Bonus Devlog: Placeholder Art & Unused Content
A peek behind the scenes at unused and/or placeholder content in Amadeus: A Riddle for Thee. Prompted by the following:
(ASK IN THE AMADEUS DISCORD SERVER AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE.)
I previously posted one of my favorites last year with no context. Here it is:
At the time I was cryptic about it; I can now reveal that this was the placeholder for the "Plant Witch Musings" background:
Which, now, looks like this:
In this case, I had fully intended to keep the tackier vibe of the clip-art placeholder. Then, I ran into that problem called "oh my god I need to ship this game and I don't care what it takes to get it out the door anymore." I just needed ANY vaguely plant-y, green-with-a-dash-of-reddish-pink texture.
I do NOT remember what possessed me to do this, but I took an old cosplay photograph of me as Princess Peach, cropped it to just the rose bush in the background, made it green, and kaleidescope-ified it.
...and I really love how it turned out?! I think this asset connects much better with the organic textures in the rest of the game, while still preserving a sense of stark contrast via the UI and layout.
Sometimes, the asset you make in 10 seconds is the best asset for the job!
The rest of my art placeholders are less fun. Because I hand-drew all of the art, I just took bad photos of the sketches I had in mind that would eventually turn into the finished art, and built the scenes with those.
I have a handful of additional sketches for images I intended to use, but never fully rendered. At a point, I prioritized the important ones, and got creative with re-using things to cover everything else.
The only placeholder-that-never-got-finished I almost regret is this one:
I REALLY wanted Amadeus's talk sprites post-ripping-his-clothes-off-in-certified-werewolf-moment to be tattered and look like shit. But it wasn't in the cards.
I had too many other things to do.
I wanted to be sure, so I ran it by playtesters. All of them said he looks effed enough by default thanks to his scars, so the descriptions alone sufficed.
I am thankful to the ~30-year tradition of video games describing characters as looking bloodied and banged up when their models look perfectly fine. It helped justify my decision.
"Look how much you're bleeding!" - guy referring to a character model in literal pristine condition. don't mind the splits I did in fact speedrun this game
Now here is where I shift gears a little bit to talk about process.
I don't have many more art placeholders to show off. For many aspects of the game's development, I just... didn't use them.
Rather; okay, let's clarify what a "placeholder" IS. Of course I have screenshots of old ugly builds with assets that look terrible. Here's my favorite:
But I don't consider these placeholders, because I made this build in a weekend for fun, WAY before I ever conceived of releasing an entire video game on Steam. I was making a tiny interactive art project for myself based on my OC's.
...and then I moved the goalposts 800 times, but that's not the point.
I am focusing on "placeholders" as assets implemented with the explicit intent of being replaced later.
And I didn't actually do that very much with my art!
I am HUGELY motivated by the process of creating art. I've mentioned in a past devlog that I can't actually write properly until I've first drawn the setting. Generally, I draw stuff first, then that art excites me enough to bother putting it in and building around it.
Case in point being that I didn't touch the build for Episode 2 ~ Reharm until I had first FULLY drawn this:
Art is often my creative launching point. Visual placeholders only come in when something else is my launching point, which is less common for me.
Examples of when I was motivated by something else, meriting the use of visual placeholders:
When finishing a complete build for playtesting. The sketched placeholders above were a result of this priority.
When designing the Plant Witch Musings layout. I didn't care about the specific background; the big-picture UI concept was what I was having fun with.
When building the piano scene. I was COMPLETELY focused on implementing/pacing the dynamic audio to the narration. Art was my absolute last priority.
...that one time I got a really funny idea for an NPC wait I can't believe I forgot to talk about this.
Okay so. You might recognize the basic composition of this image:
I made this janky collage as a basis for downtown Dartmaure. This wasn't a placeholder; it never went in the game. It was purely a reference I used to draw the actual background art.
While drawing, though, I got frustrated that I couldn't see the details of that house's entryway. In the photo, it's obscured by a very inconveniently-placed person who I called a "tourist."
"What if I just put something there in my game too?"
This was, in fact, the inspiration for The Tourist (actual Amadeus character).
I did legitimate research on historical tourism in remote mountain towns to justify this NPC, and decided to make her real.
Because of this, the following bad crop of that individual was used as a placeholder for The Tourist in-game... for about 6 months of development, until she got her proper sprite:
Which I still think is hilarious, and I'm so glad I remembered to mention it.
But I really do think that's about it for placeholder graphics.
However!!
I need to mention something important.
While art placeholders are not (generally) central to my process, text placeholders absolutely are.
Oh my god these are vital.
When building the logic of point-and-click scenes, if I had tried to implement all functionality at once, I would have gone insane.
Placeholder text that says "when you do this action, this thing should happen" was A LIFESAVER. It is THE ONLY REASON THIS GAME GOT FINISHED.
I will cut myself off here before I write an entire second post about using placeholder text to sanity check my code, but it was the backbone of Amadeus's development.
Placeholder text my beloved.
Placeholder text gets shit done.
Thank you placeholder text.
And on that note; thank YOU for reading this, and if you too would like to suggest random topics for me to write long deep dives when I'm procrastinating, the Discord server is linked along with other resources here: linktr.ee/amadeusgame. It's very small (compliment).
Otherwise, stay tuned for exciting updates soon!
"What about music," you might ask? Well, this post is entirely too long as it is. But the TL;DR of that separate post is "usually the music comes even before the art," and also "technically, the track 'IDK. Some Shit Like This' was a placeholder, and then it shipped in the final game".