Devlog 23: Getting back to it.

Well, Nighthawks has been out for a bit, people like it (thank you so much!) and progress on Gilt has resumed. I got enough of the first chunk of the next chapter reworked in order to let a few people play it last week, and the response was good! Except for Thomas Regin, my wonderful composer for the game, who took a break from microdosing eternal damnation* to play Gilt with a trackpad and therefore had trouble with it.

Friends, family, enemies, skeptics, etc - please do not play Gilt with a trackpad, gamepad, trackball, joystick, kinect or whatever other thing you have. It's 100% designed to be a point and click adventure, played with a mouse and honestly even a keyboard. I might even put "a computer mouse" as the only system requirements other than, you know, having a system, because otherwise Gilt will basically run on any PC you can read this blog post on. Yes, I know, I am 15 years out of date and people want modern controls I don't care I am doing a thing and please play my game with a mouse or find something else to play. You wouldn't play an RTS with a trackpad. You wouldn't play Quake with a trackpad. I am going to buy Thomas a mouse that he can take with his laptop.

On the programming front, I have encountered my greatest enemy of all: myself from the past. I cannot explain to you the atrocious, imbecilic bugs I have found of my own making. I am slowly fixing them all, and also fixing some of the more elusive bugs. One issue I was having with a visual effect was a lag of one frame when a character had their coordinates changed manually - which was particularly weird, because it didn't seem to affect the character when they were walking or animating. During a particularly long drive to a particularly distant guitar playing and singing gig, trying to come up with a solution or workaround to this, I realised that I was adjusting the character's coordinates in the late_repeatedly_execute() function of a room script. It turns out that this executes after the late_repeatedly_execcute() functions of any other scripts. So I called this visual effect from the bottom of the room script's repeatedly_execute_always() function and suddenly it just worked properly. Relief!

I've also been building simple reference functions for myself more and more. One thing I do a fair bit in Gilt is measure distances, and I got to the point where I realised I was doing this manually every time when using a computer whose entire purpose is doing calculations, and so I wrote the little helper function above. My maths teacher Mr. Ford's voice popped into my head explaining that I'll get better at maths if I do the work myself, rather than programming my Ti-83 to perform all the functions I needed in TI-Basic, but I'm not 14 anymore Mr. Ford and I promise I will not forget how to find the length of a hypotenuse at this point in my life.

Graphics talk time! Today I was implementing a particular character's scene, and doing the relevant animations, and I came across the old versions of his sprite while diving into his directory, so I thought it might be interesting to share the evolution of his design:

Kazimir has only a small role, but it's an important one, and an essential part of his character design is that his electrically powered prosthetic arm be obvious and quite a defining part of his character. I started out with a fairly plain design - it's fine, although his stance is a little stiff, and his arm looks very plain. The next version I tried focusing on his arm, making it more obvious, interesting, and 'designed'. I still felt that the silhouette and the colour contrast of his arm was a little flat, so version three worked on that a little, tried giving him a bit more character in the face, a bit more of an interesting silhouette around the knees of his trousers. Finally version 4 has me leaning into his broad body type with a wider stance, a greater focus on making his silhouette interesting rather than relying on the hand on the hip pose. Finally this character feels how I want it to - he feels solid, his feet feel quite convincingly planted, and he's immediately recognisable.

Of course, this style of character design doesn't work for a lot of projects and tones. Happily, this is exactly the tone I'm looking to establish in Gilt!

Writing the game is hard. I have so, so many ideas, and I write way, way too much. I have already cut so much in the last few weeks, trying to hone everything down to its leanest form while still conveying everything (unlike this blog post). Did I have an idea so good last week that I had to make a fourth font for the game? Yes. Can the idea *really* be that good, Ben? Are you attempting to do a character study moment using fonts? YES.

So, progress is good! I am still super busy in all things, but once again one of those things is Gilt, once more. I designed some gameplay that I think will be so fun last week, so I'm really looking forward to putting that into the game in place of the really intricate and quite clever puzzle that is getting cut because it's tedious to solve, poorly communicated and doesn't fit the tone in that part of the narrative. Will I keep the puzzle? Maybe, but it would need some serious reworking. The code took quite a while to get right - but I will not hold myself captive to a puzzle I don't believe in, even if it's 'clever' in concept. No compromises, I want Gilt to represent my vision fully!

(You'll never see this puzzle in the game, but don't worry, I've solved it enough times to know it's tedious and tonally wrong, you're not missing much.)

Thanks for your continued interest in the project! <3

*reading each and every review and comment for Nighthawks as though it's going to improve his self-esteem and not send him spiraling into a pit of despair

Nighthawks!

 Ben! Why haven't you been posting about Gilt?! Why isn't it done?! I wanted to play it!

Well, firstly, I'm an idiot and designing a game is really easy, but designing a *good* game is hard, and then you realise your game is bad so you have to cut half the stuff you built and make it good and that's been taking ages.

But also I had to finish my work on:

(in case the picture doesn't load, this is the cover art for a game called Nighthawks and it looks amazing and you'd have been very impressed if you could actually see it. If you *can* see it I am fully confident that you're very impressed, even if it's just by the fact that you can see a picture drawn by some guy in the middle of nowhere in Western Australia through the magic of the internet, regardless of the quality or nature of that picture itself)

Loads of game developers will tell you that the last 10% of making a game takes 50% of the work or some stuff like that and this is obviously absolute nonsense, but it was still a fair chunk of work getting Nighthawks finished up and in a state where I would be okay with people looking at it. I drew some of this stuff 8 years ago, and I was absolutely way out of my comfort zone when I started working on this game. Of course, as my waterskiing mentor would tell me when I stopped falling off my skis: "If you're not falling, you're not pushing yourself hard enough".

The game took ages to make, and I wish I could do it all differently, but it's a great feeling to have the game done. It comes out in a couple of days, and it's on Steam unless it's been banned again for being flagged as a porno game. Hard to know these days.

Couldn't have done this project without the support of plenty of folks, but Ivan Ulyanov lent me his eyes and his paintovers way more times than it is reasonable to ask a man to do so. His name got snuck into the poster in the top right corner there, which makes me delighted. It deserves to be there.

If you were a backer, or wish-lister, or just a general well-wisher, thank you so much for your support and patience. This one was a long, long project. Kudos to Richard to not giving up despite all of the normal heartache of making a game come to life and then some.

Okay, I'm back to making Gilt now. Here's a really good bit I jotted down in my sketchbook this morning. I know, it's epic as Hel.

(calligraphy masters don't come at me, I wrote this lettering out extremely quickly without any reference, it's a speculative fiction game, it's fine to get lettering wrong in my sketchbook okay)

Devlog 22: Gilt in Motion

I don't have a lot to say this month, but the game is gradually coming together, and I have some WIP shots of it in motion to share with you. Dave keeps asking me if I'm making the visual effects for the game with shaders, but I haven't learned how to write GLSL, and there's enough work to do on the game without learning another language, so I'm making do with what I can do in good old AGS script. It's still coming along more or less how I want it to, though. Thanks for your continued interest in the project! :)

Seeing characters animate in world is always a little treat for me.

Lots of work left to do on this effect but Dave wanted to show it off so I recorded it in its WIP phase. This will eventually be much more interactive.

 The really faint grid that follows the effect around in this mode was my first time using modulo operations for visual effects. A really handy way of working. I've since used it in a few more places.

I originally wrote this effect with manual offsets, but then reworked it to be more dynamic so I can change all of the variables as I please. It makes the transition to and from the effect much nicer.

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. ❤︎