle game Expelled! came out. I helped out with some of the background art on this, and it was lovely to be involved. Reviews have been great! You can check it out here and here.
This month saw the release of the new Wadjet Eye Games adventure game Old Skies. This was a pretty big project for me, my first attempt at doing an HD adventure game and it’s also getting great reviews. You can grab yourself a copy here.
Plenty of other things happening behind the scenes, but I figured it’d be nice to give a quick update about what’s been going on for those who’ve been curious. So nice to see these games out and about and being enjoyed by people. I’ll be back with dev logs about my own project soon enough!
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