tulevik.EU

Well, the demo version of the game is finally out and just in time for MAGS. It does end a bit abruptly, but should give a basic idea what the game is about and what to expect in the future.

And there certainly is a future for this game. I can’t give any exact dates or timeline or anything, but the work continues. There’s not actually that much left to do and I’m really hoping to wrap it up during the summer.

The development is still in full gear and it's been a busy week for the whole team. Victor's finishing up the backgrounds and tinkering with music, selmiak's doing some awesome environment animations and looking for the last sound bits and I'm doing the usual - implementing all of their work and breathing some life into the characters. Also, we might have another addition to the team, Emont over at the AGS forums offered to help out with additional music, so hopefully we're fully covered on that front.

There's about a week left and although there are some loose ends regarding the story and puzzles, I'm confident that we can take care of that in time.

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.

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.

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.

I finally moved on from system functionality and character sprites today and started building the actual game world. This meant creating rooms, adding walkable areas and walk-behinds, hotspots etc. The whole station is now set up and you can freely wander around and even look at some hotspots and objects. Here's a glimpse at the map, green squares mark the inside rooms and that one blue is an outside location:

Since the game has an one click interface, I initially planned that both mouse buttons do the same thing, but after testing out the rooms, I found a new purpose for the right button. It's now used for fast travel and when clicking it on exit hotspots, the character gets automatically transported to the other room, so that the impatient ones don't have to endure all that walking around. And additionally you can use the arrow keys for movement.

Today was a little shorter day with only 5 hours work, but I'd say that they were fairly efficient 5 hours.

For me, game jams are always a good opportunity to test design ideas and features that I haven't used before. In my second post you can see a one click control interface with the look function relegated to inventory bar and today I tried to do something different with character speech. Thanks to a handy SpeechBubble module made by Snarky over at the AGS Forums I got myself some speech bubbles. Messed around with it for about an hour and a half and got it more or less working the way I wanted. It's still not quite as readable as I would like, so I guess I'll have to change the font or fiddle with colors some more to see if I can make it look any better.

Obviously in order to test the new speech system, I needed more animations. Talking animations in smaller resolutions are relatively easy to make, since you don't really need a lot of movement. So, I made a few different versions with and without hand movements for all sides. Took me an hour.

And then I simply continued with other animations. Made a few idle and looking around frames, some basic reaching animations and an alternative set of clothes. The game takes place over multiple work shifts, so I figured the character could use some sleeping attire. And no, I didn't go full Underwear Ripley with it, but you can get a glimpse of a one pixel naval for a whole 4 frames.

It was another 7 hours of solid work today and might have actually been my most productive day yet.

Rest day! Nothing to see here, you can stop reading, no game was being developed.

Since it was such a beautiful and sunny day today (and we don't get too many of those in Estonia) I took a little break from gamejamming and relaxed a bit, went cycling, watched some basketball and tennis etc. I did actually think about some aspects of the game throughout the day and also spent about an hour of my evening to create a custom font for the game:

It was a nice rest and I feel highly motivated to put in a full day's work tomorrow.

To begin the day I finished the up walk cycle I was working on yesterday and then moved on to create a basic title screen. I still don't have a name for the game, so please don't pay any attention to that placeholder title thingy. The button font that you can see on the screen isn't actually a real font, I simply drew them as images. All this took me an hour.

The rest of the day I spent creating and polishing the user interface and all sorts of menus and customization options. I know that many devs and players don't really care or pay much attention to stuff like that in gamejam games, but it's always been important to me that my game has at least some basic functionality no matter how long or short it will eventually end up being and I'll gladly sacrifice a day of development time to set up proper save/load system and few useful sliders. Working on stuff like this always means lots of fiddling and constant testing, but it usually doesn't create any visually engaging content for the devlog, especially when most of the graphics are still placeholders. So, boring menus and sliders and buttons it is:

Worked for 7 hours today and the progress was actually quite good. I'd certainly call it a successful day.

I started the second day right form where I stopped last night and continued with character animations. When yesterday I drew a few quick talking frames, then today I was ready to tackle the most essential and basic visual component of any classic third-person perspective point-and-click adventure - the (dreaded) walk cycle. I kept it traditional, 8 frames for side views and 6 for up and down ones. Although I've created a reasonable amount of walk cycles for my previous games and for practice, I still feel that I don't really have a very good grasp of them. This time it took me around 4 and a half hours and I didn't even properly finish the up direction. Also, some frames still look a bit wonky here and there, but I guess it's fine enough and I'll only return to polish them when I have a little spare time at some point.

Next order of business was setting up the actual game and testing these walk cycles in a game environment. Since I'm using the AGS engine, that part was actually fairly quick and simple. AGS is designed for making point-and-click games, which means that most gameplay functionality and features are already there and simply waiting to be used. All I really had to do was set up an empty room with a walkable area and then import and assign the sprites. Additionally I messed around with the user interface and created a custom system for hotspot and object descriptions.

Today's total was about 6.5 hours and although I didn't get as much done as I would've liked, I'm still satisfied and on schedule.

Hi! This the first post of what's hopefully going to be a daily development log for an yet unnamed AdventureJam 2018 project. Although the rules of the jam allowed some pre-planning and preparation when it comes to writing and game design, then that's never really been my style. I usually don't bother with design documents and have always found it more enjoyable to simply blast off and then somehow blindly stumble to the finish line.

So, I woke up with a blank slate today and needed to jump start my journey with a vague spark of an idea. Some people get their ideas in the shower, others like to brainstorm or wait for divine inspiration. I belong in the Thomas Magnum school of though and enjoy solving problems while being engaged in a physical activity, which in my case means that I took a little cycling trip around the town and as usual, it did the trick. I now had a direction.

After getting my saddle sore buttocks back behind the desk, I lit up the search engines and spent the first few hours doing some basic research and looking at tons of reference materials. Since I'm making a sci-fi adventure, this sort of research can sometimes be a real wormhole for me. It's very easy to get lost in the awesomeness of space stations and anomalous singularities, but I managed to get what I needed and pull out before it was too late. I might revisit those places later though.

Now I (more or less) knew where I was heading and could finally start working on the actual game assets. So, it was time to launch GraphicsGale and carve out the main character of the game. Pushing pixels is also somewhat of a zen activity for me and in addition to figuring out the visual style, it also allows me to think about the actual character itself and usually when I finally finish the sprite, I know who that character is and how they will react and act in the game world. This is what I ended up with:

I spent around 6 hours total on the game today, which seems reasonable enough (Say no to overtime and crunch!) and this will probably be my daily goal for most of the days during the jam. And in overall, everything looks promising and positive and totally doable.