Devlog 2 - Very First Steps of Writing Code & Trying to Prototype Ideas

The current state of my to-do list.

Because I'm going to be talking about a variety of disciplines in these development logs, I figure I should break them down with headings according to subject so that readers only interested in certain elements can skip the parts that won't appeal to them. 

Programming 

After months of thinking about things, sketching ideas out, aligning all the elements in my head and scribbling notes on paper, I started writing code this week. I am very unfit for programming right now due to my long break from it. My approach to countering this is to keep things very simple and work extremely incrementally. First I'll make a single piece of logic happen, then when that works perfectly, I will add a condition to that, and test until that works perfectly. Then I'll parcel that code up into a separate function that I can call with a single command from anywhere, then I'll expand the function to take multiple inputs, then add logic to check which input is the correct one if such a thing is not reliant on player input but other conditions. Breaking it down into extremely small steps like this allows me to accomplish one thing, then take a break, much like a newbie runner doing a short jog now and then just to get used to things before they try to push themselves.

The nice thing about AGS is that it's quite accommodating to debilitated programmers like me, and most of the things the game will need to do are handled in engine already. That makes the list of tasks necessary to get everything working for a basic prototype quite achievable. As long as I make a little bit of progress each day, eventually the list will be complete, and I can start designing the game. Eventually, too, my fitness for writing code should increase. That's something I'm looking forward to. This morning I finished implementing a function quite successfully and then checked it off my list, but then wanted to alter how the game responds when the player cancels this function to look better. I knew exactly the maths required to make this change occur, but had used up my energy for writing code, and so saved the project and put that simple calculation in my todo list for the next time I open the project up. Knowing the solution to a problem but not having the endurance to execute the solution is not ideal!

I was fortunate enough to be able to call on the advice of long time AGS member edmundito, who helped me overcome a few issues that were specifically related to the quirks of the AGS script language. For example, assigning an integer variable as the size of an array of floating point variables requires that you refer to the integer variable with the "float" type, despite the fact that you're calling an integer and that the array size cannot be a floating point variable, and yet AGS's rule for requiring an IntToFloat call to handle this conversion breaks the script. He pointed out that I could simply refer to the integer with the "float" type and that this would pass in this specific exception, which I had not thought to try. (Edit: this is just a misunderstanding of mine which is clarified nicely here) I consider it a fair trade for having done some quick graphics for a recent jam game he made. He ran out of time to get all of the writing and graphics in, but you can still check it out if such a thing interests you.

A little game jam entry I did the graphics for this month

Design

One thing I wrote in my previous devlog was "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." On reflection I don't think this is quite clear enough. It's perfectly simple to introduce limitations or twists on the genre - force your character to not use inventory. Make them unable to speak, make them have limited mobility and have this be part of the game's challenge. I think the difficult part will be making something that adds a twist and also feels really good to play and creates a satisfying gameplay style*.

A concept I've been thinking about that might be a way of addressing this is that unlike RPGs, we often don't start out an adventure as a character with many abilities. Usually with a role playing game even a very inexperienced character has some proficiency - maybe they can cast some minor spells, can at least brandish a spear to defend themselves (and bring a spear with them rather than finding it on their way) or have a chance to hide, pick a lock and disarm a trap. And then, importantly, the majority of the game's obstacles can be overcome by using these specific abilities, as well as auxiliary additions such as potions that aren't specific to that style of character but can be used by a variety of classes. In adventure games we often get a character with few real abilities, and they're usually solving problems using items, contraptions and conversation topics they encounter along the way. I think there's a lot of potential to be found as a designer in creating a player character that isn't a blank slate, they bring abilities and expertise to the situation and it's via the application of these abilities in creative ways that the player then overcomes the game's challenges.

So that's one thing I've been prototyping this week - my protagonist's abilities and how they interact with the world. Already while just setting the functions up, establishing some rules and connecting the logic I have seen interesting gameplay possibilities emerge, and I've adjusted my philosophy about the player's abilities a fair bit based on the things that I've noticed while just playing about with the system. But one thing that has concerned me is the possibility that I might unwittingly be designing a “puzzle game”. Often when you give the player specific abilities and then present them with a series of challenges based around those abilities that’s what you end up with. There’s nothing wrong with puzzle games, I like them, but that’s not the feeling I want to go for. After deliberating over this issue for quite a while I reached the conclusion that the difference between a puzzle game and an adventure game, for the purposes of my own goals here, is that in a puzzle game your abilities are primarily means with which you can overcome obstacles, and in an adventure game your abilities are means with which you can explore the world, and in the process of doing so also find and overcome challenges (puzzles!). Think about how many of the classic verbs in text adventures are simply about examining the world. This use of our abilities to explore and learn about the world is what I’m planning to aim for - as well as interesting puzzles.

Summary

As for how I feel about the whole process of starting to develop a game again - it feels great. I've spent over a decade trying to interpret other people's visions, and have gotten used to things not being quite right, to things not working quite how I expected in the final product, misunderstanding instructions or stylistic goals and largely hoping that I had gotten things correct. Doing this work I know exactly the vision I'm working towards, and I know precisely when things look and feel right to me, and am allowed to have more of an opinion on what's correct. It doesn't push me out of my comfort zone like the other work (which is good for skill development), but it's very empowering and immensely satisfying! Of course, it also means that I have to be the one having the good ideas, and that part is definitely more pressure and more difficulty.

Thanks for checking in on my progress! Hopefully by the time I update the list will have a good deal more red checkmarks, and a healthy amount of new items to tackle.

*And then, if I really play my cards right, subverting or exploiting some of the rules I've established to create interesting situations that require players to think more creatively about the logic I've introduced. That's the good stuff, that is - I probably want to talk about exactly what I mean by this in a future post.

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.

Sketch a Day

 

Back in May I talked about finishing a sketchbook, and how it was very rare for me to sketch at all. In fact, during June and July I didn't sketch at all, despite buying myself a very handsome new sketchbook, and being inspired by the fact that I had finished my old one. This would be the year that I started sketching for real! I was going to commit to it! And then I was busy reading another Gene Wolfe book, and busy playing lots of live music, and busy working on games. It's a classic tale. But it feels bad, and I felt frustrated with it, and I like to conduct little experiments on myself to try and build habits, develop practices, maintain little rituals in my day, and so I made a decision to try and do at least one sketchbook page per day for all of August.

August is a particularly good month to try this sort of thing - the weather is perfect for getting out and about in, there are usually very few music gigs for me to play, and there's the whole 'starting fresh' vibe that comes with the end of winter and start of spring that makes one want to turn over a new leaf. So I sharpened up my 6B pencil, and I started doing sketches.

Specifically, I started sketching character heads. One thing that frustrates me is that I'm not particularly good at just sketching out a character that I like in pencil on paper from imagination. I thought that if I could somehow develop a process for doing this, then the month would be a success. So I split my time between trying to do quick photo studies, quick sketches just constructing a head from scratch without reference and working out where to lay everything out, and trying to draw some actually interesting characters with expressions and props and identifying features. And it was good. Some of them came out very bad, both on the first day and on the very last day and plenty of times in between. On some of them I could feel myself working things out as I made particular choices, gaining small pieces of insight about what works well and what doesn't just by consistently making the same sort of marks every day, and discovering what I liked and didn't along the way.

I also got to break my tether to my PC and go and draw outside, which was most revitalizing. I spend so much of my creative time at the same desk, which is well set up for my needs, but gosh it's good to get out and about a bit, and draw amongst the flowers and trees and the singing birds.

In the end, I think what I mostly gained from the experience was some better confidence with my workflow for drawing with pencil (something that I had very little of before), a better approach to drawing character heads from a structural basis, and some confidence in my ability to use a sketchbook habitually. I also got a little more 'fit' for drawing on paper. Making marks is a physical activity, and the more one makes marks, the more experience one has to inform and guide all future mark making. I also had fun - some days I'd do multiple pages just because I felt like sketching some more, I was eager to try out new ideas. That feels great. I'll leave you with a photo of a few fun fantasy style characters I sketched out, completely free from any reference, and completely away from my desk, along with the stub of one of the pencils I was using on this project and the assurance that I plan to keep sketching much more regularly from now on.

A new milestone

Today I painted the last backdrop for Nighthawks. This milestone has been a long time coming - largely due to the fact that I have been working quite busily on Old Skies while Richard finished putting the actual game together - but it still feels good to reach this point. I still have a few touch-ups, and map screens, and vignettes and things, but every milestone reached in a game's development always feels like a nice accomplishment.

This has been a fascinating project to paint for, quite different to what I'm familiar with and filled with the normal education that such a project brings. I think both Richard and I would do everything completely differently if we had our times again, but that's true of every project. I think his very polite feedback helped me to gather some semblance of cohesion in background styles, despite my approaches varying an impossible amount, and I think my focus on painting atmospheric scenes with moody lighting suits his approach to this world pretty well. I could easily spend another year cleaning up and polishing up the scenes in this game, but I would find that very boring, nobody would want to pay me for that, and it honestly wouldn't change how the scenes work in game that much at all.

I used a lot of coloured lighting, thick atmosphere and the idea of texture to try and sell our vision of the city. Many of the scenes have quite large amounts of both pure black and pure white. There are areas of the game with more magenta than anybody has probably ever seen me paint. It's been fun, while also being the normal amount of hard work, and anxious uncertainty, and "Gosh, why can't we make a smaller game" and "Why can't I make all of the scenes look as good as the good scenes?"

I'm posting a few of the scenes that I still enjoy looking at here. I've shown them off before, but not much on this blog, so now you can see some of the scenes I like to go back and look at without all of the text and portraits that normally bring them to life.

A view over the city's rooftops

Inside Cygnus Rare Books

The queue outside Nighthawks

Bikers hanging out at their local bar

A magic shop in the Lapis district

The last page of a sketchbook

I usually don't sketch very much. Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of rough passes for characters, locations & animations. It's just that I don't sketch much for sketching's sake. I don't make a point of "keeping fit", as it were. I draw a lot, but almost all of it is for a particular purpose. Almost everything I illustrate or animate is an 'asset', something that is designed to go into a game, a poster, something of that nature.

As a result of this, I haven't used a sketchbook very much. For me a sketchbook is a place in which I can solve problems, try ideas, or draw something for my own interest, and I really don't draw enough things for my own pleasure or education. But that's because I only ever started drawing in order to create games. That's where my interest in drawing began in general, so it makes sense that my drawing energy largely goes towards my work.

That being said, I have one blank page left in my current sketchbook, and looking back over the pages of this sketchbook has been quite a satisfying experience. The fact is that this book has lasted me for several years, and as a result of that I can see my interests over those years memorialized in these pages. Here's where I started trying to learn how to shade with hatching. Here's some preliminary sketches for Old Skies, for Nighthawks. Here's where I was teaching myself how to do nice lettering so that I could do nice signs in locations without having to rely on fonts. Here's a page of just shoes. Some pages were torn out and stuck inside letters to friends. Some pages have random notes written on them, or just a few scribbled tests of a new pen or pencil.

I'm currently working my way up to drawing the last few characters for Nighthawks as that project moves into the later stages of production, and as I have not drawn portraits in a very long time, I have been doing a few pencil studies in my sketchbook to get over the intimidation of such a task, and as a result have just about finished this sketchbook off. And having not drawn much at all for my own education, interest, or practice in a matter of months, I have to say that it's quite nice. I think it would be quite empowering to form a habit of doing this more often, just basic practice of basic skills that I know are a weakness of mine, or studies of artists whose style I admire very much, or just... drawing for the sake of it. I've been good at forming habits this year - I bake bread weekly now, and keep a daily journal, and generally have been pretty good at being quite diligent in many other areas. With that in mind, and my enjoyment of sketching as re-discovered in the past few days, I've ordered myself a nice new sketchbook, in the hopes that I can make regular sketching in it a routine part of my daily life.

No doubt we'll all share a chuckle about these aspirations when I'm blowing dust off it in four months time. Here's a few fun images taken from the various pages of my almost-complete sketchbook for you to enjoy. Meanwhile, I've got one last page to go and fill.

Fashion

 

Today I completed the design for Fia's seventh outfit in Old Skies. Having this many variations for a fully animated game character has been quite a bit of extra work, but it's quite satisfying to see them all lined up together. In a month's time, I will have been working quite steadily on this project for a couple of years, and it's hit that point where the work is quite routine now. Much of the thrill and excitement of the project has worn off, as is usual for big projects, but also so has much of the intimidation and fear. This will be a nice looking game, and I am confident in my ability to make it happen now.

I can see many of the issues with the visual style much more clearly now, I know what I'd do differently, and I know exactly what I'd change if I had the energy and time budget to do so - but I'm also pretty satisfied that it's a pretty nice leap forward from what Unavowed looked like to what I want the next Wadjet Eye adventure game to look like. Some folks like the new look, others prefer the old look. I totally understand in both cases.

I do miss working on the short terms projects a little - both Technobabylon and Shardlight were under a year's work for me - and I also would like to do more projects in the 640x360 resolution of Unavowed. I think anybody looking at my re-imagined projects can see that I still have ideas for refining that look (and I do hope to get around to doing some more of those at some point!)

But for now, it's a very fine thing to say that I'm content with our project, and proud of how it's shaping up, and it's nice to mark down yet another milestone in the process of making a game for you all.

Exuberance!

 One of my side projects in 2022 was experimenting with Camille C on various game ideas, more as experiments in visuals and feel than anything. I like the idea of trying to capture a mood, and her bright, vibrant style is much more exuberant and hopeful than a lot of the games I tend to work on. Quite an interesting experience trying to shift my familiar style into that kind of atmosphere.

This overhead map piece was probably the most enjoyable thing for me to paint in those tests - I was trying to create that essence of a downtown shopping district in the kind of game that might have been marketed at high school students in the 00s. The sort of affair where your activities might be shopping, hanging out with friends, doing homework, etc. I always thought that games like The Sims present an interesting and worthy alternative to the very dramatic and violent standard that we expect now, without shifting into the sort of look that might be used for a game aimed at children under 10 like Mario or Sonic.

For me, starting with a base of green, orange and purple made a lot of sense here. When doing Unavowed I started my tests with the “classic primary” colour palette of red, blue and yellow, and in my hands those colours tend to be very dramatic and sombre. Shifting into the “classic secondary” palette like this allowed me to get as far away from that as possible to help me kick things off in the right direction. I also like how this allowed me to bring in the teal and gold as really lively feature colours to help highlight things that I wanted people to look at, and working with clean, white outlines felt very vibrant and crisp to me, an attempt to match Camille’s very clean and punchy character style.

One element I did keep around was leaning into showing some brush strokes and not cleaning up too much. I do think that this kind of look gives so much texture and a sense of detail which bring a liveliness to a scene that very clean paint work cannot supply. This also highlights the sort of scene that I am very fortunate to be able to mockup in 3D and then paint over - I absolutely would not want to attempt this with a grid if on a time limit.

This is just a start, but I think it’s great to try and expand our styles. Every slightly new direction helps me flesh out my skill set! We plan to keep working on things in 2023, so expect to see more of this exuberant look!