Nighthawks!

 Ben! Why haven't you been posting about Gilt?! Why isn't it done?! I wanted to play it!

Well, firstly, I'm an idiot and designing a game is really easy, but designing a *good* game is hard, and then you realise your game is bad so you have to cut half the stuff you built and make it good and that's been taking ages.

But also I had to finish my work on:

(in case the picture doesn't load, this is the cover art for a game called Nighthawks and it looks amazing and you'd have been very impressed if you could actually see it. If you *can* see it I am fully confident that you're very impressed, even if it's just by the fact that you can see a picture drawn by some guy in the middle of nowhere in Western Australia through the magic of the internet, regardless of the quality or nature of that picture itself)

Loads of game developers will tell you that the last 10% of making a game takes 50% of the work or some stuff like that and this is obviously absolute nonsense, but it was still a fair chunk of work getting Nighthawks finished up and in a state where I would be okay with people looking at it. I drew some of this stuff 8 years ago, and I was absolutely way out of my comfort zone when I started working on this game. Of course, as my waterskiing mentor would tell me when I stopped falling off my skis: "If you're not falling, you're not pushing yourself hard enough".

The game took ages to make, and I wish I could do it all differently, but it's a great feeling to have the game done. It comes out in a couple of days, and it's on Steam unless it's been banned again for being flagged as a porno game. Hard to know these days.

Couldn't have done this project without the support of plenty of folks, but Ivan Ulyanov lent me his eyes and his paintovers way more times than it is reasonable to ask a man to do so. His name got snuck into the poster in the top right corner there, which makes me delighted. It deserves to be there.

If you were a backer, or wish-lister, or just a general well-wisher, thank you so much for your support and patience. This one was a long, long project. Kudos to Richard to not giving up despite all of the normal heartache of making a game come to life and then some.

Okay, I'm back to making Gilt now. Here's a really good bit I jotted down in my sketchbook this morning. I know, it's epic as Hel.

(calligraphy masters don't come at me, I wrote this lettering out extremely quickly without any reference, it's a speculative fiction game, it's fine to get lettering wrong in my sketchbook okay)

Devlog 22: Gilt in Motion

I don't have a lot to say this month, but the game is gradually coming together, and I have some WIP shots of it in motion to share with you. Dave keeps asking me if I'm making the visual effects for the game with shaders, but I haven't learned how to write GLSL, and there's enough work to do on the game without learning another language, so I'm making do with what I can do in good old AGS script. It's still coming along more or less how I want it to, though. Thanks for your continued interest in the project! :)

Seeing characters animate in world is always a little treat for me.

Lots of work left to do on this effect but Dave wanted to show it off so I recorded it in its WIP phase. This will eventually be much more interactive.

 The really faint grid that follows the effect around in this mode was my first time using modulo operations for visual effects. A really handy way of working. I've since used it in a few more places.

I originally wrote this effect with manual offsets, but then reworked it to be more dynamic so I can change all of the variables as I please. It makes the transition to and from the effect much nicer.

Devlog 21: I am happy.

Important dialogue choices! Actually the game has very few dialogue trees.

Hello, readers. In the time since I last posted, the game these devlogs are about has had its name announced and got itself a Steam page. You can go over there and look at it, read about it, think about it, maybe express hopes that it’s going to be the exact thing you were desiring, or regret that it’s nothing at all like you’d hoped it would be. Both are true for me.

I’ve just finished a lovely round of testing, and after 2 weeks of fixing bugs and reworking things based on feedback, I’m confident to say that the first part of the game is done except for the parts that aren’t done - which are mostly little polish things. It feels good. Players have reported playtime durations of between 90-120 minutes, which is nice because I genuinely thought it was going to be about 17 minutes long. People have got stuck, been impressed, been annoyed, been confused and been delighted - all of which can and has been tweaked, celebrated or accepted as graciously as I can. 

I promise I will not make you combine pomegranates with other items to make some weird adventure game contraption.

Best of all, though, is I think everybody has been surprised at least once. That is possibly my favourite thing so far. I’ve done my best to surprise people with visuals, programming, design and writing. Thomas has surprised some people with his lovely music - and his music for it so far is very lovely. I love working with Thomas. Largely we just mock each other, ourselves and everybody else and then he sends me music that is so perfect for the game and so unlike anything I’ve heard from him before. Sometimes he lets me play guitar on the tracks. I’m so lucky to have him working on the game.

I have to get rid of one usage of "command" here which is annoying because I should have edited it more carefully before I painted the shot.

I have exactly 20 items on my to-do list before I am ready for people to test the next chunk of the game. I crossed two items off my to-do list yesterday, and two items off the list today, as I’m currently focused on building new stuff rather than polishing. I will not tell you how many polish items I have on my todo list. It's possible that humans haven't invented a number big enough yet. At the very least we're into scientific notation territory. Yes, I’ve been blogging about this game for ages already, but now the foundations are built my progress is quite steady. I feel good about making this game.

No, actually, I feel great. Releasing a game is kind of awful for me. I like making games, not having made them. I don’t want to think about review scores, wishlist numbers, promotional sales, optimal release windows or any of that stuff. I like waking up in the morning knowing that I’m going to work on an idea that interests me for a project that I believe in, and that’s what it’s all about for me. What it’s always been all about. This morning I was up at 4am, painting away at a tough background with music loud in my headphones. Now I sit here writing this post with the background painted and in the game, and that’s everything I want from this occupation. I am happy, and I will look back at my days working on this project as being good ones. Thanks for checking in on the project and me. ❤︎

Devlog 20: Interesting challenges I've found in completing the first chapter of the game.

 

In the process of getting the first chapter ready for testing - yes, it's all designed and built and works more or less and has been played by a couple of people - as well as a proper Steam page, there've been a few interesting challenges that have arisen. Usually I kind of know in advance what challenges a game is going to give me. To have a project where I'm doing different things, and therefore dealing with unexpected challenges, has been interesting, and frustrating, and educational. I think it might be interesting for others too, so I'm going to share the ones I can remember.

Magic numbers

Look we all know magic numbers are stupid and nobody should use them, but also the way Adventure Game Studio handles room objects in arrays that can be accessed with ID calls in other scripts just lends itself so beautifully to being in the middle of the dialog editor and going object[13].SetView(34); and leaving that for yourself to find 3 months later where you're trying to adjust something you never anticipated would need adjusting, and you have no idea what object[13] is, which room this is in, and can't remember what view 34 is. Yes, it's very, very easy to add a #define pete_house_cupboard_door 13 and give your views clear names so you can actually go object[pete_house_cupboard_door].SetView(VPETEHOUSE); but it's also easy to kid yourself into thinking that you will never have to change this and you're a genius who is perfect and then curse your foolishness down the line. I was doing this today, believe me.

It turns out you need more than just a nice hook?

In trying to get things ready for the Steam page, one of the things I already had in my bag long ago was a really good hook sentence that everybody I tried it on agreed worked very well in getting their interest, wanting to know more about the game and the protagonist and what this thing is. I was quietly confident that this would serve me well when it came time to give a brief summary of the game, and so never bothered trying to take things further than that. Now I have to try and explain the plot in as few words as possible to people and I have no idea how to sum this all up. My hook sentence, which is good, still doesn't really tell you enough. Devastating. 

In trying to put a really succinct plot summary together for Emily Morganti this week I think I edited all of the extraneous nonsense out about 20 times and still ended up with what was probably too much. There's just too much stuff in this game and I somehow have to condense it all into a paragraph. I am bad at this.

When I'm the one controlling the show, my vision gets loftier

The game has over 3000 sprites, and it's only the first chapter, and I haven't even done all the animation for it yet. It's far too much, and I've also thrown out plenty more that didn't work or needed redoing. It's much worse to be looking at someone's list of assets and trying to catch their vision and bring it to life, but it's such a trap to have something cool that you want to make and the ability to stay up until 1am fiddling. Look, the game will look cool. It has a bunch of interesting visual things that you don't see in AGS games much, if at all. But also I'm an idiot.

Divide by zero errors

The tween module is a beautiful module that does many wonderful things but I'm using it in a way that takes values based on constantly changing parameters and sometimes things just go wrong, including divide by zero errors. I put in the following as a 'fix' and apologised for it, but everybody I've talked to tells me that this is a normal solution to this kind of problem. Everything still works so maybe I'm not a fraud after all. But I felt like such a fraud editing this into the module:

I'm bad at state machines

This is devastating because I've written much more complex functions for this game than a simple state machine but the one I'm using to handle my GUIs is a mess of stupid exceptions because I'm doing too many new ideas at once. I rebuilt my GUIs this week and then spent forever fighting my stupid state machine because I thought of "clever gameplay" with GUI things. Don't come up with "clever gameplay", nobody will be impressed* and you will regret everything when it's Friday evening and you just want to get this damn build solid so you can upload it for people to look at and suddenly oh that important button has disappeared again. It feels like such a betrayal to have cool functions using trigonometry and stuff to do interesting visual effects and then be unable to turn your stupid GUI on when you want it to turn on.

I wrote my chapter skip menu in a stupid way and it has caused nearly as much time trying to bugfix it as it has saved me time in not having to play through the whole game each time to get to room 10

Okay not really but gosh I should have done that in a much more intelligent way. Also did you know that if you skip a cutscene that includes a dialogue, and you do important things in that dialogue (such as affecting your stupid GUI state machine) it gets bypassed and just doesn't happen? I learned that today. The hard way.

Transparency != Opacity

Look I'm an art software man. All art software that I've ever used calls it "Opacity" and 100 is all of the image and 0 is none of it, and the amount of times I've happily set oThingStuff.Transparency = 100; and then scratched my head as to why it doesn't show up in game is not insignificant. I get that 'transparency' is a legacy AGS thing and it's always been this way, but maybe I should request an Opacity property also for simple art men like me.

Yes, you can do this:

but that hasn't stopped me from making the stupid mistake multiple times, and isn't the same as typing the nice "thing = number" one.

I am bad at communicating gameplay critical information to players

I'm actually not that worried about this one at the moment, because all people need to do is play the game and go "I don't understand how this works" and then I ask them what they do and don't understand, and then make things more clear based on their feedback. I just have to trust that people will be really honest with me when my puzzles are really annoying because I didn't make something clear. I know what it's like to be on the other end of that (here's an example I came up against earlier this year):

I got a new PC this week

This should be (and is) exciting, I have more RAM and all my image and animation editing software works much more smoothly now. But also I had to reinstall every program and all my hotkeys are wrong now and I can't remember how I had everything set up. Change is bad and I am tired and grumpy.

I keep having ideas

And I want to put them all in the game and look this one isn't a surprise but it's still annoying to have to build all this stuff that's exciting until it's not working. Every time I go for a walk I get a new great idea. I regret trying to be healthy. Don't walk. Adventure games would also be much nicer to animate if the characters didn't walk.

I don't remember stuff

Whenever I play the game I have a dozen "Oh yes, I need to fix that!" moments, and I never write them down, and so I have the same epiphany about the same glitch 100 times because my brain can only contain one piece of information at any one moment. Eventually I do end up playing with a pen and notepad and I write down every single thing I notice that needs fixing and fill up an entire page, and then go through and fix all of them except one in the middle that for some reason I skip past and then go "hey I thought I fixed that? It was on the list!". This happens to me every second day. I even had another entry to put in this blog post but I didn't write it down and so I don't remember it. I think that filling myself up daily with a mixture of coffee and regrets is gradually taking its toll.

Oh I remembered the other one after I posted this so I'm coming back to edit this in: fonts

It's impossible to find the fonts I want at 640x360 resolution so I've made three of my own. One works perfectly, one needs more adjusting, one I will either give up on and redo completely or just settle on because when I redid it completely earlier this week it came out even worse ugh. Yes I need three fonts it's vital to my vision okay. I love letters and calligraphy and signwriting and things but folks don't make your own fonts for your game, it's entirely unnecessary. You've got too much to do already. Give yourself a break.

I'm honestly having the best time working on this game and I think it's nearly time to show people stuff in action, thanks all for reading this still. <3

*okay at least two people have been impressed by it but that's no reason to subject yourself to trying to make it happen

Devlog 19: Building gameplay.

 

Here's an example of a scene in its sketched form, and in its painted form. Not much changes! And it takes hours of work. Hooray!

It's the end of another week and I just finished tweaking the code for the last puzzle for the first chapter of the game. Initially I was referring to this section as the prologue, but that's not a very accurate term for it narratively, and it's expanded a bit since I wrote it out in my design document. I like to think there's a nice amount of variety in the gameplay, the environments, and the pacing, but also I connected the separate chunks up this morning and goodness it's going to need a lot of polish.

Coding wise, overlays might be my favourite thing that has been added to AGS. Some of the heinous crimes I committed in the past using Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground(); or "I used 10 separate GUIs to make a single particle effect because individual GUI controls didn't have variable transparency back then" are made so simple and delightful with overlays. While I totally understand the more prescriptive way that graphical assets were handled in the past, with things like objects/characters/GUIs all having inbuilt behaviours, this addition has freed me to do so much more. What a great feature.

The wonderful Thomas Regin has been making music for the game, and it's fantastic to be able to play it with non-placeholder music. From the very first track he sent me I could see that he understood my vision for the game's atmosphere perfectly, and hearing it swell to life was spectacular. Then we spent an hour discussing black metal bands and getting completely distracted. I promise you there won't be any black metal in the game's soundtrack, though. Maybe some blast beats if I can nag my friend Dean enough to get them done for me (I'm bad at nagging but he did say he'd do them).

Writing wise, it's all bad! The ideas are there, and I know what I'm trying to get across with this chapter, but I have given myself very little time with the actual writing and editing, and so when I did a playthrough this morning I mostly saw mistakes and things that needed very heavy editing. I even managed to spell "protection" wrong. How do you manage to spell "portection" wrong?! But also I repeat myself too much, people talk too much, it's all too much and I don't always get across what I'm trying to say. That's okay, though, because now I know what the shape of the thing is, I can edit it. Imagine this blog post as the writing style of a game. Yes, it's that bad.

Gameplay wise, it's been too long since I designed puzzles. This section took me ages, and I stubbornly refused to put in placeholders and come back later, so a lot of my time was spent just throwing out stupid adventure game puzzles and trying to turn them into something reasonable. Is it good now? I have no idea, nobody has played it yet. I took out the bit which required you to do mathematics on a piece of paper, though. You're welcome. I think the flow of puzzles works well, as long as I can communicate things well enough to the player. I have lots of theories about how puzzles work and I keep meaning to write about it, but I haven't put time aside for that yet.

Art wise, everything took quite a while this past month. I had to polish up backgrounds, and rendering detail even at this low resolution takes hours of painting for me. Just thousands of little brush strokes and adjustments and oh good, I made another horrible tangent, well done Ben. I also had to get a logo ready, and I must have designed the seven worst logos in the entire world before I found something that worked. One of them looked like the logo for an edgy far future basketball game from 1999. No you can't see it, I'm too ashamed. Maybe one day if you're all really nice to me and I can deal with the emotional trauma of showing such a thing off. I also had to take a break to get some assets ready for the Steam page and they took me ages to paint, too. Everything takes me ages except drinking coffee, which happens much too fast and in too great a quantity.

So, friends, progress isn't fast, but it is steady. My grandma called me a couple of days ago (about two months after I had started production on the game) and asked if the game was done yet, and I told her no, it was going to take ages. She accepted this and said she guesses she'll never get to play it before she dies. Guilt is a very powerful force, there's a hint for you, people working in producer roles everywhere. Sorry Grandma. You'd hate the game, anyway. It's very sweet that she takes an interest in what I do, but also she doesn't like media with any violence, sex, horror, bad language or vaguely melancholic ponderings on the nature of faith, humanity and reverence - and guess which item on that list this game will have?

Speaking of which, I recently finished Hyperion by Dan Simmons (the Sol Weintraub story was great, exactly my stuff) and am currently enjoying Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, so you better believe I'm still choking down as much weirdly spiritual science fiction as I can handle!

That's all for now, I'm off to backup my work, eat a grapefruit in the last of the afternoon sun and tidy this Situation of a desk a little before the weekend.

Devlog 18: One month of production

We're a month into production and things are going fairly steadily! I painted the last scene of the first section today, which means I have hit a small milestone. There are many such milestones that will need to be hit along the way, but hitting one feels pretty good. The game currently has 7 rooms, 1 test room, 14 comments scolding myself to do things better next time and according to AGS, these are some other stats:

Some of these characters are dummy characters for doing other things, and yes, that's too many sprites already. I know. But it's my project this time, and I can use as many sprites as I wish.

Because I finally showed off some art in my last devlog, I figured that I would break some of the artistic decisions I made in one of these shots down, so you can get a better understanding of the ways I think about a scene when choosing layouts, colours, and shape language. If this seems like a very complex way to think about art, keep in mind that a lot of this happens naturally as I work on a composition, and I'm not carefully planning this all out before I start working on a scene. It's more a natural process where I have to place something, colour it, and give it form and those actions are guided by these thoughts. I've often done this sort of analysis to other adventure game scenes on this blog, so hopefully it's interesting to see me do it to one of my own:

(you will probably want to open these in a separate tab/window in order to read the writing, sorry!)

Here's an explanation of some of the ways I thought about colour in this shot.

Here's a quick look at some of the composition ideas that went into this shot.

Here's how I used a few of the various thumbnail sketches I did for this scene to end up deciding on a final layout I liked. 

The project also got its first bit of coverage, which is lovely - particularly as there's not much for anybody to say about it yet!

Stay tuned for the next exciting devlog in which I discover a fourth colour!!

Devlog 17: Preview

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!