Devlog 12 - Dynamics

This week was off to a good start, with the feedback from all testers being very positive (except when Windows Defender accused my project of being a virus and deleted it - searching the forums shows that this is a reasonably common issue and I'm guessing that until builds are distributed by something like Steam it will continue, unfortunately) and the general consensus was that with a few little tweaks, everything is in a very solid place. It's very clear to me now, looking back at the build I sent out a few weeks ago, where all of my design mistakes were but play isn't something you can taste yourself, like a soup. It's hard to know if a crossword clue is good or bad if you set the clue, because you already know the answer. And so it's thanks to the extremely valuable feedback from my testers that the game's foundation is solid, and I'm now ready to start building an actual game with it.

I'm also giving a shout out to Amberspire which was announced this week. Nic has been a great source of feedback for this project I've been blogging about (the source of the note "I wouldn't want the game to feel like it has a systemic core underneath it, but in fact the solutions be very linear." I highlighted a few weeks ago), and they let me play an early build of this game and it's very frustrating to come across what is very much a "just one more turn" game when you already have lots to do, especially one with such a lovely aesthetic.

Coding

Following on from the wonderful range of suggestions given to me last week by a number of people looking at the code in my last post, I spent a good amount of this week taking my functions and cleaning things up. There were a number of very helpful suggestions that showed me how to make things more readable and aid trouble-free adjustments, and a few that solved a number of tiny issues that had been things I accepted because I didn't know of the alternatives. After the push of rapid changing and prototyping in the last few weeks I knew I would need some time to clean things up, and so had allocated this week to be time for renaming things properly, addressing new feedback, and refactoring code where necessary. I've still some work to do here but in general everything is much nicer to look at and navigate, so thanks again to everybody who gave me suggestions!

I initially suspected that this would be incredibly distracting, but actually it doesn't seem to be at all while in game. It also makes it extremely clear which ability you're using while this mode is selected, which is very helpful!

I also wanted to allocate a little bit of time this week to re-learning how to use dynamic sprites in AGS, which turned out to be reasonably nice and simple for the most part. One thing I was struggling with myself when testing the build was knowing which ability I had active, even with GUI buttons highlighted and the literal ability icons following the cursor around, so one UX thing I wanted to improve was making the currently selected ability immediately intuitive. Diving back into my poor, messy test room I made a simple dynamic sprite of a lightning arc that connects the mouse cursor to the energy meter as one of my first experiments, and while "Drawing some lines" is hardly the most impressive thing one can do with a game engine, I considered it a reasonably good "Hello world" starting point here.

Armed with that confidence, I then set out to recreate a warped glass sort of effect that I was playing around with more than a decade ago, adding in a few little extra touches to give that little 'science-fantasy' feel. You can see the result below, not too bad so far. I'm given some encouragement by this progress, and have banned myself from having any more fun with this until I've made some more of the actual game.

The first version of this I wrote this week had the FPS counter sitting around 35, which shows you that even a very low resolution game can run badly under the direction of a fool. This gif looks choppy because of the screen recording software which is missing frames (you can see by the loop counter), but it's very smooth and nice in game, even on my little laptop.

Writing

I still have only spent a tiny amount of time on writing, but in putting together a little bit of dialogue to help guide players through the build last week I arrived at an interesting thought. Often in game dialogue the player is provided with multiple ways to respond to a statement or question. A lot of the time in RPGs the choice is "Good alignment accept quest/Evil Alignment accept quest/No I don't want this quest", or Jon Ingold speaks on "Accept/Reject/Deflect". A lot of the time in adventure games we like to either just add some in for variety or comedy value. But what I found was none of these approaches quite suited the section I was writing, and yet it felt like I should have multiple options here.

Eventually after deliberating on this for a while, what I realised was that having the multiple options actually acts as a way of parallel information giving to the player. For example, let's say a character confronts you with "Why are you late for work again?"

You can give the player the following options:

-I slept in again, I had to deal with the baby half the night.

-Hey, go easy on me this month. Remember how much I covered for you in summer?

-Shouldn't you be focusing on your own work? Management says your sales are down.

Not particularly exciting examples, but the nice thing is that I might want to give all of this information to players, without having to force it out unnecessarily through linear dialogue. Even though the player only gets to pick one of these options, they are presented with all three points of information in parallel, so in addition to giving them the ability to pick a response that suits their style the best, the writer also gets to give them all of this information in a way that doesn't feel overlong. I'm sure writers think about this a lot, but to me this is a new angle to consider.

Design

One of the most interesting things to report is that I thought the prototype build would be far too obvious, be considered a little condescending, and almost be annoying to players. Not at all. In fact, some of the things that I thought were too obvious were perhaps not obvious enough. It's so interesting to be so wrong about these things. In any case, I've committed to making players as entirely aware of how the various elements work at all times so that the interface is never the challenge, only the gameplay itself. I went and played a little Commandos 2 to remember just how awful an interface can get*, and then threw myself in to making my own game as straightforward as possible. I even changed the name of one of the abilities so that all of the hotkeys are grouped together on the keyboard, which feels SO nice to use.

One thing about having things in good working order is that I need to now stop thinking about what abilities I am going to give the player and now start building a game around these abilities. It's a little like having all the furniture built, and now I have to decorate a house with it. I have more experience doing this part than I have with doing the part I have just completed, so I am expecting it to be harder, because of course I want to design gameplay that is satisfying, just the right amount of challenging, and memorable, and of course that is much harder than "I want to design some fun abilities to play with".

Summary

I am buoyed on the good response from testers, on the excellent suggestions regarding my code, on the fact that I managed to hit my goal of having an updated build out to testers before the end of November. This week was a more relaxed week after the big push of the last couple of weeks, but I'm back to designing and building new sections of the game next week, and I'm curious to see what will happen as this game gradually reveals to me what it is. Thanks for reading folks, the comments and suggestions have been a great motivating force. :)

*sorry Commandos 2 fans, but as a fan of the first game, it's incredible how much more complex the interface got for the sequel. I know many people love the game but I find the UI just about unusable. One of these days I'll learn it. Maybe. It doesn't help that there's no quick reference card, only half the hotkeys are listed in the manual and some of those are wrong.