Devlog 1 - I'm Building My First Game In A Decade

While the process of making games is not new to me, I've now spent more than a decade being almost solely focused on the visual side of things. However, it's finally time for me to try my hand at developing my own game again, taking an idea from conception, through the development process, designing the gameplay, writing the world and characters, while still doing the visuals. It's been so long since I have done this sort of thing that I thought it might be interesting to record some of the challenges and insights along the way. The project is not in production yet, but seeing as pre-production is an important step, I figured my first post ought to cover how I feel about the entire process at this point. It might be a good reference point later while I'm in the midst of things.

I think a good starting point is talking about what I think my advantages are. I think my main advantage, obviously, is that I have lots of experience with making a particular style of game visuals. Since I started doing this as a career, from an enthusiastic hobbyist, I have had my skills pushed beyond my comfort zone in many ways, which has given me a far wider library of techniques and approaches than I had before. This is probably at some expense of keeping faithful to my own vision much of the time. But I know I can create a game with a visual art style that will fit my goals, and that I have the suitable workflows and abilities to do this for a whole game.

Another advantage I have is that I know the engine I'm going to be using fairly well. Though I haven't used it much in recent years, an hour or so digging through some old projects and experiments showed me that I still understand everything reasonably well, and I'm quite confident that I can accomplish most of my current ideas in this engine. This will shorten pre-production time and pains considerably - somewhat helped by the fact that I have set myself modest goals for now.

I also have a good support network of people that I know I can turn to for feedback, to bounce ideas off, and to keep me motivated. This has always been vital for me, and no doubt it always will be.

Finally, I have an idea that I think will make for interesting gameplay, in an interesting setting. This is particularly important for me because as much as I enjoy the act of making games, I am very quickly demotivated if I start to lose faith in my project. This one has been stewing in my head and my sketchbooks for some time now, so my faith in it is quite strong at this point.

I think it's also healthy to try and identify some challenges that I perceive at this point, because the only way to deal with challenges is to start by knowing what they are. I think the biggest challenge at this point is that I haven't really written code, designed gameplay, or built a world in over a decade. For all of my confidence in my experience and familiarity with my tools, the real way to make games is to start actually building, and until I start for real my resolve is just conceptual. All of that gets put to the test the moment one tries to bring an idea to life, and the jump from "I like this idea" to "This is working how I had hoped" is a giant one.

I also think the fact that I aspire to create gameplay that's slightly outside of the current standards of "Inventory + dialog + closeup puzzles" for the point & click adventure genre will be challenging to accomplish. I'll talk about this more later, of course, but as soon as one tries to do something a little different, there are all sorts of issues that arise. Some of that will be facilitation issues, some of it will be that some people will probably hate it and it might take time to work out why/if their complaints can be addressed. Maybe the whole plan is foolish, and I'd be better off sticking to the default systems - but I wouldn't be writing this development log if I was just sticking to default systems, I'd be off making a standard point & click adventure game.

Lastly, I think stamina and resolve will be a challenge for me. It's always hard to make a game, and it's going to be hard to go from making just one aspect of it to doing a wide range of the tasks. Keeping that ball rolling along is always a challenge, and I'm not foolish enough to believe that the idea I like will be the only force needed to bring it to fruition. I'll be talking about that process here, as every developer I know endures this, and I think it's healthy to address it.

The final thing I want to cover in this first post is my goals for the project. I have many, but I'm going to keep it to a select few major ones for the sake of brevity. I'll probably talk about the others later.

My primary goal is to take a more analytical approach to gameplay design. In the past I think a lot of my gameplay design was very 'first draft'. I'd come up with ideas, try to make them work, and if I thought they were okay, they'd go into the game. Not much refining, trying to deepen things with additional layers, attempting to elevate things beyond their initial concept. I think especially for "puzzle design", which we like to think of as a standard feature of this genre (lots to say on this - but later), I think any time in the past that I made a puzzle that people liked and was satisfying for them to solve was down to a good idea and a lot of luck. That's quite okay, I think a lot of good songs, stories, ideas can be attributed to luck, but I also used to rely very heavily on luck to get my art right, and having spent over a decade studying art theory, looking at a lot of other people's art and doing a lot of drawing myself, I now have better chances of success with each attempt to create art. Much like someone who has a bit of running skill can be shaped into a winning athlete, I hope that with study, practice, coaching and research, I can elevate my approach to gameplay design beyond my efforts of the past. Believe me, it's much nicer sitting down to create an image from the studied and practiced point of view than from the "I hope this works at some point" one.

Another big goal of mine is to improve my character animation. Working in HD resolution for Old Skies taught me a good deal of humility about the weaknesses in both my character anatomy skills and animation skills. Those weaknesses were clearly always there, but I could not see them for a variety of reasons. Historically my focus has always been on making games that look nice in screenshots. My aim now is to make a game that looks great in motion.

Finally, I want to take a more directed approach to writing than I did in the past. Historically I was somewhat averse to editing, and my character conversations ran too long, weren't necessarily good at conveying tone and information as much as they were vehicles with which I entertained myself and explored ideas, and consequently I think I often failed to engage people It's probably time to rein some of that in and be more intentional about what I put in the game and what I cut.

That all sums up my current thoughts about the project so far. Though it only exists in the form of concepts and tests at the moment, I plan to enter production very soon. I have a lot to think about, and will probably have a lot to talk about, so if this is of any interest, do stop by now and then and check in on my progress, or leave a question in the comments section! :)