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!

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...

Devlog 15: I'm a writer now.

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?

C'mon, friends. You already know the answer...