Broken Remnants Dev

Follow the development of the adventure-RPG in which your actions - and your inactions - determine the fate of its people.

[charlieboots-dev-blog]

Taking a Break for AdventureJam

So Adventurejam 2016 is just around the corner (if you don’t know about Adventurejam, check it out: http://jams.gamejolt.io/adventurejam2016 ) and I’ve decided to give it a go this year!

Although I work full time, I’ll try to craft something nice during these two weeks. I already have an idea in mind, so I’ll just go with that and see what happens.

This also means that I need to put Broken Remnants aside until the jam is over. But no worries, I do not plan on abandoning it, and I truly believe that accomplishing a small but complete game in a shorter span of time will be beneficial to BR in the long run. 

I can’t reveal too much about my idea, since the premise is also the main spoiler. You’ll only have to find out for yourself once the jam is over!

[charlieboots-dev-blog]

The Honeymoon Phase: Keeping Sight of Your Purpose

There’s a wonderful moment at the beginning of every creative project you will ever undertake – the moment where the light strikes, where your creative power takes over, when your new idea seems like the best idea in the world. During this period, a newfound force will drive your project, and you’ll feel like you can go through anything to make this awesome idea a reality.

I like to call this the honeymoon phase. This is the time during which you will feel unstoppable. New ideas keep coming and going, you’ve got so much energy to devote to your project, and everything seems like a good idea.

But the honeymoon phase does not last forever.

After a little while, this driving force begins to slow down. Your original source of creativity starts to fade. The goal you had in mind – the reason you began this project in the first place – is far off in the distance now, and slowly you are forgetting why you are doing this in the first place.

And worst of all, your work sucks.

You take a good look at what you have done – all of the hard, dedicated work – and find that it is not as great as you expected it to be. You begin to doubt yourself. Why are you here? How could you spend so many hours on something as pathetic as this? What made you think it was a good idea in the first place?

Following your heart, you start spending less time on your project. You find yourself becoming completely detached from your original idea. Maybe you’d better move on to something else. After all, this project is going nowhere; it will never be as great as you expected it to be.

Wrong.

This process is something every creative mind goes through. Every bright, wonderful idea begins to lose its luster after a while. But, that does not mean it does not have potential.

It is difficult to bring an idea – a concept, something so abstract – to life, exactly the way you wanted. Often, when the project becomes tangible enough, the creator begins to see everything wrong with it. With time, the initial idea that drove the entire project is forgotten as the creator fixates on these problems and struggles to make the project perfect.

However, the end of the honeymoon phase does not have to mean the end of the project. This setback is only a part of the inevitable reality. Back in my teenage years, I struggled to finish my novels because I gave up when the honeymoon phase was over. I thought I had to be doing something wrong; I had to be, or else why did my stories begin to suck after a while? Little did I know that this is part of the game.

Good ideas are worth fighting for. It isn’t easy; if it was, would this project truly be of any worth? I highly doubt it.

When I felt myself leaving the honeymoon phase of Broken Remnants a few weeks ago, I knew what to expect. I’ve been there with so many creative projects, but this one is too important to me. And so, I did what felt best to get myself back on track.

I took a short break. Without stopping my progressing entirely, I significantly reduced the amount of hours I put into the project. This was to clear my mind for a moment, but also to give myself time to cross the end of my semester.

I wrote down my purpose. What was my first driving force? What made me spend months developing a paper prototype for this project? I can’t lose sight of this, and this is truly the key to perseverance during a creative project.

I wrote down the ways in which my game will fulfill this purpose. I want to draw powerful emotions from my players and make them feel like there is a connection between them and the characters I am creating. My game is no longer just an idea – it is slowly becoming alive, so my concepts need to be alive as well.

I wrote this article, to remind myself of the process, and to remind anyone who may read it that they are not alone. The end of the honeymoon phase is a natural process; you just need to be ready for it, and remember how you originally felt about your project. Odds are, you can make something great; you just can’t see it yet.

[charlieboots-dev-blog]

One of the biggest questions that I asked myself before I began developing this game was one of the utmost importance: “How will I deal with the decisions the player makes?” It took me a while to figure out how I would do this – both narratively and technically.

More often than not, the choices available to players in games will seem to make a difference at first. Whether or not it makes an actual difference can often only be figured out later.  I have heard of several players becoming frustrated on a second playthrough, when they discovered that the different choices they made didn’t really influence the outcome of the story at all.

On the developer side of things, it is difficult to develop full narrative arcs based on player choice. In branching narratives, each choice can lead to new content; this results in the creation of a large amount of content that most players will never see.

But then I realized I was asking myself the wrong question. Having choices to make for the pure sake of choice may seem interesting at first, but there has to be something else driving this reasoning – why? Why does the player have a choice? What am I trying to convey through these choices?

Certain games made this very clear. When I played through my several runs of Undertale, I could feel the meaning that were meant to be shown through the choices. In Undertale, you get to choose how to defeat your enemies – with violence or with words – and every single battle matters. The meaning behind these choices are quite clear and attempts to question something most RPGs have never question befored; is violence and destruction truly necessary to accomplish your goals? What does repetitive killing do to a person?

This is why Undertale has been effective for so many players. There was a clear meaning to the choices being made. From there, I reformulated the question I had about the choices I wanted to implement in my own game: Is there a meaning to these choices?

Once I found the answer – haha, no, I won’t tell you what it is – I was able to reiterate the consequences of the choices. In this way, the outcomes seem less arbitrary, and hopefully, they will affect the player in a deeper way than my previous outcomes would have.

Technically creating these choices is another story entirely, but I have made a lot of progress. All in all, the first choices and their consequences are integrated, but there are still minor bugs that come in the way of a good game feel. At least, I know exactly where I am going.