State of the game (literally)
I'm aiming to have this game published on Steam by October 1st, 2022. That basically means getting it finished by mid September at the latest, so that's around eight months from now. Is that doable? Who knows. Most likely; no.
The current state of the game is actually a bit further along than I'd hoped it would be considering my massive lack of skill with Unity. The character can move around as I want, look at things, interact and describe things they see. There’s context sensitive interaction so all actions are tied to object (doors open, pickups get picked up, buttons get switched, etc).
I’m trying not to overcomplicate things here. This is the first game I am working on with the aim to release which is actually viable to do so, so I’m not overcomplicating things here.
There's a few hurdles to get over here. I am shit at writing stories, all the art needs to be made, I want the game to be fully voice acted as well. Welp.
All of the art is going to be low poly - PS1 style graphics. I mentioned in my first post why; I just like the style. It’s got that tasty retro feel and still eaves some things up to the imagination. If it looks like a door or a statue or blade of grass then normally, that’s good enough. There’s also the general public appeal of it all. These ps1 style horror games are sort of in I suppose now. Or at least they were.
I’ll make art specific blogs at some point but I’m sticking to some rigid rules; my textures are at most 128x128 and the models can’t be so complicated that they look out of place. as for effects, I’ll use whatever looks good rather than sticking to what was possible on a PS1.
I’m shit at writing stories, and I don’t usually read them either unless I know they’re going to be good. It’s tough, then, deciding to make such a story heavy game, but it’s something I am just going to learn. I like things a bit surreal, so the story is really reflecting that. What I have so far may constitute about an hour of gameplay, with fluff and exploration excluded.
Something I've found very hard is making this believable; why is a character here, what are they doing and how is that played out in a videogame? You can’t have a character kill a bunch of guys and then feel remorse for killing a special character, etc.
The game has changed a lot in the 2 months I’ve been working on it (one month I suppose, if you count me going home for Christmas), but I’m somewhat settled on what features it will have, and will not have. For my first game lets just say that I am going to keep it simple.
Music and effects are one of my final considerations. I’ll likely rely on asset packs, free music and the like for this. When it comes to voice acting, I’m hoping to get some friends to do it. I hope they’re up for it, because there might be a lot.
Might as well say it, I am using Playmaker here. I never got on with learning any programming language other than Javascript and web related languages, and I’m more of a ends suits the means kind of person here.
Playmaker has basically allowed me to think of how something should work and then get it implemented almost immediately. While I know there are gonna be issues later, I’ll stick with it for now and rinse out any niggling issues for Game #2.
Conclusion and short term goals
Not sure how often I’ll update, but it’s good to have a dev blog again. Funnily enough my last dev blog is celebrating it’s 9 year anniversary on Tumblr (it’s private and pw protected), but nothing came of that other than lots of half made projects.
My next goal is to finish the story and whitebox the game. I’ve gone about things all wrong creating art test assets and putting them in the game, so it’s back to square 1 for now!
Anyway, see you in post 3 in the next week or so.