Min'atoa Game Devlog

Min’atoa Station, my 6-month capstone project for my Game Development course at Yoobee Colleges, in which I fall down a rabbit hole, drown in a pool of tears and learn to make magic.  Or, less poetically, scope too big, lose and remake multiple assets multiple times, and launch a game that falls well short of my goal - yet shows a glimpse of a potentially amazing experience. 

My aim was a linear 3D narrative game - think Gone Home in a Myst type setting with a terrorist theme.. I reckon I got halfway, so there’s only 90% left to go. 

Team vs Solo 

Tutors urged us to push our boundaries, and in my Goodest Boi team I stretched my wings into new areas and thrived. In other teams (whether real or not) I’d felt held back by low expectations. My mantra was ‘play big’. I love to learn, and that means embracing looking stupid, stumbling before you can walk. I chose a solo project, so I’d be propelled to shine, and I was pleased I did. The gasps of surprise from the class even at my prototype were validating. A teacher once said more learners rust out than burn out - having a tutor that believed in me created its own empowerment magic.

New Idea vs Darling 

I was torn between:

A new game, designed for addictive game-play loops, replayability, marketing hooks, commercial 

Min’atoa - unknown market, unproven gameplay, not replayable, huge scope, high risk. 

The gamedev mantra “kill your darlings” echoed in my head. I brainstormed great alternatives that I loved. And yet, YOLO, carpe diem. I left a ‘safe’ life doing what I was told for this. The window was open - now or never.  I’d never “finish” Min’atoa left to my own devices. It needed a structure for existence - the force-field of deadlines, accountability, of expert help. I knew it was too big, so I ‘maimed’ my darling - reduce scope, use existing assets, basic textures, no puzzles - just a story game. That seemed do-able (cue evil laughter). So I talked myself into ‘story-only-Min’atoa.’ Call me crazy, but I don’t regret it.

Tools

I got overwhelmed.comparing narrative tools: Inkle, Twine, Yarnspinner, Ren’Py, Ink. Prairie, Fungus, Novel-software, Scrivener. My author friend Peter cut through my angst by wryly observing that Shakespeare used a quill pen. For my Myst-type story - linear, non-branching, no dialogue - Google docs was fine!  

Writers Block

Although I had a plot, I couldn’t start. Tutor Matt P got me to put story beats in linear time order, then rearrange them into the order the story needed. Write short  ‘memory joggers’ of each plot movement onto Post-It notes. This simple process broke the writer’s block. 

Later, I found myself blocked again, and dedicated an entire week turning these brief notes into strings of story.

Story gating

Player autonomy is a key feature of game design. In game writing, each story elements has to stand on its own in whatever order players come across them, and the plot still has to make sense.  So story games build artificial ‘gates’ to order key story elements (eg in locked rooms), to achieve greater dramatic tension and plot cohesion,  

I fit the plot into the game’s natural gates: portal, balcony, room, and controller balcony, and Arrivals (and later,,Departures) desk drawers; Doors opened with buttons, and crystal docks.. I felt clever making drawer locks, and hiding keys and crystals. The gates were not infallible, but ‘good enough’ in playtesting. 

The downside was, the story game became a puzzle game. It changed how players played, from a slow pace that encouraged reading, to active, testing interactable objects to see what they did. In retrospect, i wish I’d deliberately designed for the slower game feel of Gone Home, where players interact with passive objects whose function was to add atmosphere.

Story Element Workflow

There were 25 notices and 21 letters, each with two gameObjects - players click on a 3D object in the scene, to bring up UI with its matching 2D readable. This meant 92 assets whose materials change when I edit their words. A simple workflow was essential. 

Playtesters noted the 25 notices were easily legible; that removed 25 UI assets. 

For the 21 letters, I felt clever about my idea of stationery. I made stationery (paper, design and font) for each character (Tris, S’tiel, Priestess and Council). Each in-game letter automatically populated its UI stationery with a text string. Instead of 21 UI assets, I only needed four.

I was smug about this at first - I’d polish text; and the UI automatically updated. But for beta, for the first time I had to have textures on all 46 3D documents. It was an awful workflow. I’d play through, click on each letter or notice, bring up UI stationery with its unique string, snip it, create 46 materials from the snips, and tile these to fit each gameObject. 

It was so tedious to change materials, it created a mental barrier to improving the text, even if it was way too long, or made me cringe. I deleted eight noticeboard posters that were too embarrassing. I left “Lorem Ipsum” text on most letters. I wish I’d fixed these. I did find ways to automate this process, but events overtook (see refactoring section) so I didn’t get time to code this.  

Localisation

The more words, the more difficult and expensive is localisation, reducing the potential market, if I were doing it again, I would aim to 

reduce word count dramatically, and use more images

have illegible 3D textures (see for example Zelda, Breath of the Wild) or develop an alien text / symbols

retain the process of populating 2D UI assets with strings, so that it would be easy to populate strings in different languages.

Prioritise Your Intuition

Sam Fleury, Runaway Play gave an NZGDC talk on prioritising your intuition to reduce burnout and improve personal effectiveness. He noted that our tendency to try to ‘push through’ a wall was often driven by feeling unworthy. It often led to bad code (or other work) that had to be redone. 

When I noticed my brain clearly saw the chains of logic, I coded quickly and cleanly When my ‘programming mind’ lost it’s edge, went ‘fuzzy’, if I continued to push I wrote bad code, and felt burnt out. I found it took an active decision to resist the ‘imposter syndrome’ urge to push on. I’d step back, take a rest, or pivot to a task that used another part of the brain (art or story).  

I took note of sunshine, various foods, coffee and rest affected my focus and set up the right environment. Dancing barefoot on the grass is great therapy.

More often than not, when I came back I’d see a bigger picture, and pivot to a different priority, or to a fresh, cleaner approach. I’d never pivot when I was nose to the grindstone. 

I heartily recommend this practice. It was vital for a solo dev on a big scope game.  Pacing myself was not costly, I wrote better code in less time with less stress. And it might seem obvious, but burnt out, tired devs don’t make games that are fun, intriguing, and delightful,

Attributions  

I wanted assets that left the option open to allow commercial use. This hugely limited choice for the game’s many imported assets: ~20 sound effects, music,  five fonts, five paper textures and plugins, . 

I recommend designing a good filing system for attributions. I did record them as I went, but not in one place. Finding them months later cost time I’d rather spend on my game. 

Brian and I made most of the images and icons from scratch. But right at the end I realised an image used fan art I’d made for #Myst25 from Riven, a game by Cyan Worlds, Commercial use violated their very generous terms for fan art.

I wrote to Cyan, saying I’d remove it, but it’d be a lovely Easter egg for Myst fans. Hannah Gamiel, Director of Development, Cyan Inc immediately wrote back to give permission to use it, which was typical of the lovely Cyan approach to their fans. 

Refactoring

We’d planned for Brian being away for 3 months OE, but didn’t factor in a month to reinstate his melted server and hospital with pneumonia. Since Yoobee had only Unity 2018, I’d coded the prototype, Sabotage, from scratch in 3 weeks. 

Once Yoobee got Unity 2019, I reverted to Min’atoa with Brian’s code, which was robust and elegantly effective, But since we were both new to Unity it used unusual approaches - event signals, listeners via parented assets, and master controllers with enums. After painfully watching me struggle, my tutor Woody spelt out the stark choice: strip out Brian’s code and he’d help me rebuild it, or struggle on alone. 

I chose to strip it out. I really wanted to step up at coding, and Woody was brilliant at it. Although Min’atoa would not be finished to the level I wanted in other areas, I could do the writing and art later.  

Deleting two years of scripts left 416 fatal errors; removing ‘missing scripts’ from assets took hours. It would be an enormous task to rebuild. I brutally trimmed my asset list of Brian’s features (a fully functional inventory, and putting items down). and features I’d planned (writing, art, animations, codes and puzzles). 

Then I got intensive tutoring from Woody. I learned: 

keep it simple - add complexity only as required 

use prefabs - get one asset completely right, then 20 others work 

get the essentials (story gates) working - doors, drawers, lifts and locks. .. 

Within a month, most of the functions worked again. My crowning achievement was replacing Brian’s inventory with a scroll-selectable list that appears on hover (over a lock that takes multiple items) and shows what carried items fit in. 

I was also pleased to get different endings working (including one that pivots the whole scene).  I’ll never know what Min’atoa would be if I’d made the other decision, but I do know I would not have learned as much as I did.

The biggest code drawback was no inventory for the 21 letters,they’re just lost . The player can’t refer back to any letter they’d collected. Woody had shown me how to do it, but I spent the remaining time fixing bugs I had, and improving art and gameplay. This is such a major drawback that if I get time, I’d like to issue a patch for it, and I (think) I now know enough to do it. . 

Result 

I launched a game that I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, I have another game in my public itch.io portfolio. Overall, for pretty much a solo game made in a limited time, it showcases my capabilities and adds to my credibility as a  game developer. 

On the other hand, I wish it were more fun, that the story was better, the puzzles more difficult, the game design was more complete. The main failing with the game was the story. I have so much to learn and I plan to fully engage with expert writing mentors next year to learn to

create empathy and connection with the main characters 

reveal through what’s not said, rather than tell

reduce word count (strict 140 character limit per item) 

use environmental storytelling.

Given the need to limit scope, I only included very basic puzzles, that were not at the level of complexity or engagement of good competitors, like Aporia or Eastshade. Brian and I had designed more complex puzzles, but specifically removed those for scope reasons. If I were to do it again, I would prioritise adding to the puzzle component in simple ways such as:

embed hidden clues, codes and hints

add images, sketches and drawings . 

Not having clues to choose different endings is a major omission. For much of the development, I placed puzzle items to make life easy for me, rather than for the player’s satisfaction, The player finds them in obvious places, one after the other repetitively, instead of having to use deductive reasoning.

I would put more time into thinking about how to make it fun for the player to discover hidden items, work out lore-logical places for them, and hint at their location rather than make it so obvious. 

Conclusion

There are definitely things I want to improve in Min’atoa Station, but for now, the game is out ‘as is’. 

Next time I’d invest time early to “find the fun”. Find the fun in the story, puzzles, and gameplay from the player’s perspective as early as possible and build from a solid base of a proven enjoyable gameplay experience. 

At the end, my measure is not even the game. but instead what I have learned. I'm a person with new skills. Looking back my progress seems humbling and miraculous. In 2017, I first clumsily opened Photoshop, my first ever digital tool. In 2019, I made Min’atoa Station, a credible 3D game. Without diminishing Brian’s enormous contribution, or that of my tutors, it was ‘my game’. I designed the world, characters, story, gameplay, modeled and textured 3D assets, 2D assets, the menus, animations, lighting, audio, did the voice acting,  used many plugins and more..I ended up coding everything, I listened and learnt, I asked for help and got lots, I struggled and fought and.. Lo. 

Min’atoa Station was but a twinkle in my eye in mid-2017, it seemed a far-fetched dream that we'd launch to the public. And now here it is, I want to cry.

Jayne Gale and Brian McClintock, Escape Velocity Studios, present to you  

Min'atoa Station.

It's a love letter to Cyan Inc, it's a crazy passion project, it's a testament to an unlikely friendship of two devs who aspired to learn Unity together. and thus became Escape Velocity Studios. 

I (Jayne) feel hugely blessed and privileged to have learnt, at age 60, to create imaginary virtual worlds, walk around in them, enjoy their richness and beauty, and even interact with them.  

Major pre-launch announcement - the beta will (has to be) online next Friday. I hope I look like a graceful swan gliding towards the deadline, but much frantic paddling of feet is going on below the surface. First up, the first cut of our trailer! 

The amazing Brian (the other dev, the rest of Escape Velocity Studios) made this in a few days while learning Cinemachine and Vegas Movie Studio. Wow! 

Things look a lot more complete. I replaced the placeholder signs with hexagonal textured assets, as in the door above. 

 I also replaced the fountains, which had stretched oddly, and  added ambient occlusion to give a more shadowed 3D effect on the models. 

I made made nicer posters around the room using screenshots from an environment I made last year. 

More importantly, three game breaking bugs are fixed. In the very last week, the player was being ejected from the game, falling into the deep blue sky.  I couldn’t even playtest. Fixed by (doh!) re-check the ‘is trigger’ box on a capsule collider.  

The player now moves smoothly in the lift, so what you may say but, crucially no longer breaking a game ending. The parenting process rotated the player so, like Hotel California, they could enter the lift but could never leave. Below is a screenshot of the player’s eternal view, trapped in the lift.

I (and my friend) spent hours trying different fixes on - get this - the WRONG SCRIPT. No wonder nothing I did made any difference. This is why tutors are Gods. Working on the script that actually does the thing just ‘may’ be important.

There was also a fatal flaw where in one case, docks received crystals that they were not supposed to. And at that point so close to finish, my brain fried so I take no credit, my tutor simply fixed my code.

And to finish on a high note, you might glimpse some fanart of the Riven moiety dagger I made for #Myst25. I told Cyan I would take it out, and the Director of Development emailed me straight back to say I could keep it in my game. I swooned. So that’ll be just a lovely Easter egg for Riven fans.

Stick by stick, stone by stone, slowly the bricks come together until I can glimpse a semblance of the beauty of the cathedral I am building. Glowing particle flowers...

We demo’ed our beta versions yesterday, so its time to give the world another glimpse. Since alpha I have added quite a bit of code function, textures, models, animations and game design. Here is now what the player sees when they first exit the portal...

And here’s the player at the arrivals area...the kiosk is unattended so you can’t buy souvenirs or tickets until AFTER you’ve saved the world! 

I also have some placeholder intro and endings in progress. 

I have learnt a lot about coding, game design and managing a game project, complete with Murphy’s Law and life interfering with my careful lists, plans and sprints.  

The amount still do do before Gold in two weeks is daunting, Some awesome devs from PikPok generously playtested, and I got very sage advice...”As a solo dev, its easy to get bogged down in details that can soak up time, so pull your head out of the detail to see the bigger picture/ Think "what will make the most difference to your game in the time you have left?”. 

So the next two weeks will be very mindful allocating of spoons to “things that will make the game best”. And maybe a bit of crunch...

This week I have mostly been...having a meltdown. Under my tutor Woody’s guidance, I’ve slowly rebuilt the code for Min’atoa.. I studiously avoid thinking about how much remains to be done, and focus determinedly on one step at a time. My code has become a teetering, ever climbing, increasingly intricate structure of tangled, arcane logic. As I add each piece to the tottering edifice, I expect it at any moment to tumble like a Jenga stack. And this week it beat me, so I’m taking a well deserved break and pivoting to art. Game dev is not for the faint of heart. 

This week I worked on lighting. I want ambiance and atmosphere. I put in lights and glowing switches..Turns out Unity daytime water glows, so I had to switch to nighttime water. Quite pretty effects though. . 

And isn’t the ivy tutor Jacob found just gorgeous eye candy! It’s made by  Thomas Luft, who’s made it freely available on GitHub here.

At Jacob’s urging, I made a mood board (possibly rather late in the piece - no, not possibly, absolutely way too late). Jacob is going to provide art feedback. For your viewing pleasure here ‘tis.

I am shocked to realise its only two months until I finish this amazing, incredible mind-blowing three year journey studying game art and development. What a privilege it’s been to learn how to build worlds and write magic. Far out.

Alpha trailer of a game by my friend Hamish... Looks like it'll be atmospheric

Its been a while. I'm sorry, poor lonely devlog. While engrossed in making a game, its hard to make time to write about the dev process. But apparently fresh insight is highly valuable after the game is done and the process is forgotten (like childbirth - there might be very good reasons for forgetting the pain of making a game, I might never make another. And I did birth two kids...). And devlog is a course requirement.

 So to recap nearly ...oh dear...two months.  Under orders I made an asset list. After being revived with smelling salts, I  was forced to trim asset quality and scope. The asset list is still terrifyingly long. The scene has most of its 3D assets and basic functions errr functioning. Drawers open, lights turn on, buttons click...and 3D notes turn into UI notes.  With nice stationery! Textures! Fonts!

Playtesting showed players didn't want to read screeds and screeds of text on the UI, so my goal now is 'show not tell' - which means making props, creating images and recording audio.  

I recorded myself (cringe) voice acting. Found that players didn't want to listen to long audio either! Pesky players! Back to the drawing board - trim the audio, trim the text even further.  When players started the game they wanted to know quickly where they are, and what the rules of the 'world' are. The design of the intro is going to be very important, given that they didn't want a long exposition.

A big part of story game design is 'gating' players so they don't get story spoilers too soon, but feel like they have choice about where they go and what they read.  To encourage players to read notes, when players pick up a note, they sometimes find under it, the key that unlocks the next clue. Hmmm reminds me of treasure hunts, in long ago childhood parties.

So to ramp up that mechanic a notch, I have locked drawers and doors, and have created gated areas within the room.

Oh that reminds me! Apparently its an 'Escape Room' game, I discovered today.  Who knew their genres?

Some another in-game screenshot for your viewing pleasure:

I hope you see progress over two months.  In that time also, life happened.

I learned that doing 'research' playing other games is risky - I got captivated by a game, so progress almost halted 'til I tore myself free. Pesky games!

My fellow dev has been absent for 3 months, so this is solo work.

I was thrilled to interviewed for a job with Weta GameShop (didn't get it, but even so!) and invited to be a playtester for another game studio. Life options after study suddenly became very real. 

Ideation week 

Ideation week was: “come up with a bunch of ideas, not just one”, so that we didn’t get fixated on one idea. It was amazing to see how easy it was to generate a bunch of ideas, with the pressure of having to pitch our best three to the class on Friday. 

Next week was choose which one idea to “work on for 6 months of your life”. 

This was a terrifying prospect. It really puts into perspective the true cost of making a game. Not money, not tools, not self esteem but… my life, that I can’t get back. The “opportunity cost” of that six months. 

6 months is a strange deadline. It’s good that its finite, not falling into the trap of fiddling around making a game for years. As with gamejams, deadlines force faster decisions, brutal choices eg simpler mechanics, reuse of assets. 

On the other hand, its quite a long time: seductively long. I saw the previous class aim for too big a game, very ambitious, and yet its so long it takes the pressure off. And six months “of my life” is a not a trivial commitment. What else could I do with that time? If I invested that time in learning Houdini, formal coding theory, Substance Painter, Zbrush, even Illustrator. What price six months? 

My goal is to make games for working people, people who are stressed out enough in their lives and want to relax. My ideas were::

Idea 1: colour puzzle game, with additive and subtractive colour mixing: 

could include light bending into rainbows, and liquids mixing and flowing, to escape a room.

Idea 2: narrative game (the rest of the blog will cover this)

Idea 3: creative sandbox game, where you

collect extinct plant fossils, revive them as viable seeds, plant and nurture teeming gardens to bring life back to a barren island, post your results.

Idea 4 Massive Lost in the dark, procedural cave  

Challenge areas: run out of air, falling rocks, flood, completely dark 

Dragon hoard with intelligent dragon; cave beings (burrowing, mining)

Idea 5 reality TV music game

design music acts, perform them, select your top four acts to mentor, pit them against three other teams for public votes weekly until a winner. 

Idea 6: Abstract art splashy game; 

Mix paint splashes in different 3D splot shapes and textures, (brush strokes) colour gradients 

add stamps and sparkles; share on Social media

Pitch week

I chose the narrative game concept. I’ve had it in mind for ages, written background story over the last two years.

I wrote the story beats in sticky note form into a linear timeline then added red (spoilers) orange (misdirection or mild spoilers) and green (general background) tags so I could work out which bits would go in which locations in the game. 

I then typed out the story beats into a paper prototype using A4 pages for each game location, and playtested it on a couple of people. The playtesters LOVED it, but then, they’re mates.

I got generous pointers from actual game narrative designers and authors: Turns out, narrative is a complex arcane skill that writers hone over years. Note to self:  “You know nothing, Jon Snow”. Ygritte from GoT (George RR Martin Esq).

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. I have a habit of optimistically tackling I things I know nothing about. I’ve written maybe three cool short stories; my experience is policy papers and scientific writing.

But my Daily Dream Machine and Trello lists don’t lie: I’m staring down the barrel of a 5 July deadline for alpha in Unity 3D. My hard earned Min’atoa station (Unity 2019) crashes in Unity 2018; no time for embarrassment! I grabbed some old assets, made textures from screenshots of typed up story bits, pasted them onto cubes and presto! Mocked up notes, signs, posters and books. 

I made 2D UI textures for the up close, and even found a free ‘book’ plug-in (2D UI with turnable pages) in the Asset store.

Without further ado, here’s a sneak peek - the WIP of the alpha. Already you can pick up readables and unlock doors and drawers. How exciting dear fans!