#advjam2018

Another full eight-hour day today, but things are still kind of questionable at this point and it's really hard to say whether the game will be ready or not before the AdventureJam deadline falls. I can however say that if it's not done by tomorrow evening, the release date will pushed to the end of May, which is the MAGS deadline. I have some other obligations on Friday and won't probably have much time for anything else than uploading the game.

First two work shifts on the station are more or less done, but there's still a bunch of missing animations, objects and a whole background. And if I want to have at least something that resembles a story, I'll need another shift, although for narrative purposes I'd like to have even more. Hopefully the last day will be an effective one and I won't run into any unexpected issues or weird animation loops.

Well, our team is now officially out of AdventureJam 2018. It was a good effort, we were close to finishing it, but I guess it wasn't meant to be this time. I went over the assets and plans after today's work day and decided to pull the plug. It would currently take another day or two to make it playable and about a week to turn it into a proper game. The main goal was and still is to make a game and have fun while making it. I value my health too much to succumb to crunch and all-nighters and releasing it in a poor technical/gameplay state wouldn't do justice to the visuals of the game.

Good luck to all other AdventureJam 2018 participants who are still making a run for it and congratulations to everyone, who already managed or will manage to pull it off.

On a postive side, we're now way ahead of schedule when it comes to MAGS. I've already put about 75-80 hours of work in the game, there's over 200 frames of hand drawn animations, plenty of quality backgrounds and a solid backbone for the story. So, the project is actually in a very healthy state and depending on how much we plan to add, it will be done in a week or two.

I'll be out of town for the weekend and plan to resume to the project on Monday, which means that I'm also putting an end to the daily blogging, but I'll certainly start posting again next week, although probably not this often. So, keep an eye on this blog, tulevik.EU twitter or the MAGS thread in AGS forums for any further updates and an eventual release date.

I'm glad to annonounce that there's another addition to the team just before the final stretch. Selmiak from the AGS forums offered us some help with sound effects. It's a very welcome addition, which will hopefully save me several hours of web browsing and sound searching. Sound design has always been the last order of business for me during game jams and that sometimes means that I simply run out of time and the game remains eerily silent. Well, I'd really like to have something audible this time, because the atmosphere of this game would greatly benefit from it.

Otherwise, today was about the same as yesterday - puzzles, dialogues and animations. I actually do enjoy animating and it's probably one of my favourite aspects of game development, but it does tend to eat up a lot of time and sometimes slows down the overall progress much more than I anticipated. The remaining days will be busy, but I guess there's always time for a little stroll around the station:

When Victor came aboard to help me out with backgrounds, I didn't really have a set visual style or a detailed plan for the environments. Besides specifying some of the key elements for each room, my instructions were basically: "I hope you like lots of creative freedom and you can go as wild with it as you dare to go." And luckily this has worked out great for the game. So far the art has been truly excellent and this latest piece is probably my favourite yet:

I didn't actually plan this room to be visible or playable, but now I certainly have to create some puzzles for it, because it's definitely staying in. Speaking of puzzles, then that's exactly what I've been up to today. Implementing puzzles and interaction and creating the necessary animations for them. Had a full eight-hour workday, but there's still a lot to do. So, I'll probably look into cutting some of the planned stuff tomorrow and hopefully it won't take too much away from the game.

As I said yesterday, I took a break from the game today. Well, to be honest, I did a little bit of work. Spent about an hour importing and setting up some animations I had done during the week. The in-between frames are still pretty rough for most of them, but it'll have to do for the moment.

A couple of logs ago I mentioned that the game takes place over multiple work shifts. I have planned out about 4-5 of them and managed to complete most of the first one today. There's still a bunch of missing animations and the texts definitely need revising, but it's finally starting to look like an actual game.

I'm also at a point, where I'm slowly running out of things to show, because some of it is boring code and some of it contains heavy story spoilers. However, until there's more actions and animations to show, you can marvel at another one of Victor's mockup screens:

Despite the relatively relaxed work schedule, I am starting to feel the effects of the jam a bit and had some trouble falling asleep last night, because my brain kept constantly either writing dialogue or designing and scrapping different puzzle ideas. Did a 6-hour day today, but I'll probably rest and clear my head tomorrow, so that I can start the last stretch with full energy and renewed spirit.

Wow, it's been a week already, half way through the jam! Not sure if half of the game is done, but it's slowly getting there. I'd actually be behind the schedule, if I hadn't had some unexpected help. Victor from Wormwood Studios joined the project a couple of days ago and is helping me out with background art. Here's a work-in-progress example:

Since I now had some WIP and mockup backgrounds to work with, I spent a couple of hours adjusting the game to make it line up with the new look and style. Then I proceeded to add character shadows (most of the code for that came from the EpicShadows module) and as usual, when adding or changing your code, something else decides to break up and act all weird. In this case, the shadows didn't really want get along with the default AGS fadein/fadeout screen transitions, so I had to create a little custom function for that. The code's very robust and ugly, but seems to work somehow.

I know that some people have also created a system for dynamic shadows in AGS, but that's a dark and unexplored area for me and I'll only look into it when everything else is done and ready. I think I managed to iron out most of the kinks and issues I had with the engine today and the game should be running more or less as intended at the moment, which means that I can finally start inserting puzzles and dialogs into the game during this weekend.