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.
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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.
