Devlog 3

The current state of my todo list. See how many more checkmarks since last week!

The process of creating this game is an act of taking a number of hypotheses I have formed about what makes a game interesting in the last decade and putting them to the test, hoping that I can visualise a player's experience of my intent. I will inevitably be wrong about many things. It will be interesting (and likely frustrating) to find out what I learn I am wrong about during development and what I realise I missed after development.

Programming

Now that I have my basic functionality working in AGS, it's been time to learn how to use the actual built in functions that the engine provides. Quite frankly, I feel like an absolute beginner. Unlike the process of setting up my own functions, storing my own data and doing my own calculations, a bunch of the built in features of AGS have changed quite a lot since I last used the engine seriously, and a lot of things that I used to know how to do are different now. It's a little frustrating to find that I don't even know how to process a mouse click or move a viewport - very basic functions that I once took for granted. The important thing I keep reminding myself is that it's okay that I'm a beginner, to break my process down into individual steps and that soon enough I will know how to do all of these things again. It's okay to be unable to do basic things, it's just a matter of learning these pieces of knowledge bit by bit. There is no shame in inexperience, only potential!

All that said, I love the latest versions of AGS. Many of the changes since I last used this engine & editor are wonderful, and will help me facilitate some of my current ideas in ways that I couldn't have hoped to accomplish before, or would have required much more convoluted methods. What fantastic work everybody is doing on this engine. There's so much good stuff that I have to caution myself not just to tinker with these things all day, which I could easily do. I allow myself little bit of tinkering, and then a good chunk of actual making a game.

It does feel satisfying to be starting to build a game, and not just working on systems, too. One thing I am noticing is that I get a very quick feedback loop on whether something feels right or wrong, because I can immediately put things into the engine and test it. It's not like that when making assets for other people to implement.

There are also a few things that I want to put into the game but cannot get working right yet. I allow myself a few attempts at getting these working, and then instruct myself to move on. As stubborn as I am, I am aware that logical thinking is a skill, and I am very poor at this skill currently. As I continue to work on this game I hope that this skill will improve, and so will my ability to accomplish my ideas. Meanwhile, my to-do list keeps me honest and stops me from spending too much time in the tinkering mode.

Design

It's also satisfying to be thinking about design again. I've been talking to a bunch of different people about design lately, everybody with quite different opinions. I don't think anybody sits exactly where I do on the current state of adventure game design, which is probably a good thing. That likely means that I have something to bring to the genre. I also think people have very different ideas on what "Innovation" means here, too. It probably runs the whole gamut from something very simple like "The player character is an elephant" to "You have to dissect your own psyche in order to deconstruct your notions of the world that you perceive in order to apply these new concepts to your surroundings and progress" or something. It's been a while since I chatted to Igor Hardy but I have no doubts it's along those wonderful lines.

On my end, I'm looking at being a bit more thorough in my examination of the very basics of the genre and seeing what else I can get out of the systems that might be overlooked by other designers these days. I think a lot of players and designers have a somewhat fixed idea of what point & click adventure games do. It would be nice to try to expand that a little. There's a few sparks from things that inspired me years ago that are still smouldering inside me, waiting to be kindled into a fire.

Art

The latest page in the project sketchbook. "Rigid vigilance" is such a bad phrase, and so annoying to say. Turns out writing short descriptions of things is a skill, too!

I always jumped right into creating 'final' visuals for game projects in the past. I'm not doing that this time! That means I'm doing placeholder sketches to build with instead of trying to nail the game's art direction down, and almost all of my actual work on the visual side of the game has been trying to improve my character animation workflow. It's been going well, I think I have myself setup to make the nicest, most solid character animations I've done yet. I've also sunk a considerable chunk of hours into doing so - but that's game development. Sometimes the research into how to do things better just takes that long.

The actual worldbuilding drawing I'm doing is in the project sketchbook. One fun little trick I found to help the process of filling these sketchbook pages was to come up with "look at" descriptions for the ideas I am sketching as I draw them. This gives a sense of direction to the activity that sketching can otherwise lack a little bit. I'll have at least one full sketchbook of these pages by the time I have all of my ideas for this project laid out, and while many of them just won't ever get used, doing things this way means that I'm less likely to forget things or rush into drawing things before I've played around with the idea a little bit first. Hopefully I'll also remember how to write after I write a few dozen more bad look at descriptions.

Summary

As I slowly piece this project together, new ideas emerge on an almost daily basis. I've heard designers and other creatives talk about the act of putting the elements in place and then seeing how they work together, and letting our experiments with those elements bring fresh layers to light. I am definitely finding that is the case here. The more I work on this idea, the more I believe in it.

I'm also behind on my drawing work because I've been doing so much prototyping (although I did finish the last 'essential' character animation for Old Skies this week), I haven't been sleeping enough because I'll wake up early to write code after staying up late to write code, I only read one book in September, I haven't done my normal amount of guitar practice for my gig this weekend... developing my own idea and re-learning to program is life consuming in ways that I haven't missed. I'll put "finding a balance between this project and everything else in my life" on my to-do list, I guess.