Check out the game here! I'll spend the rest of this post talking about the journey this game took to fruition.
I never mentioned this before, but Pseudomo was actually built as an experimental part of a larger game. Without going into it too much, it's a top-down 2D action role-playing game with light resource management. As I see the game, its like FTL with the tactical ship combat swapped out for intense action sequences ala Hotline Miami. I know I don't have the chops to code something of that scope and scale yet, so instead I'm making games that isolate and simplify its various systems. Hopefully by the end of all this, I'll have enough experience to tackle The Big One.
Pseudomo was an incredibly simplified version of its basic combat system. I wanted to implement an attack and a parry, and that's what I did. To the Edge of Candy Island started off as an experiment in its resource management system and over-world, node-to-node type movement (like in a Mario game or FTL) - it wasn't until about a week ago that I decided to make it a Candy Jam submission, and that's where the project really kicked off.
I had a couple core systems implemented already; you had energy that dictated how many actions you could take, a hunger meter that would kill you when full and modified how much energy actions took, food that would lower your hunger when eaten, grid movement to get you around, hunt and rest buttons that would randomly get you food and lower your hunger/raise your energy, and a couple random events in the form of Game Maker's built in message system. I was getting ready to fill it up with random events and whatnot, when I realized I didn't have a strong theme to tie it all together. I considered different settings for a couple days but none of them felt right. I even considered using the theme from the larger game, but felt that I would be too tempted to put in more systems I didn't have time for.
It wasn't until after spreading the word about Candy Jam for a day or two that it hit me - I was trying to get this game done by February, Candy Jam's deadline was Feb 3rd, why not make it a candy game?? It was a perfect fit for me - I wanted to do something humorous, and a brutal resource management game set in a candy world was just too bizarre a combination to pass up.
I knew I needed help if I wanted to submit something substantial within a week. I turned to my friends Jack Rankin and Chris Deverell, who have helped me brainstorm ideas before but have never actually worked on a game. Within a couple days, we laid out everything we wanted and needed to do with the game: I would build a framework for implementing items and an inventory as well as random events and how they were calculated, Jack would write as many candy-themed items and random events as he could, and Chris would draw every piece of art we needed.
We had three days left at that point, two of which I was working a day job, so I was really counting on these guys to get everything done for me. That's a scary feeling - leaving something in other people's hands when you care deeply about it. I wanted this game to be good, it's a submission to a public thing, specifically for the masses (which is another weird feeling, different than just posting stuff to various forums). But despite their lack of experience, I trusted them. These guys are talented, after all. I knew they wouldn't let me down, even if my nerves were unusually high.
And they really pulled it off. Within 2 days, we had everything we initially thought we needed. By Saturday the 1st, Jack had written a copious amount of events and Chris had drawn nearly everything we needed.
If there's something that this project has taught me about being a 'team leader' it's that I need to specify and stress the exact, important details outlining a task. Despite doing great work, a good portion of Chris' assets needed to be redone to fit a grid layout, and most of Jack's events needed to be re-worded to fit the message structure, resulting in a lot of extra work during production. If I had properly outlined the exact proportions of the game spaces and message constraints, the whole thing would have gone a lot smoother. I wound up spending something like 7 hours implementing Jack's events when it could have taken 4, which doesn't seem like much of a difference, but this was a small project. Imagine this problem in a significantly larger game - the difference could easily be dozens of hours at that scale. Chalk it up to a lesson learned - any task I give will be outlined appropriately in the future.
The Sunday before our deadline - SuperB owl Sunday - was supposed to be about playtesting and bug-fixing. But because so much needed to be redone, it was crunch time. The three of us gathered at another friend's house (who was throwing a super bowl party) to finish it all up. I was particularly impressed by how quickly Chris re-did all the art and made new art whenever we realized we needed it. It took all day, and until about 2 am when everyone but Jack and I had gone to sleep, but we did it. We finished the game. Sweet, sweet success!
Something unique for me about this game is that there is somewhat of a narrative to it. All of my other experiments have been purely mechanical in nature, with no drop of explicit story to speak of, so to work on a game that relied primarily on the writing was great experience.
I tried to drop little details here and there without explicitly describing everything, I put a couple lines in that would (hopefully) imply a lot of what was happening - for example, the opening paragraph states that you finally wake up, and the in-game clock starts with 2 days having passed. I don't have a concrete explanation for this - not in a narrative way at least, I actually start the clock at 2 days because I didn't feel like writing the code for when it would say 1 day, and having it say '1 days' would have been dumb - instead I'm hoping players will put together their own reasons for these details.
I thoroughly enjoy little pockets of storytelling in games, whether it's from little paragraphs in an adventure game, environmental assets arranged just so in 3D worlds, or flavor text at the bottom of playing cards. I've read a few articles that describe the best storytelling as leaving details up to the audience - you paint the broad strokes and they project all the details in a way more personally satisfying than anything you could possibly write explicitly. Moving forward with my experiments, I'll try adding this kind of storytelling where appropriate. I feel most of my games will be heavily focused on mechanics, and due to my self-imposed rapid pace, I may not have time to add in that flavor to games that aren't specifically revolving around it. Candy Island was an interesting case in that the most of its fun comes from reading the different events and results, we'll see how these other ones go.
The game I'm working on now is a little dungeon diver in the same vein as Gauntlet. Whether or not I'll have time to add some sort of narrative to it is up in the air. With less than two weeks on the clock, it's not promising. But it should be fun in a tactile sense! Look forward to that come March! Thanks for reading!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment