304 Devlog 22: Gilt in Motion

2026-04-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

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.

2026-03-17T03:57:00.000-07:00

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. ❤︎

Devlog 20: Interesting challenges I've found in completing the first chapter of the game.

2025-10-10T06:29:00.000-07:00

In the process of getting the first chapter ready for testing - yes, it's all designed and built and works more or less and has been played by a couple of people - as well as a proper Steam page, there've been a few interesting challenges that have arisen. Usually I kind of know in advance what challenges a game is going to give me. To have a project where I'm doing different things, and therefore dealing with unexpected challenges, has been interesting, and frustrating, and educational. I think it might be interesting for others too, so I'm going to share the ones I can remember.

Magic numbers

Look we all know magic numbers are stupid and nobody should use them, but also the way Adventure Game Studio handles room objects in arrays that can be accessed with ID calls in other scripts just lends itself so beautifully to being in the middle of the dialog editor and going object[13].SetView(34); and leaving that for yourself to find 3 months later where you're trying to adjust something you never anticipated would need adjusting, and you have no idea what object[13] is, which room this is in, and can't remember what view 34 is. Yes, it's very, very easy to add a #define pete_house_cupboard_door 13 and give your views clear names so you can actually go object[pete_house_cupboard_door].SetView(VPETEHOUSE); but it's also easy to kid yourself into thinking that you will never have to change this and you're a genius who is perfect and then curse your foolishness down the line. I was doing this today, believe me.

It turns out you need more than just a nice hook?

In trying to get things ready for the Steam page, one of the things I already had in my bag long ago was a really good hook sentence that everybody I tried it on agreed worked very well in getting their interest, wanting to know more about the game and the protagonist and what this thing is. I was quietly confident that this would serve me well when it came time to give a brief summary of the game, and so never bothered trying to take things further than that. Now I have to try and explain the plot in as few words as possible to people and I have no idea how to sum this all up. My hook sentence, which is good, still doesn't really tell you enough. Devastating.

In trying to put a really succinct plot summary together for Emily Morganti this week I think I edited all of the extraneous nonsense out about 20 times and still ended up with what was probably too much. There's just too much stuff in this game and I somehow have to condense it all into a paragraph. I am bad at this.

When I'm the one controlling the show, my vision gets loftier

The game has over 3000 sprites, and it's only the first chapter, and I haven't even done all the animation for it yet. It's far too much, and I've also thrown out plenty more that didn't work or needed redoing. It's much worse to be looking at someone's list of assets and trying to catch their vision and bring it to life, but it's such a trap to have something cool that you want to make and the ability to stay up until 1am fiddling. Look, the game will look cool. It has a bunch of interesting visual things that you don't see in AGS games much, if at all. But also I'm an idiot.

Divide by zero errors

The tween module is a beautiful module that does many wonderful things but I'm using it in a way that takes values based on constantly changing parameters and sometimes things just go wrong, including divide by zero errors. I put in the following as a 'fix' and apologised for it, but everybody I've talked to tells me that this is a normal solution to this kind of problem. Everything still works so maybe I'm not a fraud after all. But I felt like such a fraud editing this into the module:

I'm bad at state machines

This is devastating because I've written much more complex functions for this game than a simple state machine but the one I'm using to handle my GUIs is a mess of stupid exceptions because I'm doing too many new ideas at once. I rebuilt my GUIs this week and then spent forever fighting my stupid state machine because I thought of "clever gameplay" with GUI things. Don't come up with "clever gameplay", nobody will be impressed* and you will regret everything when it's Friday evening and you just want to get this damn build solid so you can upload it for people to look at and suddenly oh that important button has disappeared again. It feels like such a betrayal to have cool functions using trigonometry and stuff to do interesting visual effects and then be unable to turn your stupid GUI on when you want it to turn on.

I wrote my chapter skip menu in a stupid way and it has caused nearly as much time trying to bugfix it as it has saved me time in not having to play through the whole game each time to get to room 10

Okay not really but gosh I should have done that in a much more intelligent way. Also did you know that if you skip a cutscene that includes a dialogue, and you do important things in that dialogue (such as affecting your stupid GUI state machine) it gets bypassed and just doesn't happen? I learned that today. The hard way.

Transparency != Opacity

Look I'm an art software man. All art software that I've ever used calls it "Opacity" and 100 is all of the image and 0 is none of it, and the amount of times I've happily set oThingStuff.Transparency = 100; and then scratched my head as to why it doesn't show up in game is not insignificant. I get that 'transparency' is a legacy AGS thing and it's always been this way, but maybe I should request an Opacity property also for simple art men like me.

Yes, you can do this:

but that hasn't stopped me from making the stupid mistake multiple times, and isn't the same as typing the nice "thing = number" one.

I am bad at communicating gameplay critical information to players

I'm actually not that worried about this one at the moment, because all people need to do is play the game and go "I don't understand how this works" and then I ask them what they do and don't understand, and then make things more clear based on their feedback. I just have to trust that people will be really honest with me when my puzzles are really annoying because I didn't make something clear. I know what it's like to be on the other end of that (here's an example I came up against earlier this year):

I got a new PC this week

This should be (and is) exciting, I have more RAM and all my image and animation editing software works much more smoothly now. But also I had to reinstall every program and all my hotkeys are wrong now and I can't remember how I had everything set up. Change is bad and I am tired and grumpy.

I keep having ideas

And I want to put them all in the game and look this one isn't a surprise but it's still annoying to have to build all this stuff that's exciting until it's not working. Every time I go for a walk I get a new great idea. I regret trying to be healthy. Don't walk. Adventure games would also be much nicer to animate if the characters didn't walk.

I don't remember stuff

Whenever I play the game I have a dozen "Oh yes, I need to fix that!" moments, and I never write them down, and so I have the same epiphany about the same glitch 100 times because my brain can only contain one piece of information at any one moment. Eventually I do end up playing with a pen and notepad and I write down every single thing I notice that needs fixing and fill up an entire page, and then go through and fix all of them except one in the middle that for some reason I skip past and then go "hey I thought I fixed that? It was on the list!". This happens to me every second day. I even had another entry to put in this blog post but I didn't write it down and so I don't remember it. I think that filling myself up daily with a mixture of coffee and regrets is gradually taking its toll.

Oh I remembered the other one after I posted this so I'm coming back to edit this in: fonts

It's impossible to find the fonts I want at 640x360 resolution so I've made three of my own. One works perfectly, one needs more adjusting, one I will either give up on and redo completely or just settle on because when I redid it completely earlier this week it came out even worse ugh. Yes I need three fonts it's vital to my vision okay. I love letters and calligraphy and signwriting and things but folks don't make your own fonts for your game, it's entirely unnecessary. You've got too much to do already. Give yourself a break.

I'm honestly having the best time working on this game and I think it's nearly time to show people stuff in action, thanks all for reading this still. <3

*okay at least two people have been impressed by it but that's no reason to subject yourself to trying to make it happen

Devlog 19: Building gameplay.

2025-09-19T01:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Devlog 18: One month of production

2025-08-13T06:58:00.000-07:00

We're a month into production and things are going fairly steadily! I painted the last scene of the first section today, which means I have hit a small milestone. There are many such milestones that will need to be hit along the way, but hitting one feels pretty good. The game currently has 7 rooms, 1 test room, 14 comments scolding myself to do things better next time and according to AGS, these are some other stats:

Some of these characters are dummy characters for doing other things, and yes, that's too many sprites already. I know. But it's my project this time, and I can use as many sprites as I wish.

Because I finally showed off some art in my last devlog, I figured that I would break some of the artistic decisions I made in one of these shots down, so you can get a better understanding of the ways I think about a scene when choosing layouts, colours, and shape language. If this seems like a very complex way to think about art, keep in mind that a lot of this happens naturally as I work on a composition, and I'm not carefully planning this all out before I start working on a scene. It's more a natural process where I have to place something, colour it, and give it form and those actions are guided by these thoughts. I've often done this sort of analysis to other adventure game scenes on this blog, so hopefully it's interesting to see me do it to one of my own:

(you will probably want to open these in a separate tab/window in order to read the writing, sorry!)

Here's an explanation of some of the ways I thought about colour in this shot.

Here's a quick look at some of the composition ideas that went into this shot.

Here's how I used a few of the various thumbnail sketches I did for this scene to end up deciding on a final layout I liked.

The project also got its first bit of coverage, which is lovely - particularly as there's not much for anybody to say about it yet!

Stay tuned for the next exciting devlog in which I discover a fourth colour!!

Devlog 17: Preview

2025-07-29T05:18:00.000-07:00

Hi friends. Progress is going ahead smoothly on the game. I've been filling my spreadsheet boxes, I've been implementing assets, I've been solving problems in code. However I've been talking about this game for long enough without showing anything, so today I am not going to talk much, I'm just going to show a few screenshots. Nothing is final, everything is subject to change, but you all know all that stuff already.

Here's a few shots of what the game looks like so far. Thanks for being patient while I mostly just talked about stuff, even though I know most people just think of me as a graphics man. I hope these graphics will satisfy some of your curiosity. Yes, there's a lot of Loom, a lot of Dune, a lot of that lovely mix of sci-fi and fantasy that captures my imagination in so much fiction. Hope your eyes enjoy!

Devlog 16: Production!!

2025-07-22T04:01:00.000-07:00

We're finally here, friends. Production time. Okay, from here on out I know exactly what I'm doing, I won't waste any time at all. Familiar territory, I've been doing this for years, absolute efficiency. Except that bit today when I used the wrong operator in a for loop and got stumped for 10 minutes. And yesterday when I was running a physics simulation in Blender to see if one of my visual ideas was even possible. And, and....

Okay, but seriously. It's show time, and there is a secret to doing this and I worked it out ages ago. It's a very complex secret so please take notes. The trick to getting a game made is to: make a list of all the things that need to be done, and then do them all.

Seriously. That's it. Break it down into a small list that you know you can get done in a day, and then force yourself to do everything on that list that day even if you spent too much of your break playing Peglin. Do this every day and eventually the list is gone. If you only do one thing, that's one less thing to be done.

Art

The moment Dave read my doc last week and agreed that he's publishing it as the next in house Wadjet Eye game, I hit the ground running. Lists, spreadsheets, post-it notes like you wouldn't believe. Highlight all of the design/narrative issues we agreed upon and start trying to address them. Work out exactly how many characters, exactly how many backgrounds I need to make. Here's an example of how my backgrounds spreadsheet for the game's prologue (minus the scene names which would give things away):

Yes I use dark mode for my spreadsheets, I'm an artist

If you're curious to see what the "refs" or "whitebox" stages might look like, I covered that in a blog post here. If you want to know why I might use 3D for some scenes, it makes it much quicker to get the perspective and foreshortening on curved surfaces right, and it can simplify other stages that might be very difficult by hand. Mostly it's not anywhere near as much fun as sketching things out loosely by hand, but it can save some headaches in the long run.

If you want to know what the thumbnails stage looks like, here's the thumbnails for the first scene of the game!

If you're thinking, hang on Ben, is that seventh scene just a redraw of the life crystal room from the 1995 science fiction adventure game The Dig as painted by the Bills Eakin and Tiller and Adam Schnitzer well then the answer is absolutely not I have no idea what you mean I was just seeing how the composition felt okay the final scene ended up being WAY different hmph!

I looove this method, it's so nice and fast and free and you can get an instinctive feel for whether a scene works for you or not VERY quickly. Paint em zoomed out, big brushes, as few details as possible, as little actual effort as you can get away with. So, yes, like my "finished backgrounds" from 2010, thank you very much, no need to point it out in front of everybody.

Animation

The "best" part about being at the start of an adventure game project is that your character needs to walk and reach in every direction and currently they can't walk or reach in ANY direction. That means you get to animate lots of thrilling animations which are basically just picking things up in different directions and heights. I build an extender function each time I put one of these in the game, because I want to be able to call the animation without thinking which animation number it is, I want the character to face the right way before it starts, reset to the correct talking direction when they finish, I need the offset that I use to calculate floor shadows and reflections to adjust automatically so I don't forget to set it/reset it each time, etc. And so I have a whole script module of just this. You can see by the script header that it's an absolute delight of reaching in different directions:

I thought this was an adventure not "reaching for stuff simulator"?! Where's the space whales and trombone blowguns?!

The best thing about being the one in charge of the project is that I can make the very firm decision that there's only one player character, with only one outfit. That will save so much work. Seriously, imagine making a game with multiple player characters, or outfit variants, or time periods? Who would do that, man?! Not me, that's for sure. In my game we wear one thing, we play as one thing, and we like it. I'm a man over the age of 35, anyway, I buy 7 pairs of jeans and t-shirts at a time and that's my outfit every day for the next 5 years. So it's realistic.

Design

Whenever I think I have a good puzzle, I try and add another layer to it. That's all I have to say for now. I know I'll get it wrong for some people but I'm genuinely trying to get this to at least be interesting.

Programming

Most of the programming is pretty straightforward now that I have my main foundation down. The way AGS uses overlays now allows me to do some of my old visual tricks much more nicely, and I'm a little tidier than I was in the past, but mostly AGS is built to handle everything I want to do out of the box, and all of the custom gameplay stuff I want to do I built late last year when prototyping. On Friday I took my lumpy old project file, stripped tonnes of crap out of it and upgraded it to the latest version of AGS 4.0, and after a few issues had a nice, neat project file set up, and so mostly everything has been straightforward.

I allow myself one (1) "tinker" project each day, though, because otherwise they will build up forever and I will never get any of it done. Today's was making an icon of the inventory item you're picking up swoosh from the spot you pick it up at to your inventory in whichever slot it's destined to fill - after I was unimpressed with the visual feedback of picking up an item while playtesting. So now my function calls for picking up an inventory item will use this instead of the default AddInventory() function:

Because the game is still in the early stages I check the offsets and element sizes to perform the calculations, which should save me from having to adjust this later on if I move things around or resize things. Might as well plan for it!

Summary

I feel great. I've been wanting to build a game of my own direction and vision again for literally years and it's fantastic to be doing it again. I know the boring parts, the annoying parts, the awful "players hate this bit and I don't know how to fix it" parts are coming, but at this point I'm having the best time and making good progress.

Now, I have some Peglin to attend to...

Devlog 15: I'm a writer now.

2025-07-15T03:23:00.000-07:00

The last time I posted here was the end of May, and I was just transitioning from the phase of "collecting all of my thoughts" to "turning this into a game". I spent the 6 weeks between then and now forming a massively jumbled set of ideas, places, characters and gameplay elements into a game script. Indeed, yesterday I handed in my design outline to Dave G of Wadjet Eye Games, and crossed my fingers that I had explained myself well enough and that my idea was good.

Don't get me wrong, I thought the idea was great. In my head it's the most lively, original, heartfelt thing I could make right now. It's over a decade of built up dreams, hypotheses, little philosophies all rolled into a huge ball, with the fat trimmed off it mercilessly and as well rounded and cohesive as I could get it in 6 weeks. It's 24,000 words, 56 pages of what I hope is the best I can do. But of course there's still that nagging feeling - what if I can't see the problems? What if I missed something big, aside from all the big stuff that I had missed then caught and fixed? What if it's too weird, too silly, breaks too many unspoken and spoken rules of the genre?

It's natural for any writer to be anxious while waiting for feedback. I should know. I'm a writer now.

You might remember this post going around a long time ago, about the funny ways ladies have died in literature:

All your writer friends will have laughed at it because it's so stupid to die from "Too many pillows" or "Missing slippers" or "Pony exhaustion". Some writers will tell you that the funniest one is "Someone said "No" very loudly while they were in the room" because that's a very stupid thing to die from, and then we can all feel very proud that we would never write something so stupid, isn't it a good thing that we're modern writers and not stupid old writers.

But next time a writer is in the room you're in and asks if you liked their work say "No" very loudly and watch them literally die. That's proof of what we all know - that writers are just people who will tell lies for attention and money. Trust me on this, I'm a writer now. I wouldn't lie to you. Not even for attention and money.

In any case, Dave Gilbert didn't say "No" very loudly, and so I have survived. He said this, in fact:

That's an awful lot of praise and I'm very grateful! I'm going to warn you now that some people will not share his opinions here, some of my friends will hate this game, that's okay. We can still be friends. You don't need to like my guitar playing, either. But it's a good outcome. I took lots of ideas, I designed the best gameplay I could around them, and then I wrote a game around that. The design stuff still needs a lot of work, of course. The writing stuff will too! It's ridiculous to think that a 56 page document with 27 characters and 73 backdrops will make it unscathed from document form to game form. But nevertheless. I'm a writer now. I haven't forgotten how to do it, and now I can finally, finally start actual production on this game that everybody is bored of hearing about before I've even shown a single screenshot.

If I had to be really honest, I would give the classic answer that I didn't really do much writing. I came up with the setting, I came up with the general thrust of the plot, and I came up with some fun characters, and then the game just kind of wrote itself. You know how your friends will react to weird situations, so if they're your imaginary friends and imaginary situations then that still counts. Not all of them are my imaginary friends, some are imaginary bastards. I should know, I've been stuck imagining them for weeks now. But that's how the game got written, I threw all the bits together and it wrote itself and mostly I just spent dreadful, agonizing hours editing and lamenting that I had read this too many times to know if it was actually the most boring thing to read imaginable or if I was just burnt out on it. I do maintain that taking out two pages of quantum physics was probably a good move, however.

And look, I could have shown screenshots. I know people like my illustration work enough that I could ride that wave of "x amount of people already like your drawing, and will probably buy a game because you drew it". I really appreciate that. But I wanted to sell this game to Dave based not on my drawing, but my writing and design, and I'm pleased to say I did that.

Oh, and how did I distracted myself from overthinking everything while waiting to hear feedback about my document?

C'mon, friends. You already know the answer...

Devlog 14 - Coming together

2025-05-30T00:30:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody. This is a long post but you don't have to read it. If you just want to see some pictures you can scroll down and see those. Then you can go and spend your reading time on someone who had an editor. Gene Wolfe is good, but there are plenty of others too.

It's been months since I posted any progress on my own project, but as you may have gathered from my last blog post on here, I had been rather busy finishing up other things, and then it took me a while to get the momentum back up on my own work. Releasing a game is quite distracting!

Nevertheless, I am still working on this project, and progress is going well! The stage that I was blogging quite intensively about at the end of last year was very much the prototyping phase, as well as re-learning how to use the scripting language and the new tricks of the AGS editor. I emerged from that period with a prototype that took my original ideas and simplified them enough that my testers enjoyed using them, and I still felt like I could make intricate, interesting gameplay with, and a system of implementing it all that was functional enough to be usable over the course of constructing a whole game.

In short: I knew what I was going to build, and I knew how to build it. This might seem like a simple matter considering that I'm making a point & click adventure game (which I've made before) using AGS (which I've used before) but it wasn't quite that simple because I am going for some slightly different mechanics. I imagine it took Brian Moriarty a while to figure out the "what and how" phase with Loom, for example.

In any case, now that I have that decided, I have to try and lay out a rough course of action for the project where I take mechanics that I like and build a game from it. That's what I've been doing, and a lot of it is sketching, writing, building, testing. I try to write down or sketch out every idea I have around the game/setting/world/characters, whether they're good or bad, and then I refine things or cut things when I've developed everything else a little more. Sometimes I have what I think is a fun bit of gameplay, but can't make it fit the situation. This classic "There's a puzzle here because adventure games need puzzles I guess" scenario is something we've probably grown familiar with. So maybe that puzzle can be lifted and placed somewhere else where it can actually integrate nicely with the setting, or maybe I can come up with an adjustment to a character that makes it feel more natural.

I also have to give the players problems to solve - not just in terms of puzzles, but motivations. You need a reason to be setting out on this task. The character I'm controlling should feel like they have to complete this task in order to get what they want, whatever it is. I haven't written a game in 10 years, and frankly I never felt like I gave my early projects enough opportunity to allow this to develop, and so this time I am trying to develop that out much more. In addition to notes typed into text files and post-it notes, I also keep a big notebook that is now about half full, and a sketchbook in which I've been slowly developing the setting - at first just jotting down ideas in order to not forget them, but lately it's because I have a specific part that I want to show and I want to try and establish or develop a concept for how that might look.

I finished this bottle of fountain pen ink writing notes out last week. It's not at all necessary to use fountain pens or nice notebooks to do anything, but I enjoy it and therefore it makes the process of making a game more enjoyable for me. People are suspicious of how long it takes to do nice headings and things in fountain pen and sometimes question me about it but it honestly doesn't take very long. I posted a video the other day of my handwriting the other day and while it's not fast, it's not dreadfully slow either. I can write a lot faster than I can think, I assure you. The title I was writing out is the name of an Infocom text adventure I've been playing. I've been playing lots of those lately. They're really good!

So that's where I'm at. Things are coming together. Last night I finished my first worldbuilding sketchbook for the project and uploaded a video of me flipping through the pages of it. No music or talking, just the sound of rain in the background and pages turning.

Because there's no talking in the video, I've a few comments to add here about how I use my sketchbook. I use the bulldog clips because sometimes with a hardcover sketchbook the binding means the pages don't lay as flat as I'd like. You can buy a ring bound sketchbook to solve this, but I prefer this format, and bulldog clips are cheap. The ones I use now are old Waverly clips that I think my local office supplies store found in the back room when they re-arranged their store for the first time in decades and put out on discount, so I bought a big old dusty bag of them for very cheap. They work fine even if you can't fold the arms flat like the wire handled ones.

I use different brands of pencils for my different hardnesses because I don't want to have to read the label to see which pencil I'm picking up. It's much nicer to go by the colour of the brand. You can find the details of the pencils I use in the video description. I think most well known pencil manufacturers make pretty good pencils - these are all nice to use. Don't buy generic pencils branded with things like "Artist's Pencil" or "Professional Drawing Pencil" or something though, cheap pencils don't sharpen nicely and either the wood lets you down or the lead lets you down or both. Pencils are cheap so don't buy cheap pencils. But you also don't need to buy a Blackwing or a Rotring or whatever just to sketch a melancholy mushroom guy. Staedtler or Faber-Castell or anything is perfect.

I usually lay out the very light foundation lines with the 2H pencil, it's easy to erase and even if you don't erase it and leave construction lines in with it they don't get distracting. Then I go around with my 6B and delineate the key forms from the mess of 2H scribbles, as well as filling in the large areas of block shadow. Then my 3B is kind of my general purpose detailing, refining and shading pencil within those forms. The mechanical pencil is just used for writing the text because otherwise I have to sharpen my pencil constantly.

I use three different types of erasers because they're all useful in their own way. I managed without a retractable eraser for ages but in specific cases they're great. These Leuchtturm sketchbooks are great. The word means "Lighthouse" in German, it seems, and lighthouses are awesome. If you think they're too expensive just remember it will take you probably 147 years to fill it and so broken down to a daily cost they're actually super cheap. George Broussard recommended them to me. Thanks George! I never expected to be getting art supply recommendations from you back in the day when I was blasting cracks in walls with Duke's rocket launcher.

As for the content, most of this stuff probably won't get used directly. A lot of it is just "oh that's an interesting idea, I'll jot that down" and it's easier to put certain ideas down in sketches than notes. Adding little bits of text helped me so much to describe what I was trying to show with the image, to get used to putting words together and being descriptive without being annoying (some of these are definitely annoying, it's fine, I don't mind if you want to tell me that) and it helped everything to feel like it was a part of the whole theme & project. Having uniform text box designs helps the book feel consistent throughout despite different styles & different levels of effort per sketch. Adding little corner framing elements was fun just to give the thing a visual theme and to make something that I felt was designed & nice to look at rather than just "some drawings".

A lot of people say you should allow your sketchbook to be messy and not worry about quality but I don't think that's entirely true. When I'm proud of something I want to work on it more. So currently I run two sketchbooks, one that is messy and ugly and I don't care about it, where I work on things that are hard for me and I'm not proud of it and don't show anybody, and then this one which I don't necessarily work harder on, but I don't use it for study or practice, I just use it for developing concepts for one project. The messy one has about 6 pages left, also, so having this book hasn't stopped me from being messy or free. But I hate flipping through that other book and I like flipping through this one - often I'll see an old idea that I'd forgotten and think "Oh, I really like that, I should revisit that".

You only get to make so many things in your life so it's a good idea to give yourself both the space to make things that you don't ever want anybody to look at and also space to make things where you can go "Yes, here's some stuff that you're allowed to see!" for people who are curious.

Anyway today I peeled the plastic off a brand new sketchbook and filled the first couple of pages and so nothing has changed, hitting a milestone like that is meaningless, it's just it was the boost I needed to finally update this blog.

It’s been a good couple of months!

2025-04-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

Hi all! I know I’ve been quiet. It’s been a busy time, with lots going on - and it’s actually stuff you can check out, if you’re interested.

Last month the new Inkle game Expelled! came out. I helped out with some of the background art on this, and it was lovely to be involved. Reviews have been great! You can check it out here and here.

This month saw the release of the new Wadjet Eye Games adventure game Old Skies. This was a pretty big project for me, my first attempt at doing an HD adventure game and it’s also getting great reviews. You can grab yourself a copy here.

Plenty of other things happening behind the scenes, but I figured it’d be nice to give a quick update about what’s been going on for those who’ve been curious. So nice to see these games out and about and being enjoyed by people. I’ll be back with dev logs about my own project soon enough!

Devlog 13 - Nobody will ever grasp exactly how much effort I have put into getting the tiniest things feeling good.

2024-12-12T08:04:00.000-08:00

It's so nice to know what I'm making now. Having actual solid direction on what I need to do is great, although it means that my todo list has gotten both longer and more filled with stuff that takes me way too long. Sometimes I think how much simpler things would be if I would allow myself to just design a straightforward AGS game, with inventory and dialog and that's it. But I know my heart wouldn't be in the project, it would scratch my urge to experiment with gameplay, and I feel like I've made enough of those already to do something different. It's just that everything takes so long now and while I can feel my skill at working with AGS script improving literally every single day, I also spent 3 hours yesterday fighting with room overlays and I still haven't solved all my problems there and I don't know how much more time I can justify spending on learning how to use them right now while the rest of my todo list looms.

This week I want to shout out vga256's EXiGY project, which was announced last week. I've been hearing about this for around a year, and we've spent many hours talking about design ideas, development woes, and the usual things that two people working in similar fields always talk about. There's some blogging about the process going on over there, too, so if you like reading these, you will probably like reading those.

Graphics

The build I sent out had the scenes roughly painted up, but being unsure about the solidity of the gameplay I didn't spend too much time polishing them, so I've quietly been seething at myself for these half finished, amateur looking scenes while I try to remember how to make computers do what I want. Anyhow, with things working better I started painting the scenery up properly this week, and found solutions to some of the problems* with the scenes ended up being a bit simpler than I thought.

Of course, nothing in the scenery has changed at all. In essence they're exactly the same scenes, just now I've worked three times as long on them and am less dissatisfied with them. I expect some testers will struggle to notice even one difference between the 'bad' version and the 'fixed' version. But that's the way of the illustrator, I'm used to this. See the title of this blog post.

Coding

After my efforts last week, the last thing I needed to learn was performing a modulo operation in AGS. I know this is probably considered very easy but for some reason I have a hard time visualising how this works and so my three different effects that require this took me far too long to put together. At one stage I actually had an effect indexing through an array backwards. I'm a graphics person, right, I haven't done utility maths in years, so some of these operations I had to write out with a pencil, stare at them with my head in my hands for a while and then go "Oh, it's that easy? *sigh*". At one point James Spanos gave me some information on what will make the engine run slow that helped me understand the issues with something I had written which allowed me to refactor it, which was immensely helpful. Prior to that it was one of those problems where the issue was that I didn't even know what the issue was.

I have everything working more or less how I want it to at this stage, in terms of how it feels to operate your character's abilities in the world (with the exception of every single edge case that I *know* will crop up) and so after some more tweaking and adjusting I'm going to send out another build with the clarification that there's no more gameplay, I just need feedback on what's annoying and what's fun in my UX.

I have no doubts that some stuff that I think is really cool will be horribly annoying to some people. There's one detail that I know is inaccurate, but feels so nice to use to me that I hope nobody cares. I had thoughts on how to fix it but it involves another two modulo operations and I don't even know how well the fix would work and I need a break from maths. I also have no doubts that some of the fine details will not be noticeable at all. See the title of this blog post.

Design

There's a fun thing in illustration where you make a change to an image and you can't decide, so you turn the layer on and then off again. Slide the opacity up and down. Maybe it's somewhere in the middle, but 47% opacity feels like too much, 46% opacity feels like too little. It's a kind of ensnaring vacuum that eats hours of your time. I'm finding the same with design - I move an element to the bottom of the screen, I move it to the top. Not sure. Let's make a hardcoded element a variable now so I can experiment more. Every script in the game has an expanding list of things that were once hardcoded and are now variables while I tweak and test and repeat.

It's amazing the things that I've found myself doing in the background because a mouse mode didn't feel right, or something felt too static, or things just felt wrong. Sometimes I find the solution very quickly. Other times it's the sad understanding that all the endless tweaking isn't fixing anything, you have to throw everything out and start over. Some things that seemed like a solution to something not feeling good ended up making it feel even less good. I want the player to always know what power they're using, intuitively. I want the act of using that power to feel good, like you're dragging that power around the screen as you move your cursor. Some nights I have stayed up until 3am trying to accomplish this. See the title of this blog post.

Summary

Sorry for the long post this week folks, I was out singing and playing guitar for 3 hours tonight and so my usual editing process was skipped over. These are the ramblings of a tired man who is trying to do illustration, animation, programming, music and various other things all at once and I know everybody reading this will think "Yes, Ben, that's ALWAYS the way it is". I know. I know the person making pizza crusts has attention to details doing that I will never even conceive of, as is the person painting lines on the road, the person writing a book about moths, etc. It all takes way too much effort and time and it's not fair that making good things takes a silly amount of work. But I'm enjoying the process so much, despite all my moaning.

I'm also still playing loads of Jagged Alliance 2 because it's the time of year I always get sentimental about long sessions in strategy & RPG games over summer holidays. It's probably how I ended up here in the first place. And Jagged Alliance 3 is really good and I enjoyed it so much, but Jagged Alliance 2 is Jagged Alliance 2, you know?

Thanks for reading :)

*the problems, in general, being variations on "this looks bad and I want it to not look bad"

Devlog 12 - Dynamics

2024-12-04T20:20:00.003-08:00

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.

Devlog 11 - Systems!

2024-11-28T06:14:00.002-08:00

Well, I've rebuilt my systems, I tried to design a gentle onboarding process, and I have given myself the day tomorrow to add some fun stuff into a build that has been almost entirely focused on being non-frustrating and robust, and then it's testing time again. Let's go through what I have tried to address!

Feedback

After my first round of wider testing I highlighted three comments that really spoke to me about where I could improve the game, so here's how I've tried to address them:

"A lot of vectors to "do" things and I fear it's confusing." Firstly, the number of vectors have been reduced. Some of the things that were being handled with two separate vectors are now handled with a single one, and some of the things that the player had to do manually are now being handled automatically by the game. Secondly, I have built a small section of game that is designed to introduce the player to the various vectors one at a time, so that they are not immediately confronted with a whole slew of confusing options. I suspect this may feel a little too pandering, that's okay, it's hard for me to tell from my position and so I can only design it the best I can and wait for feedback.

"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 have made a point of introducing the player to the idea that there are multiple ways of solving puzzles within this small onboarding section. When the player solves a small obstacle with one method, the game checks which method they used and another character points out the other method that could have worked. This is a small thing, but I am hoping to convey to players that this game will have mechanical non-linearity. There may be "consequences"* to your actions - maybe you will use a resource that you would have not used otherwise with a different solution - but I want players to understand that they have options. Such is the entire point of building a systemic foundation.

"[ability] felt really good because it had absolutely no gameplay system connected to it. I did it just to feel good." Some of the stuff in this build (and some of the things I hope I have time to add tomorrow) will absolutely be "just for fun" stuff. I want players to feel satisfied by overcoming challenges, but I also want them to have some joy in just poking at this world and seeing what happens outside of those challenges. This is the thing that led me to enjoying adventure games as a kid, the satisfaction of solving puzzles didn't kick in for me until much later.

Coding

So obviously I have been doing lots of this the past few weeks, and I keep talking about "systems" and so I want to show roughly what I mean here with a simple example:

Rarely have I regretted anything as much as the space between words in the property "Max Energy", a sin I pay for every day and keep meaning to change.

Here's an example of one of the player's abilities, which is "Flux" - giving and taking power from devices in the world. It's the most straightforward of your abilities, offers the least amount of fun, creative design, but when used in combination with your other abilities it offers some interesting gameplay options. In the process of using this ability on a device I have to do a number of checks to see which party has how much power, how much power each party can hold, and trigger a variety of different animations and responses based on the outcomes of these checks. I also know that every time I use this ability the player will have to walk up to the device and touch it, and different devices will require that the player walks to different locations, faces different directions, and plays different animations. Some of these animations will require the player to reach below the bottom of their feet, meaning we have to account for an offset (I have done enough animation work with AGS to believe that I won't need an X offset, but I can add this easily enough if it does become necessary).

As you can see from the code above, I've automated this whole process via a series of extender function calls and custom properties. I have to make sure that I populate each new hotspot with information that will drive these functions, but this is very quick and simple to accomplish. Then, when I want to add this ability to the hotspot I simply use:

With this single function call all of my animations, calculations and fiddly little things are handled for me, keeping my room scripts nice and neat and saving me from having to remember coordinates and sprite numbers/animation loop numbers, and meaning that I only have to write each function once. It's been a little intense getting these various systems built after my years of being away from coding, but it's coming together nicely. We'll see if this is smooth enough in the upcoming test!

Design

Most of my design lately has been focused on being gentle and informative, to help guide players into the experience, but I have still been thinking about systems based design a fair bit in the background, and playing a wide variety of different games to see how designers think about challenges outside of the very discrete world of point & click adventure games. It's really interesting to break games down into their core systems and see the various factors involved, and sometimes see the challenges that present themselves. Here's an interesting problem I noticed this week, playing "Inventioneers", a very well made clone of The Incredible Machine for iPad. Here's a viable solution to a level, in which your goal is to put the snowman's head onto his body:

It's typical fare for the genre, the balloon lifts the head, the timer wakes up the blower chap who blows the hammer which swings around and knocks the balloon into the scissors which cuts the rope, etc etc etc. However, one of the obstacles is a wall of ice, which you can handily melt by putting a flamethrower chap in place and dropping a bauble on his head to make him shoot fire. Anything in front of him with the "ice" property will melt, the snowman's head can pass through. But, in action:

See how the snowman's head happily rolls directly into the blast of the flame? It doesn't melt. That's because the snowman's head is a "goal" object, not an "ice" object. And so the logic of the game breaks just slightly because an object that I know is ice is not acting like ice. Of course, I can understand why the developers of this lovely children's game didn't want to draw a horrid animation of a lovely snowman's head melting down to a withered carrot and charred top hat, but this illustrates the sort of thing that I will have to be careful to avoid in my own project if I don't want players thinking "No, I can't send the snowman's head through there, it'll melt" and them getting stuck without trying it as a solution. Much to think on!

Summary

It's been a busy week, and I wish I'd given myself another day for adding fun stuff and polish, but tomorrow will have to be enough and there's no point polishing something that absolutely needs testing before anything else. I'm not confident that I've solved all of the problems with my first build, but I do think that I've taken steps to address the majority of the non cosmetic concerns (the fonts are still awful, there are still many missing animations and things), and I will start making plans for what's next once I have gotten some more feedback from folks and have a better idea if I have made progress or not! Thanks for following along in the journey! :)

PS: If you want to critique my code here, feel free! I'm very much an amateur, looking to improve my abilities.

*I am approaching consequences here quite differently to how I usually see it done in adventure games. I do not plan to scold players for their decisions, to change the ending based on their choices, or to present choices as 'better' or 'worse'. Instead I am interested in allowing players to solve problems in multiple ways. This is inspired by my love of RPGs and the like which allow a fairly wide variety of options to solve problems like "get into the building". I am even planning to have things designed so that if you spent a resource (say an inventory item) in solving a puzzle one way, but then think of a different solution that either doesn't spend that resource or spends a different resource, to allow the player to go back and undo their solution and do things a different way. Think of games like Eye of the Beholder, where you could hold a pressure plate down with a sword if you had nothing else, but if you then find a rock through the door you just opened, you can go back, pick up your sword, and put the rock down in its place. Or put the rock down as well as the sword. Or maybe your party is all casters & thieves and nobody uses swords, but rock throwing is great for you in combat. Options! :)

Devlog 10 - Progress, Again.

2024-11-22T01:28:00.001-08:00

I have more than just old game scenes in my reference folder, but I'm keeping my PureRef file to these for now.

No Monday morning test this week, because while I rebuilt my UI at the end of last week, the UX still needed a fair bit of work. So a good chunk of Monday was spent doing UX refinements. It's mostly a thankless task because UX is a bit like a font. You only really notice them when they're annoying, when they're done well they are basically invisible to most users. It also seems to be the consensus that the best way to get UX right is to keep getting it slightly less wrong through each iteration until it's basically not annoying anymore. So a lot of the day was the cycle of implement, test, adjust, test, etc. By the end of that development day I had everything feeling pretty good to me (although there's a tiny bit more vector math I need to do in order to get some timings right. Later, though - it's a simple enough calculation, I just have to stay focused on productivity so I can get this new UI in the hands of testers).

I finished off the day by re-learning how to use drawing surfaces & dynamic sprites in AGS. You can't say I don't know how to have a good time.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent building a second room designed very specifically to teach a particular idea, and on Thursday I designed another room to teach another aspect. Friday I was fixing, polishing and implementing stuff, not doing new things. Next week I plan on getting all of this gameplay working, polishing and tweaking and trying to make sure it feels good, explains itself well and if I can have it in some sort of decent shape, I plan to get testers looking at it again by the end of the week.

Where I think the project sits now:

I think it feels good to use your abilities. When I was testing the game before sending it off to testers, I felt the tedium of my own systems. When the tests came back reflecting this, I wasn't surprised. I don't think the whole thing is "right" yet, though it's a lot better. Still more to do, but I think it can be refined, honed, tweaked. I even expanded how the abilities can work a little, and I expect this will keep happening the more I design around them.

I think the mechanics can be used for some clever gameplay. You only have a few abilities, but they can be combined in interesting ways, and I already have a list of puzzles that I want to build. I fully expect some will work well, others will get thrown out, but this is my first time ever designing in this way, so that won't be a surprise.

I think I still need to find the fun. "Clever" doesn't necessarily mean "fun". I worry that the limited number of elements will make for repetitive gameplay - though of course aside from the things I've been building, I have the normal avenues of inventory items and dialogues with which to craft gameplay. But I have been very, very focused on the systems and the foundation are not the gameplay. On Friday I finally started to try to put the "game" in, as opposed to working strictly with mechanics, and I'm hopeful that it'll start to come to life soon.

The systems are not the gameplay. This was the topic of some extremely sleep deprived, late night, "I have to rethink how I approach implementing these ideas a bit" emails to a friend last weekend. Yes, of course, I have been focused on getting the systems sorted out. That is crucial. But once they are, the gameplay will not be a solved problem, in fact, it will only be the beginning of the problem. Designing a system does not mean that you've designed gameplay. It means that you've designed some tools. You then still have to design what you want players to do with those tools. My game is not fun yet because my focus has not been on designing interesting gameplay, it has been on designing a foundation. It's akin to making sure that it feels good to make Mario run, jump, shoot, fly first, and then you can design your challenges around these mechanics once they're right.

I think my game will look nice. I mean you all know what to expect from what my games look like now, and in drawing my own visions it's almost comical how quickly my style throws back in time a decade or more and I'm drawing the most Ben304 looking game ever. But I've looked at art a lot since back then, and I've honed my skills. I made a big PureRef file that you can see at the top of this post with some of the influences for the project, and the two scenes I painted for the game are scenes I feel good about. Even though I am plenty experienced at doing game art, it still takes a while to find the right direction for a project. I think I'm getting there.

Summary

In general, I feel good about the progress this week. My instinct is always to push forward, move ahead, feel productive, but the outcome of my last test told me how important getting this bit right will be. I've even changed one of the abilities slightly after having done some design around it, and this is what I think of as "the game telling me what it is". I can't promise that the next test will not be miserable for everybody too, but at least I'll know I've tried!

Devlog 9 - Taking direction

2024-11-14T02:05:00.006-08:00

Here's a sketch that I put down randomly months ago just to capture an idea that I went back and referred to when laying out a new environment this week.

The week began with me getting a great amount of feedback from my very patient testers, and some things were made abundantly clear to me:

1. My current interface is not clear, is not intuitive, and is tedious to use. This isn't a great surprise to me because the game's design was torn in a few different directions for a while, and it's still taking shape. Getting the interface right is something that can't be finished until I know what the game is, and that takes time! But working on this has become my #1 priority now.

2. Trying to use subtext with gameplay elements is not working. That should be obvious, but it wasn't until I put the game in front of other people. There's a couple of things that I have been trying to do in a clever way, and absolutely nobody understood them. That's okay, UI and UX design are probably my biggest weaknesses, but I know this: I have to refocus everything towards clarity.

3. People seem to be more accepting of the game's tone than I expected. Somehow this was my biggest worry going into the prototype testing phase, and largely people were pretty okay with the tone, it seems. I'm still a bit too wordy, I need to give the players a bit more motivation, but I have spent very little time on any writing, and I believe I can fix those things.

4. I think the game's second area is more coherent than the first. The feedback on this was not unanimous, and I think some of this is absolutely because of UI/UX issues getting in the way, but I feel this way, and the shape of the feedback seems to imply this. The difference being: I designed the first area while I was still working out how the player's abilities work. I designed the second area once I had figured them out. Hardly a surprise that my ability to design around them has improved.

5. My coding is reasonably robust. After the first two lots of feedback came in, I jumped back into the project and made a number of changes to try and make the game less tedious and unclear for the third tester, and because all of my interactions are handled with pointers and functions, doing so was a matter of just an hour or so worth of tweaking. That's a good feeling! The only thing that broke was the final puzzle of the prototype, which I am probably going to cut and implement in a more clear manner.

I want to share one snippet from each of the three test reports that I got back that really helped me solidify an affirmative direction for me this week:

"A lot of vectors to "do" things and I fear it's confusing." This was an excellent way of summarising the problems very succinctly, and kind of condensed all of the feedback down to its core. I believe it's quite acceptable to give the player various vectors to do things, as long as those vectors are extremely clear, and the onboarding process is curated towards clarity also. That way players can operate with intent and make deductions and decisions and feel like they are in control, rather than trying to guess at what will happen.

"I wouldn't want the game to feel like it has a systemic core underneath it, but in fact the solutions be very linear." Perhaps the ultimate compass with which to steer this ship at all times - if you give the player a lot of options, and the game allows them to do all of those things, but the actual world interaction itself is entirely linear, then the systems have been largely squandered. I need to make sure that my gameplay design aligns with my systems design. There is some dichotomy here between the solutions based puzzle game and the exploration based adventure game that I have been trying to balance, and to have it stated this elegantly is so helpful.

"[ability] felt really good because it had absolutely no gameplay system connected to it. I did it just to feel good." This was exceptionally valuable to me because I had spent so much time trying to develop the systems that this had been my core focus, and it was wonderful to hear that and interaction I had put in just as an exploration of the world and character actually felt rewarding to a player. It reminded me that players aren't just here to "solve problems". Having systems that allow the player to interact in detail with the world is great, but some of those interactions should be just for exploration, even if it's the outcome of using an ability. Exploration is gameplay!

Summary

Okay, so let's sum all of this up.

Nobody had fun playing the prototype. Everybody mentioned that they liked the ideas, that the core is good, but the UI got in the way, and the UX got in the way, and it was generally a frustrating, confusing mess. The UI cannot be saved, and so it's been thrown out completely and I've rebuilt it. I am okay with this, I was not attached to it at all after testing the game myself using it a number of times.

Everybody seemed into the setting. A few things to polish and tweak, but I always expect that. That means that I am building a world people want to explore, and that's always one of my biggest goals. I feel good about this. I would say that I didn't spend much time on this, but that's actually quite wrong, I have dozens of pages of sketches where I slowly developed the game's world, bit by bit, earlier in the year. That fact that it was so long ago just make it feel like it wasn't much effort - I definitely put lots of time into it.

People liked some of my cool visual effects, disliked others. I am an art man, not a design man, and so I want to put interesting visuals on everything. Sometimes that is annoying. That's okay, I can strip out most of the stuff people disliked without being too disappointed. Some of the visual things were just distracting. I don't want people getting distracted.

Having rebuilt the interface, I'm now building a gentler introduction to the mechanics. I expect that I will probably make it too hand-holdy. That's okay, I will accept feedback on that part and take it in my stride. I'm still finding out the shape of this game, and I've worked on enough games now to know that some of the best ideas take a while to emerge from a project. If everybody hated all of the mechanics and told me directly then I would accept that my ideas are bad, and scrap the project. That hasn't been the case, so I am grateful for the silver linings, and I shall do my best to address the rest!

Devlog 8 - Putting it to the Test

2024-11-08T02:33:00.002-08:00

This guy from Eric the Unready is one of my favourite guys.

Another week down, another few things off the to-do list. My primary goal for this week was to get a prototype in a decent enough shape that I could send it to a few testers with whom I've specifically discussed gameplay design with in the past, so they could try out my systems and share their thoughts on whether they work or not, what feels confusing, what feels tedious. The writing, art, animation and audio is all still very much WIP, but I have a different set of testers that I think of as more "mood" or "overall" testers that I'll show the game to a little later, when this stuff is all more set in place. In any case, I successfully hit my goal, and have sent a little prototype off. Depending on how busy those folks are, I'll be sharing the outcome of this in upcoming devlogs!

Testing

Monday morning's playtest this week went very well. Another reason that Kelsey is an excellent candidate for playtesting, aside from what I mentioned in my earlier dev diary, is that she's quite an emotive player. She'll mention immediately if something is frustrating, or confusing, or feels broken. She also reacts quite audibly to things she thinks are funny, interesting, strange, etc. In this case, I had put her in a brand new area with familiar elements, and a puzzle that was intended to be a combination of all of the elements that I had built - effectively, showing the player how the abilities they learned how to use in the first area can now be combined together in order to overcome an actual puzzle. The player is purposefully confined to a single room while they figure this puzzle out, and I watched Kelsey examine the elements, observe what happened as a result of her actions, and after a few moments I heard an audible gasp from her as she correctly deduced the solution to the puzzle, and watched with great satisfaction as she proceeded to execute her solution.

Success. I can design a puzzle using these systems! It'll be interesting to see what the other testers think, as they won't have the bias of having tested the game earlier and having familiarity with it that Kelsey has.

Programming

Most of this week was spent getting the prototype ready for a few more folks to take a look and give me feedback, and that involved a lot of cleaning up things I had built in a rush, putting in some more feedback for when players try to do things, connecting a couple of things I had been building in isolation together. I need to build a few more testing tools for myself, because testing is going to be very tedious until I do, even with a very short little snippet of a game like this. Adding in the inventory functions made me realise that I need to adjust some of my default interaction handling in my switch functions, but it's trivial to make that change. Mostly, though, I need to make sure I'm writing down what I need to do on my todo list the moment I think of it, because the amount of times I thought "I must fix that", then got distracted with fixing something else and forgot about it is amusing and a little annoying. In any case, I have no doubt that my test feedback will contain funny bugs. I certainly found a few myself!

Design

I have been playing lots of puzzle and narrative style games lately, just to refresh my memory on what I aspire to design towards and what I hope to avoid. It's interesting to dig into really puzzle forward games like The Witness and The Talos Principle again, and also more system based things, more narrative based things, and try to work out where I want to sit. Ultimately my goal is to make a reactive world, but by that I don't necessarily means a world that will judge you based on your decisions, or remember your choices - mostly I just want players to be able to try things and for those things to work, even if it might not suit a specific puzzle. I think of it a bit like The Incredible Machine - the balls still bounce, even if they don't land on the thing that will make them bounce into the right bin.

Replaying Eric the Unready this week has been particularly fun. I never got far in it when I tried playing it years ago, although I did think it was very charming, and I love Legend games in general. What I am really enjoying on a replay of it is how the game allows you to goof off regularly and gives you fun responses for it. If Eric the Unready has a puzzle that involves showing your ass to someone, you can bet that the game will allow you to show your ass to everybody, and often give you fun consequences.*

I also have been finding out how I want to handle dialogue in the game, and it might end up just being slightly differently to how a lot of my peers do it. I don't have anything innovative or noteworthy planned, I've just been noticing a few patterns about how conversations in games leave me feeling lately, and what I think I'd like to avoid.

Summary

With the prototype build sent out, I feel a little more at ease than I did last week. It's always a little odd waiting for feedback from testers, but I am actually quite calm about it. The nice thing about testing on such a small prototype is that I know that I haven't wasted too much time on an idea if everybody hates it, and I haven't designed too much game around it if people think that it could do with a fundamental change. Of course, it's hard to foresee anything yet, so I will get back to playing Eric the Unready, and deal with all of that stuff next week. Thanks for reading!

*Yes, of course there's a puzzle in Eric the Unready that involves you showing your ass to someone.

Devlog 7 - Late to the Party

2024-11-01T02:09:00.001-07:00

Some of the books I've read/plan to reread as part of gathering inspiration for this game

As work on the project continues, I am still probably spending a few too many hours figuring things out rather than just building, but the results of this week's Monday morning playtest were a success - the thing I thought would be annoying did, indeed, turn out to be annoying, and so I dove in and fixed that as my first task for the week, and then started working on the next room of the game. Everything is solid enough now that I believed I could get the whole next room playable and have that ready as the subject for next week's Monday morning playtest. I did accomplish this, as well as allowing myself some nice tinkering time. AGS 4.0 is proving itself most amenable to working with my ideas once again.

Writing

I didn't actually do much writing this week, but I did go and gather up some of the books I've been planning to read & re-read as grist for the mill of inspiration. I'm in the rather lovely position where many of the most inspiring books I've read came into my life after the last time I wrote a game, and so I have a wealth of untapped inspiration bouncing around my mind. With the intensity of juggling a range of things I haven't made any time for reading in the last couple of months, but that's changing now, and I'm currently working my way through M. John Harrison's Viriconium series. I've loved Harrison's writing style ever since I read Light, and I knew Viriconium would have a setting that suited the world I'm building here a little more closely, so it's a delight to dig in to this. Especially after making it through The Pastel City which pretends to be a very standard Sword & Sorcery novel with a nicer vocabulary for the first 95% of the thing and then turns into a proper Harrison novel.

I still can't find my old thesaurus, and boy do I need it. I was directed to Power Thesaurus by Nic Tringali and it's lovely, but I really do like to be away from the screen sometimes.

Programming

A nice side effect of lurking the forums and reading people's technical suggestions this week was that I learned about the function late_repeatedly_execute_always which seems to have been added since I last used AGS. This is a wonderful feature and allows me to be much more specific about when things happen in the order of operations. Within two days of learning about it I had already used it to get a couple of things done that would have needed really annoying workarounds otherwise. What a great feature, that I am quite late to the party in finding out about.

Another thing on my list is to relearn how to use drawing surfaces and dynamic sprites effectively. This can be a bit of a rabbit hole, so I'm putting re-learning how to do that sort of thing on my future todo list, once the more gameplay important stuff is done. It's also quite possible that what I have in mind won't be very performant in AGS, and it would be very funny but not very wise to build a 2D point & click adventure game that runs slowly. It's a little frustrating to be so out of touch with this stuff, but I know I can learn it all again, eventually.

In implementing the game's second area I found an issue with how I designed one of my systems, and I built a workaround that makes it work correctly, but it's an annoying workaround and I hope to soon be competent enough at code logic to not need it anymore. For now, it works, and I can keep building the game, and it will probably never get in my way, but it's extremely inelegant and it would be nice to have it fixed properly.

Art

This week saw me paint a single scene up, but it was a scene based around a gameplay idea that I thought would be challenging to sell effectively in AGS with consistent visuals. It was nice to see it working properly after all the elements come together - hopefully the illusion works as well to everybody else's eyes as it does to my own. Non AGS developers will probably think it's a fun, atmospheric scene. AGS developers will probably be annoyed that I got it working once they see it. Except Ivan who will smirk and say "of course you did this :')"

I had to, Ivan. You know this.

Summary

Yes, it's taking longer than I would like. Ugh, weekly update seven and I've only just put the second proper room in the game. I only put the first inventory item in today, and there's not a single dialogue tree yet. What kind of adventure game are you even making!? Oh gods it's not edutainment is it?!?!*

It's interesting how much longer "Making an adventure game with some slightly more complex mechanics in AGS" takes than "Making an adventure game in AGS". That said, the bulk of that time was getting the systems ready for building the game with, and it was very important to me. I am happy to be making steady progress on my todo lists, though, checking items off every single day, and I have a strong foundation† built now.

Next week I will be putting the final piece of gameplay into the opening section and then tidying some things up, adding some extra animations, worldbuilding text and things, and then I think it's time to show it to people. I'm not sure if I can get it into the state I wanted it to be before showing everybody, but it will be close enough, and there's no point trying to get it perfect before I know how well the core works. Wish me luck!

*it's not edutainment, any learning you do while playing this game will be your own fault, unless I accidentally make it a bloody allegory, please god don't let me make it a bloody allegory I respect my players intelligence too much for that surely

†"strong foundation" says the guy in the same blog post that he expressed his frustration at having to use a terrible workaround for a stupid problem he himself created, nice

Devlog 6 - Occam's Razer

2024-10-25T03:00:00.002-07:00

My sketchbook and design/writing notebook for the game. I like to be a little fancy!

An interesting week this week, friends. Well, every week is interesting at this end of a game, where every problem is a brand new problem, you're still working everything out and you haven't hit those mid-game doldrums of "I like being creative but this week all I am doing is things I already know how to do". Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to most of the problems being solved and the process of building my ideas not being a matter of solving 3 different problems every time, but there's also the fact that problem solving is satisfying and it feels good to walk away from a problem that you weren't sure how to solve.

Design

The first thing I did on Monday morning this week was patch up a few little issues that I knew about, and then compiled the project and asked Kelsey to take a look at it. Over the weekend I reached the conclusion that I wasn't going to be able to continue making improvements to my systems until I got an external pair of eyes on things to see how an actual player would interact with them. She's a perfect candidate for early playtesting because she is well versed in the genre, but won't approach the project like a designer, and is also both attentive to systems and not particularly interested in slogging through clunkily designed interfaces.

So, with a very limited build but with all systems working in the way I had planned them up until that point, I sat quietly and watched while she played, reminding myself that it's always awful to watch people play your projects, that it's normal for things to not be communicated well and for this to be frustrating to see, and that there were going to be bugs and that I could fix them. And... much to my delight, the systems all worked. There were a few little bugs which I could talk her through, and she asked some questions (some of which I answered, and some I remained quiet to see if she'd figure out the answer by playing), and I noticed some things that needed to be implement more clearly, but overall I was so pleased to see that everything worked more or less as expected, and that I think I have a good foundation for a game here. Oh, thank goodness. What a relief. That wonderful feeling of hey, this might be a solid idea after all.

We had a discussion after she had accomplished both of the small goals in the build, I made some notes on things I can fix and improvements I could make and then I thought it would be fun to show her the system I liked the most, so I told her what to do and then sat back to watch my cool project at work. Of course, that immediately broke something. "Well," I thought, "it'll make for a funny end to this part of the week's blog post."

Troubleshooting

In the process of trying to get the project in a worthy state for someone else to take a look at it, I had written out a list of issues that I thought should be cleared up first at the end of last week. One of the harder to find ones was a strange bug in which sometimes my mouse handling code wasn't processing clicks. I have quite a few lines of code handling all of the mouse and interface stuff (somewhere between 500-600) and so it wasn't too surprising to me that I might have made a strange mistake, and I spent a good hour or two going through and cleaning all this up, making it nicer to read, and replacing some of the repetitive bits with for loops. No luck finding that bug. The next day I was playing some Skyrim (it makes sense, I like old RPGs, and old computers, and keyboards and mice without these glowy lights on by default - my mouse has started doing this fancy pulsing glow lately that just seems completely unnecessary) and also getting a little frustrated at some of the bugs in that game. Weird pathfinding, the mousewheel handling through menus is very strange, sometimes I'll be underwater and suddenly fall to the ground as though I'm in the air. Oh and sometimes when I go to cast a spell nothing happens.

This was particularly frustrating when I was clearing out a cave of tough bandits. Stupid game. I'm clicking the button but nothing is happening. Oh, wait a minute. I know where I've seen this issue before. Hang on, maybe there's a reason my mouse has started doing a fancy pulsing glow lately.

No, reader, I am not proud of how long it took me to make this connection. But I am pleased at the fact that unplugging my mouse and plugging it back in again seems to have fixed the issue. Occam's Razer, right? (Actually it's a Keychron but you know I had to).

Programming

All that said, after Monday morning's playtest session I had a new feature I wanted to implement which immediately filled me with dread. I knew the logic behind doing this task, but I figured the implementation of such logic would be overwhelming in a very draining way. Reader, I'm happy to report that I got it working in about 15 minutes, and the delight I felt as I watched this feature triggering all of my test flags was so great that I let out an audible sigh of relief. It's like solving the best puzzle.

After that, I set about doing what I knew I had to do - I stripped out most of the hard coded functionality for the prototype I had sent and started rebuilding my systems to be more modular. This has been kind of a theme for this project, but it's an important one. One of my goals is to work with what I think of as "Attribute based design". Rather than each interaction being completely hand-coded, my aim is to give the player a handful of abilities, and then have the attributes of the items in that world inform how the world reacts to those abilities. Imagine if you were playing Loom, and got the draft that allows you to turn things green, and rather than only being useful in a handful of places, you can now turn basically anything green - it's just that this only has a "puzzle solved" effect in the appropriate places. This is more like the approach I'm trying to take, but I don't want to write this code individually for each individual hotspot in the world. Hence the constant refactoring.

One nice thing I learned about AGS in the process of setting this up is that extender functions can be passed with identical function names as long as the type changes. I vaguely suspected that this might be true due to the fact that we can call things like Character.Scaling(); and Object.Scaling(); despite the types being different, but I was still very suspicious on Wednesday morning when I typed my duplicate functions in and it just... worked. I had this explained to me nicely here when I posted about it, and what a wonderful feature this is. I then mentioned how wonderful this is to Dan G and he gave me a name for it - "Function overloading". That's the best thing about relearning programming by actually making a project - I immediately find an application for everything I learn. In any case, now when I put a new hotspot or object in my game, the default handling for trying to use your abilities on it is not "I can't do that" or no response. The character walks to the coordinate specified in the properties (not using the built in walk to coordinates because it won't work with my systems), faces the direction specified in the properties, and then checks the objects other properties and applies the ability or gives the response according to those properties. I think of it a little like The Incredible Machine but in an adventure game, except my machine is a lot more limited and much more credible. Or is it...?

Writing

Writing an adventure game is interesting. It takes a while to get to know the character and most of the lines require you to know your character reasonably well. So I'm not stressing too much about getting things correct just yet. I know my character's backstory and his goal, I know the setting and the plot, but the little things will take time. It's fine, I have time. It is interesting going through hotspot descriptions and interaction responses and seeing if I can give more details about the world and character through those, though. It's a little bit like setting all the design elements in place and then playing the game and allowing it to tell you what it is.

This sounds kind of like nonsense but it's the same with any form of improvisation. Play a few chords on guitar and listen for what is good, what is bad. Make a few marks on a page and look at what looks good, what looks bad. Eventually if you keep carving all the things that aren't the head from the block of marble, the block of marble is a head. The quality of that head does depend on your actual skills to find the good and the bad, though, sorry, the first one at least will probably be a bit crap. At least I can erase my crap lines. Stone is a bit less forgiving. I once had someone try to get me to come and do tattoos for their backyard tattooing business after they saw my artwork. The ultimate form of "no undo"!

Summary

Okay, so I've proven that the system works, the interface has potential, and I've rebuilt it all to be flexible. My next steps are to build a small chunk of game and get a small group of people playing it, and seeing what they think. With all my heart I yearn to do cool animations, a detailed and animated interface and polish up the scenery, but there's no point perfecting something untested. So that's my next goal, I'm building a section of game with just a few small but diverse and reasonably intricate chunks of gameplay that will get the player to use all of their abilities (and hopefully teach them how they can work in unison) and then we'll find out if I have a worthy enough design on my hands to start building a proper game from this, or if I need to go back to the drawing board and rethink some things. I'm going to get people to do some regular playtesting - I've got another one lined up with Kelsey on Monday just to see how she interacts with the new things I added, how everything is working together. From there I need to write out a big todo list and then just get building.

Devlog 5 - Getting it Right

2024-10-18T02:00:00.000-07:00

It's very nice to try ideas out in loose pencil before I actually start drawing on the computer.

This week has been a good week. There's always a feeling when things start working together in greater harmony where I think "This feels like an actual game now". This project has taken longer to get to this stage than normal, but I'm starting to get that feeling. It's a good one.

Writing

I've been very design focused so far, but I have finally started trying to write a few lines for the game, and here's another area where I am very rusty. But I also think, looking back at my old work, that I never had particularly high standards for my writing before. I did very little self editing, always wrote far too much, and often wouldn't think about what information I was trying to convey with each line. This time I'm trying to reduce the quantity of spoken dialogue that I create and increase the quality of what remains. After lots of tinkering I think I have the opening lines of the game in place, which seemed to take me forever - but I know some of my favourite writers rework their lines endlessly to get them right. I can also tweak background paintings forever.

It will be interesting to see if I still believe in the quality of these lines after having written more. At least I managed to name four of the characters already.

Programming

Your friendly learner programmer is slowly getting back in the swing of things. I can write a for loop now without having to reference the manual to remember the formatting. I have started using enumerated types for my functions again, the declarations of which I did have to look up in the manual but are thankfully as simple as I’d remembered. I wrote my first switch statement ever this week, what a wonderful addition to the engine since I last used it. And, best of all, when I hooked up a few different little systems that I had been building for a while and tested it - everything worked. It’s all pretty simple stuff, I am not building a ridiculously complex game, but to see things I had envisioned working properly was a delight. It means that I can build my ideas with my current knowledge. Time will tell if those ideas translate well to player experience!

One thing I am being careful about is not getting too worked up in getting a piece of code "right" at this moment. There are a lot of places where I know that I have a function working but I've done things in a very inefficient way, typing out things manually rather than handling them in loops, functions, etc. The honest truth is that my brain is still quite weak at following the logical processes of everything, so every now and then I will have something that I know I could do in a neat and compact way, and so I give myself one chance at doing it that way. If I can't get that working, I don't waste more time trying to get it working in that compact form, and just manually write it all out, which is quicker for me at this point, and leave myself a note to come back and try again when I am more fit for coding. I think it's okay to work like this for now - eventually I aim to be competent enough that following these chains of logic is trivial. But I would rather get everything working properly and try the features in game instead of wasting time trying to find the neatest way to write a function that I haven't even tested with everything else yet.

Art

I have everything in place enough now that the art tasks for this game are just my normal day to day "Here are the items on your todo list, make sure you're getting a bit done each week". This part I know how to do. It's still work, and it takes a lot of time as always, but in this case I have the confidence so that I am not really intimidated by these tasks, even the more complicated ones. Every font looks wrong, though, and I have started trying to make my own. It also looks wrong, but at least in this case I can keep fiddling with it bit by bit until it's less wrong.

Design

Here's the weird part - I can play some of my game now. Can even solve some puzzles with the player's abilities. There's no inventory or interactive dialogue in yet, but I know how to make those things, and it's the other stuff that I have been more interested in getting working. I know I'm being mysterious about this but I want to figure this stuff out more before I talk about it because while it's quite simple, the implementation means that I have to see it myself to know if it feels good, and if my ideas are strong enough to merit basing an entire game on them. It's really satisfying to be refining the things that don't quite feel right (it's amazing how much an animation playing or any kind of feedback are an essential part of design feeling wrong or right).

On Wednesday night I was hooking in a bunch of the animations that will make the design feel better and playing around with the elements and my brain went “Wait, wouldn’t it be more interesting for the player if…” and I figured out another layer I could add - just a small one, but this sort of thing was my hope. Build a set of simple systems, make them interact, and then experiment with them and see what emerges. I’m not trying to build puzzles yet, as this start section is designed to let players figure out how to use the game’s systems in a limited, not too challenging environment, but I think this sort of approach will be a fantastic way of designing interesting gameplay once I am. I know Jonathan Blow has talked about this sort of approach in discussing how he designed puzzles for Braid & The Witness. And I think it ties in nicely with my idea that an adventure game protagonist can bring a set of abilities and tools to a situation and we can encourage them to use those in interesting ways, rather than relying on players finding the majority of their tools in their surroundings.

Of course, people might get really bored with using limited resources. But I never got bored of the simple panel puzzles in The Witness. I plan on showing a build around to a few friends once I have a bit more interactivity in place, in order to get some feedback - I’m sure they’ll have thoughts on all of this.

Summary

Overall, the results of this week's labours have left me feeling quite optimistic. I always have the feeling that things should be moving slightly faster, but also the feeling that I'm solving new problems to me, and doing so takes time. Even more time now that I am re-learning so much. That being said, I've discussed parts of the design, writing and even shown a bit of art to various people and the response has all been positive interest, and that gives me energy. Yesterday I looked at the programming task I had set myself for the day and I did not want to do it. Even the thought of making it work felt overwhelming. But I broke it into smaller pieces, rewrote it several times, and eventually got it working. It's the only thing I got done on the game in the whole day before I got to working on some end of the todo list Old Skies art. But I got it working, and the next time I need to solve that problem I know how to do it. That's a good feeling.

Thanks for reading, all. I'm off to set up my telescope to try and catch another glimpse of comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.

This is the second comet I've seen with this scope since I bought it.

Devlog 4 - AGS Is My Friend Again

2024-10-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Cripes, a new todo list. I have been busy!

Well, readers, several weeks in to spending a little bit of time in AGS daily and it's starting to feel comfortable again. I've gotten a lot of value out of just lurking on the AGS forums, reading answers to tech discussions and seeing the insights there, and just getting hands on time with the editor and engine. I'm also still trying to get the core Old Skies stuff finished up and ticked off, but of course the list magically grew a fair bit in the last month. That's the nature of to-do lists after testing. I'll get there. I'm slightly less tired than I was this time last week, but only slightly. I have enough dark chocolate (85%, the good stuff) to get me through one blog post, at least.

Design

It's amazing how much ideas change once I try to make them work in engine. I think some of the issue is that my long gap between making things come to life has made me forget what it's like to conceptualise an idea, build it, and then tweak it just right. Another issue is that I am probably trying to do things slightly differently both to what most AGS games do and what I tried to do in AGS in the past.

For example, after implementing one idea this week and trying it I immediately knew that it felt awful, and that I had to change things. This was a rare, happy occurrence where after I went for a walk I realised how I could change it both to remove the issue I was having and improve another element I wasn't happy with, but it did caution me - things that seem like fun in my head will not always be fun in game. Every little element of an adventure game probably has nuance to it, down to how we walk around scenes.

Programming

I am sorry to say that I have found myself to be very bad at mathematics now. In trying to do some maths based operations I found myself very quickly overwhelmed by fairly basic ideas. Because of this I am re-learning maths, just a little bit every day with my morning coffee, because I seem to have forgotten the vast majority of it. Sorry, Mr. Ford, who always encouraged me to be an illustrator and didn't yell at me when I drew cartoon owls riding strange tricycles in the margins of my calculus exam. I think you might have been onto something with the illustration thing, though. Happily, my old Ti-83 graphing calculator still works after all this time. I'm doing the long division on paper with a pencil, though, because I'm trying to get my head comfortable with doing it again - in short, I'm training to get fit for maths.

In terms of standard AGS stuff, though, it's going well. Here's a quick fire effect I built in AGS before maths class one morning. It can follow objects or characters or even the mouse cursor as seen here:

Time to build Flamethrower Quest

The background is an old one I had done a couple of years ago for a nice tribute series. I have a bunch of other effects and variants I want to build, but am limiting myself to a little bit of fiddling each day, which is the only way the actual work gets done.

Art

I've painted the first scene for the game. It looks good and I am happy with it. No doubt I will be polishing it in tiny amounts for a month. I had to change a bunch of stuff once I saw it in engine, and I decided to do a bunch of parallax effects and things because why make the first scene I've implemented in an AGS project in years simple? It probably seems funny to consider drawing a single scene a nice milestone considering how many scenes I've drawn for other people's projects but it still feels like a good one. I think this game will look nice.

Summary

Probably the biggest criticism I would have of myself this week is that my goal setting habits have diminished a little bit now that I'm trying to draw, animate, implement, test and tweak all at once. I tend to find my work practices a little more scattered and less focused. I think now that I'm getting a bit more familiar with implementing in AGS, though, I can probably go back to working steadily through a checklist and making measurable progress. My biggest criticism of myself last week was that I overextended myself, tried a bit too hard to re-learn AGS and didn't get enough sleep. The gig that I mentioned that I hadn't done enough practice for went great, but I was definitely a little over-tired and made a few mistakes that were just "Didn't get enough sleep, brain forgot how this part goes". I've been better about all of that this week.

I am still finishing up Old Skies, a bit each day, and I'm very close to having the fundamental stuff done. I know I've been telling people this for weeks but I keep taking care of all the extra stuff that keeps popping up on the "important things to do" list and that list is still nearly all done. Dave has been putting the trailer together (as opposed to the "teaser trailer" which already exists) and it looks good. I'd redo so much of my work on the project if I could. That's always true. I'm proud of my work on the game, nevertheless.

Thanks for reading. Wish me luck with the mathematics study. And send more dark chocolate, it's all gone now.

Devlog 3 - Relearning How to Use the AGS Editor

2024-10-04T03:05:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2024-09-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

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

2024-09-22T05:58:00.000-07:00

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.

I think a good starting point is talking about what I think my advantages are. I think my main advantage, obviously, is that I have lots of experience with making a particular style of game visuals. Since I started doing this as a career, from an enthusiastic hobbyist, I have had my skills pushed beyond my comfort zone in many ways, which has given me a far wider library of techniques and approaches than I had before. This is probably at some expense of keeping faithful to my own vision much of the time. But I know I can create a game with a visual art style that will fit my goals, and that I have the suitable workflows and abilities to do this for a whole game.

Another advantage I have is that I know the engine I'm going to be using fairly well. Though I haven't used it much in recent years, an hour or so digging through some old projects and experiments showed me that I still understand everything reasonably well, and I'm quite confident that I can accomplish most of my current ideas in this engine. This will shorten pre-production time and pains considerably - somewhat helped by the fact that I have set myself modest goals for now.

I also have a good support network of people that I know I can turn to for feedback, to bounce ideas off, and to keep me motivated. This has always been vital for me, and no doubt it always will be.

Finally, I have an idea that I think will make for interesting gameplay, in an interesting setting. This is particularly important for me because as much as I enjoy the act of making games, I am very quickly demotivated if I start to lose faith in my project. This one has been stewing in my head and my sketchbooks for some time now, so my faith in it is quite strong at this point.

I think it's also healthy to try and identify some challenges that I perceive at this point, because the only way to deal with challenges is to start by knowing what they are. I think the biggest challenge at this point is that I haven't really written code, designed gameplay, or built a world in over a decade. For all of my confidence in my experience and familiarity with my tools, the real way to make games is to start actually building, and until I start for real my resolve is just conceptual. All of that gets put to the test the moment one tries to bring an idea to life, and the jump from "I like this idea" to "This is working how I had hoped" is a giant one.

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. I'll talk about this more later, of course, but as soon as one tries to do something a little different, there are all sorts of issues that arise. Some of that will be facilitation issues, some of it will be that some people will probably hate it and it might take time to work out why/if their complaints can be addressed. Maybe the whole plan is foolish, and I'd be better off sticking to the default systems - but I wouldn't be writing this development log if I was just sticking to default systems, I'd be off making a standard point & click adventure game.

Lastly, I think stamina and resolve will be a challenge for me. It's always hard to make a game, and it's going to be hard to go from making just one aspect of it to doing a wide range of the tasks. Keeping that ball rolling along is always a challenge, and I'm not foolish enough to believe that the idea I like will be the only force needed to bring it to fruition. I'll be talking about that process here, as every developer I know endures this, and I think it's healthy to address it.

The final thing I want to cover in this first post is my goals for the project. I have many, but I'm going to keep it to a select few major ones for the sake of brevity. I'll probably talk about the others later.

My primary goal is to take a more analytical approach to gameplay design. In the past I think a lot of my gameplay design was very 'first draft'. I'd come up with ideas, try to make them work, and if I thought they were okay, they'd go into the game. Not much refining, trying to deepen things with additional layers, attempting to elevate things beyond their initial concept. I think especially for "puzzle design", which we like to think of as a standard feature of this genre (lots to say on this - but later), I think any time in the past that I made a puzzle that people liked and was satisfying for them to solve was down to a good idea and a lot of luck. That's quite okay, I think a lot of good songs, stories, ideas can be attributed to luck, but I also used to rely very heavily on luck to get my art right, and having spent over a decade studying art theory, looking at a lot of other people's art and doing a lot of drawing myself, I now have better chances of success with each attempt to create art. Much like someone who has a bit of running skill can be shaped into a winning athlete, I hope that with study, practice, coaching and research, I can elevate my approach to gameplay design beyond my efforts of the past. Believe me, it's much nicer sitting down to create an image from the studied and practiced point of view than from the "I hope this works at some point" one.

Another big goal of mine is to improve my character animation. Working in HD resolution for Old Skies taught me a good deal of humility about the weaknesses in both my character anatomy skills and animation skills. Those weaknesses were clearly always there, but I could not see them for a variety of reasons. Historically my focus has always been on making games that look nice in screenshots. My aim now is to make a game that looks great in motion.

Finally, I want to take a more directed approach to writing than I did in the past. Historically I was somewhat averse to editing, and my character conversations ran too long, weren't necessarily good at conveying tone and information as much as they were vehicles with which I entertained myself and explored ideas, and consequently I think I often failed to engage people It's probably time to rein some of that in and be more intentional about what I put in the game and what I cut.

That all sums up my current thoughts about the project so far. Though it only exists in the form of concepts and tests at the moment, I plan to enter production very soon. I have a lot to think about, and will probably have a lot to talk about, so if this is of any interest, do stop by now and then and check in on my progress, or leave a question in the comments section! :)

Sketch a Day

2023-08-31T09:13:00.001-07:00

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

2023-06-13T03:38:00.003-07:00

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