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| 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.
