Devlog 16: Production!!

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? Who would do that, 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.

Now, I have some Peglin to attend to...