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Fine, I'll say something more profound:
Game Development is like a tree. It flourishes and grows until you take it down with a bulldozer, because you need to build a very boring office building in its place.
For the record, I don't know what that means. I'm doing some kind of stream-of-consciousness writing-thing at the moment, and it doesn't work for me, like, at all!
The working title of my next game is Project Synthale. It has a real name as well, but I'm not going to share it just yet because *write reason here*.
…
Fine, it's called “Nova Forever”, and it's an exciting sci-fi adventure game about an unexpected friendship, a space mall and connecting with people!
So much stuff!
That folder I showed you is full of things already. I'm all over the place at the moment and I love it! We have music, we have animations, we have scenes, objects, items, interfaces, cursors - we even have this little ad for candy in the game! (You should know the game takes place in a Space Mall!)
It's very tempting, right? The rings are made of gum!
The game's outline is written, which means I know what happens, why it happens and when it happens, and I'm really happy with it and can't wait to show it to the world! This will be my first commercial game project, and I'm trying everything to come up with a good workflow to make this thing in a somewhat sustainable manner.
In the beginning, I tried to be very clean with it and just focus on writing, which I did. But soon, I realized this didn't suit me at all. At a certain point, I needed to see and hear things, at least a little, to make sense of the game and what the hell I'm doing. I needed iteration—a little vertical slice of the game and its systems.
So after that outline, I began to implement and iterate on the basic systems. At every step of the way, I asked myself what I could do to make it as snappy as possible. My goal is to take out some of the rigidity that the genre sometimes suffers from. That means more tempo, fast walking speed, no endless dialogues, and a slick and functional interface.
So far, it's been going great. In the beginning progress was very fast. It took maybe a few weeks and I had a character running around, inventory systems and even a very cool little music-switching system I will talk about another time!
That fast progress slowed down significantly as soon as all the individual content of the game had to go in. In the beginning of a game the problems are so obvious and you are busy implementing very basic things that you don’t even need a plan to start on implementation, it’s very motivating!
But the actual content is so plentiful that I started to need more of a routine and game plan, which I’m slowly starting to apply. It’s really crazy how fast you are drowning yourself with ideas and things that you need to put on to do lists. This game is not super long, but it still needs so many things!
Writing a manifesto worked for me.
Early on I wrote down a kind of manifesto about what I wanted this game to be, to come back to and see what my intention was when I started. Let's look at some of those points and evaluate them:
"A point & click adventure game"
Who even plays these games anymore? Lots of folks, actually, including myself! I knew from the beginning that this was a passion project and would be for a little bit of a niche audience.
Seriously, though, I appreciate the many people who still enjoy point & clicks nowadays. They are out there, as are the games of the genre, which have been fantastic lately! My favorites of the last few years were Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, and Nightmare Frames.
I think it's important to keep in mind why these games exist and to keep making them. People love stories, and adventure games are such a great way to tell them.
Which is funny, since the next point on my manifesto is:
"Story & emotion first - always."
It was a good idea to write that down. That's the kind of thing you forget easily when you model a chair for 2 hours. This also means that the game should never stand in the way of the story's progression. Pacing, flow and puzzle design (and difficulty) come to mind, and I'm sure this will be one of the toughest things to get right.
Let's look at some other points:
- "Orthogonal perspective throughout gameplay" (I'm working with pre-rendered 3D characters. So I thought I'd be very limited in my options regarding camera placement. But so far, I can get away with way more perspective than I thought! A story for another day!)
- "Possibly stop motion-like animation in service of optimization" (Yes, this is a huge thing and works very well! I love the style of limiting the actual frames and giving the game a little more unique style that way. It also lets me optimize scenes without everything having up to a hundred frames.
- "Full voice acting" (Whoops. That one costs M O N E Y . Stay tuned about this!)
- "A fast travel system" (This is debatable. The game is not super big, and you can get around fast by foot. I think I'll still implement something to see if it works!)
- "The environment is a character." (I wrote this down to remind me not to be too random with my environmental design and to refer back to my writing for the places we see.)
- "Possibly a one-click-interface." (This is a little controversial. We see more and more adventure games where you just use left-click for all kinds of interactions, sensitive to the individual context of the stuff you're using. I'm still on the fence about this, but I'm seriously considering it at the moment.)
I wrote so much more stuff, but I don't want to spoil things about the story. At the moment, I'm still working hard on everything all at once! It's a little chaotic to jump from dialogue to coding or music, sound and visuals, but it works very well for me to implement everything at once in a fast manner to then evaluate and iterate on it.
I will have to stop working on the game for a while soon, but I hope I'll be able to share a little more soon!
