The past year has been a curious one, for a while it felt as though progress on my projects had paused somewhat - until I started to reflect and I realised a lot had happened, and quite quickly too...
I finished a long term game project.
Frozen Cortex with Mode 7 Games was completed in Febuary. Almost 3 years of art work. It received good reviews and seems to be selling OK, especially considering the rapid expansion that had occurred in the indie games market during its development. Something else happened in those 3 years - let us come back to that.
After finishing Cortex I quickly put together a prototype Unity project called 'Quiet as a Stone'. The basics of this came together in just two weeks - you can work fast in Unity if you adopt a 'game jam' mentality. I have a lot of ideas for my long term project Into This Wylde Abyss and I wanted to test some of them out within a smaller context.
The simplest context I could think of was a child throwing stones at the ground, a canvas for world making. This idea partly came to mind whilst thinking about Miyamoto recounting the origins of the Legend of Zelda games, from his memories of childhood exploration.
I distinctly remember a photo walk around Oxford thinking this idea over when I noticed the setting sun glancing over the mud and worn stones of the grounds I was in. The simple interaction of a stone bouncing from soft mud to hard stone came to mind. I knew I could represent it as I saw it. And I saw a blank canvas for a whole potential world of interactions and atmospheres.
Over the next five months or so I worked on the prototype. I focused on creating objects in a world that have a sense of solidity, feel reactive and graspable. I used a technique I favour, photogrammetry, for much of the environment artwork.
I coded a scene generator which would randomly generate a sequence of areas on which to play, with a progression of lighting and weather effects. I put a lot of early attention into the audio, ambient breezes, distant crows, rocks hitting stones, clay pots smashing.
I allowed the player to create and save these small scenes, of a world in miniature containing rocks, ruins, trees and villages. I began to experiment with the manner in which these objects interacted with one another, the constraints and limitations, the gravity of the game and environment. I was looking for strange, useful questions to ask myself What if Diablo 3 was an art application? What would an atmospheric pinball game be like?
This prototype was then unexpectedly accepted for the Eurogamer EGX Leftfield showcase. This was an incredibly useful and beneficial experience. After months of working mostly in solitude you get to see how a wide variety of people react to your work. It's one thing to talk to someone who is interested in your project, it is another to witness uncensored opinions. Ranging in extremes from folorn head shaking and confused hand gestures to rapt attention and spontaneous joy.
Atop this rich learning experience were 4 days spent getting to know other Leftfield exhibitors, all of which had interesting stories and projects, years of experience and penetrating criticisms to make of my demo. Many thanks to them and especially David Hayward for making this happen.
After a few post-show evenings of rapid hacking, gameplay changes and observational note-taking it was pretty clear I needed to rethink the prototype’s fundementals. It was also clear that the 'game jam' mentaility I mentioned above, though extremely fruitful early on, when combined with my lack of experience in code architecture had created a quite unhappy code base. It was difficult to comprehend and alter. The logic behind each gameplay event played out internally like a sequence of cascading pachinko machines. Not a very firm foundation to develop on.
After the show I wanted to release a minimal version of the demo which simply allowed for creation of scenes that players could save and re-explore in different settings. Perhaps on itch.io or somewhere similar. The todo list to make this happen in a form I was happy to release quickly grew and the prospect of untangling a pile of code I had no intention of using again did not appeal. I decided to drop it and move onwards. Moving the prototype forward with the the lessons of EGX in mind. Hopefully with code that will last and can be re-used for more than one project.
Perhaps the sense of a year on pause mentioned previously comes from the sheer amount of learning I am having to do. Primarily about technical subjects. Raising my meagre coding abilities a bit, studying and testing out different game architectures and frameworks within Unity. For what it is worth it seems that a form of Entity Component System is the right approach, building on the version that Unity utilises but trying to enforce a stronger separation of data and logic.
In a break from game development I was very pleased to have one of my Oxford photographs exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum as part of a group of winning competition entries. I don’t often enter photo competitions, I don’t think my photos are suited to it - but it worked out well this time.
So this brings us to now. While rethinking my projects and studying technical matters, Mode 7′s next project began production. At the time of writing it hasn’t been announced, so I can’t tell you much other than I rapidly made a concept for it in Unity (an excellent approach to interactive concept art for games by the way ) and we have been working on the actual game in Torque3D for a while now.
[ Evocative Mode 7 Project Imagery ]
Update - Frozen Synapse 2!
Then something really quite exciting happened: I received a HTC Vive in the post courtesy of Valve. VR has always been on my mind since the Oculus Rift DK2 but now it really is something I’m taking very seriously for Quiet as a Stone. Especially after sampling the Vive demos at EGX and re-thinking the potential for player creativity and immersion in Quiet as a Stone. Now to get this company admin work sorted out, technical foundations laid for my Unity projects and I can get back to the exciting business of world making.
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