Rewatched Back To The Future last weekend, still a fantastic movie. I had forgotten most of the specifics since watching it last. Then Huey Lewis and The News came on iTunes shuffle, and I had to open Photoshop and crank this one out.
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This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
A strange week in indie land.
At the start of last week I was moved by Dom2D’s post about the state of his life. I admire Dominique‘s artistry and optimism, so it’s not great to see he struggles with things. I can identify with a good number of his sentiments from various periods in my life, about making ends meet and feeling like an imposter sometimes, which I wrote about before. But it was heartwarming to see all the nice responses he got. I hope he’ll feel better at the new studio he’s working at now.
Further good vibes were obtained at the Idle Forums, were responses to Black Feather Forest were positive, and some great constructive feedback was given in terms of writing and character development. I was stuck in a rut a little bit, because once you have a project that shows promise it’s sometimes hard to decide in which way to proceed with it. Especially in games there are so many variables, and everyone has a preference for a different thing. But discussing the narrative got me going again.
During the week I edited some dialogue, converted each existing scene to a new workflow method that solved a few strange bugs, and I reworked the interaction icons. I’m ashamed to admit it but I completely overlooked those when polishing up the demo, I was so focused on other things I forgot they were still using the low-res default icons supplied by Adventure Creator.
I was quite pleased, then over the weekend a shitstorm broke out. It was like everyone had to get their bad vibes out at the same time. Zoe Quinn, Phil Fish, Rami Ismail, they all got mangled on the social media. A delegation also decided to hate on me for even trying to tell a story a subject more grounded in reality than your average videogame, which shook me up pretty bad on Sunday. I wish people wouldn’t make assumptions based on a headline and a cursory glance at my blog, I’ve done my research.
Anyway, new week, fresh vibes.
Next week: fresh vibes.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
Last week I took some time to decompress after the deadline. I pulled up my Steam backlog and finished The Wolf Among Us (so good), caught up with Team Fortress 2 and played the shit out of State of Decay Breakdown. I loved State of Decay but the story in the main campaign had me beat at some point. My main dude kept dying and critical missions failed. Breakdown lets go of all that and just lets you build a home base somewhere and then survive infinitely. Unlike for instance DayZ, they’re very good at creating narrative around these random characters, by generating missions where they get lost or spot a special zombie. It’s really fun to play, even though the AI is sometimes absurd.
I also binged on The Killing’s final season. That show has also been an inspiration in how Black Feather Forest came to be, and I’m glad to have more of it, even if it is just 6 more episodes.
Somewhere along the week I took a look at the intro of my game, where you are introduced to the main characters, and went to rewrite it. I realized it was the only conversation free of player choices, so I made it a bit more engaging and flavorful.
On twitter I saw Fork Parker tweet an image of someone who had reimagined a scene from True Detective as a Lucasarts adventure game. It looked awesome, and I hope the people who crave that to be real can find some satisfaction in my game when it comes out. The creator, Lazerhorse aka Arthur Doyle, was even Canadian himself, a nice coincidence.
Next week: some actual work???
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
Last week was the final week of the second development period for Black Feather Forest, its goal being to polish up the demo to submit to an event here in Holland. I’m glad to report it was succesful, which means you can play the new version right here!
Content-wise not a lot has changed; I’ve mostly fixed bugs, edited dialogue here and there and added a few of the planned features to the GUI. Notably the Dossier is nicer to look at, and the dialogue UI should play nicely on all resolutions now. Initally I wanted to also add some new locations, but with the time I had I decided it was better to make the existing content solid before moving on to new challenges. And the past week left me no other option when a handful of game-breaking bugs came to light!
being a game developer is sometimes a bit like being an explorer, because you often see really weird things that nobody has ever seen before. Especially when there are several plugins working together in ways you have no idea about.
Things like a conversation with an NPC only triggering if it was the first location you visited in the game. Or menus that you explicitely disabled popping up again if you press the skip button at the wrong time. Colliders rotating on the X-axis when a character turned on the Y-axis. Cutscenes that only run half of their actions. Z-buffers that sort differently between engine and build. Every day is a new adventure.
Luckily both of these plugins are made by devs that really understand how to run good and swift tech support. So thanks Chris and Tony.
So now that the demo is ‘done’ I can comfortably start adding new content. Basically starting the production towards the final product.
And finally, there is also a matching url now: www.blackfeatherforest.com
Next week: the tale of how I’m probably going to break all of the things by upgrading the software.
If you have other topics you’d like to hear about in a future blogpost, let me know in the comments.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
Last week I got some great feedback on the Black Feather Forest demo. Articles ended up on warpdoor, indiegames.com, rockpapershotgun, badogames, indiegamemag, and I even got a call from Canadian radio! I’ll be on their morning show later today.
When you’re working on a thing in isolation for a while you start to lose sight of whether it’s any good or not. I hadn’t expected people to get so excited about it yet, so this definitely cements that I’m going to finish this game. Working on it is so satisfying that sometimes I forget I’m not earning any money this way. That will have to be stage two of this campaign.
Sadly there was a problem with my new internet connection at the new house so I’ve had to subsist off of the wifi of parents, friends, cafe’s the past week. Not having reliable internet is such a burden, and when emails pour in and you have to participate in heated discussions in comment threads that’s a bad position to be in.
There was a bit of discussion about the influences in the game that led me to de-emphasize some mentions in the script. The people I spoke with were very accomodating and I think we came to a good solution.
In terms of progress, I’ve been working on a new iteration of the ingame GUI. I’m still having problems hooking a few menus together the way I want to, but at least they look good now. A big issue I had before was that the dialogue GUI didn’t scale well on lower resolutions. I finally sat down and adjusted everything, so now the look is unified and works at any size.
Aside from that I’ve been mostly doing polish on existing content, and adding new animations for all the characters to make the whole thing feel more alive.
Next week: the premiere of the new demo build.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
It’s hard to fathom that it’s been a year since I started working for myself.
Said goodbye to my desk job designing games for someone else (honestly it was a sweet job, what was I thinking) and started my own thing.
I got some assignments pretty quickly, thanks mainly to friends/colleagues putting in a good word, and thus I started incing my way up. I’ve been able to carve out a pretty okay living so far, struggling some months when the work dries up for a bit, but enough to move up to a nice studio apartment with my girlfriend and pay the bills (and jump into a Steam Sale every now and again).
And now, 52 weeks later, I announced my first solo commercial title! Holy cow I hadn’t even thought of that. When people asked me around week 45 what I was going to do for my ‘anniversary’ I shrugged. Turns out week 52 was pretty special after all, thanks to the fellas at Warpdoor. More on that in next week’s update.
But for now I want to thank the fine folks that offered their support, good conversations, and/or advice this past year. Some names that come to mind: Jens, Michiel, Adriaan, Bojan, Benjamin, Ilona, Lowen, Anke, Alwin, Niels, Esther, mom and dad, Ralph, Anne, Matt, Chris, and ofcourse you, dear reader.
Then, presskit! I am perhaps disproportionately excited to have this bit of php code, but if you as a journalist or what have you ever needed any info on my company or my games, the presskit’s the place to be.
So now, back to the daily grind.
Before HoT started getting picked up by the media I found myself mostly doing small tasks – a subconcious way to avoid having to deal with the large and nebulous tasks still in the backlog. However it wasn’t without its merits, the demo segments are a lot more polished now. “But,” I thought on tuesday, “what actual new content was added to the game? None!” So I got to it and started doing animations, and made a start on a new scene. Then over the weekend I went on a small vacation with friends, during which the social media coverage really fired up.
Next week: tales of exciting new improvements to the interface, and great feedback on the demo from cool people.
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Well, cat’s out of the bag – Black Feather Forest appeared on Warpdoor, a curated site for interesting indie games run by smart guys from indiegames.com and killscreen. So if you want to check out what I’ve been (mainly) doing for the past month or two, grab the demo and let me know what you think.
The demo is a rough early version with some features missing or partly implemented, but any feedback or suggestions are appreciated; bug reports too, either here or in my email.
And now seems like a good a time as any to tell you about the website for Black Feather Forest. There’s not a lot there yet but it’s a nice place to go, a sign that it exists for real at least.
It’s weird when something ends up in the ether outside of your own involvement (I only posted to a forum for feedback), but at the same time it’s somehow reassuring when it gets picked up, that you’re on the right track with what you’re doing. I wasn’t going to drop the demo publically until I polished it up to my satisfaction, coinciding with an upcoming showcase at a festival, but I realize that when you are making things you always want to hold onto it until it is ‘just right’. There’s always something more to polish, to improve, to add, to tweak. So heck, let this be the way that I get over that and let you guys in on what I’m making here. I hope you dig it.
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Drew my second-favorite pair of dogs, Harlow and Indiana, Instagram stars.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
Last week the heat had me beat a little bit, but I came back and did some animation for the opening of my game.
This is the title card shot after the intro cinematic. I painted it on tuesday and animated it with all kinds of parallax effects on wednesday. A classic case of ‘make a plan before you do something’, because after I had finished making it in After Effects, it turns out Unity Free cannot play video files (without excessive hacking or plugins). But it was fun to do so I guess time wasn’t completely wasted. I’ll redo it in-engine this week, which should only take a fraction of the time.
Inbetween on wednesday I jumped through the final hoops to hand off my old apartment, so now that chapter is closed. And thank heavens, all the stuff I had to arrange around that ‘project’ ended up tripling my phone bill this month. Let’s hope the next person enjoys it as much as I did.
In the meantime I also continued my research into the background of the BFF narrative. Even though the story is completely fictional I still want to accurately represent the cultural and societal factors are that could lead to such events taking place. So I’ve read what is known as ‘the Forsaken Report’, in which the Commission of Inquiry describes real cases in great detail, which has been a fascinating read. I’ve also reached out to some community members and CBC reporters in Prince George, Prince Rupert, and Vancouver, and a cultural expert studying the Northwest to learn more about the heritage of the Haida people.
At the end of the week I stayed at my parent’s house for two days (came to see them, stayed for the wifi ha), and got to spend some time sitting next to my dad at the kitchen table while we both drew. Check out his facebook page with space age art over here.
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Something I rarely do anymore is paint something mundane that is in front of me – a still life. It’s great for practicing colors and composition, but it’s not something that I think about very often. This week I was visiting my parents and I saw some nice dusk light fall in through the back door, so I decided to make a study of that.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
I know I said I would work on the Fawlty Towers game, but shortly after that I saw a call for submissions from INDIGO, a dutch games convention put on by the Dutch Game Garden, and it is in association with the Dutch Film Festival. So that put a revision on Black Feather Forest at number one on the todo list. Niels once described the script of BFF as being very filmic, so that makes this a good crossover venue to show the game.
Besides that I set up the new version of Trusted Soil, my graduation project with Anne Bras, in Adventure Game Studio. Having worked with Unity exclusively for a while now had made me forget how easy it is to get something basic up and running in AGS. With a bit of luck I can copy a lot of code from the original demo over to this version.
Anne and I decided a while ago to make the full version of Trusted Soil (read more about it here) and try to sell it on Steam. We’re doing it in Lucasarts pixel-art style now, and I’m concerning myself full with the programming side. For that reason we attracted Misja van Laatum (artist on Indiana Jones and The Fountain Of Youth) for the backgrounds, and Molly Carroll (recent HKU graduate) to do the animations.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
Amidst calling plumbers and garages and landlords, I returned to porting my Fawlty Towers game to Unity. An update in the Adventure Creator package made it much easier to work with the built-in Unity 2D stuff – especially the Polygonal navmesh feature, which allows me to map out where the characters can walk by drawing a shape, a galactic improvement over using a bunch of rectangular to map out the area.
Navmesh rectangles vs a polygonal navmesh:
The sensible thing to do would be perhaps to work more on Black Feather Forest (which I did do some GUI design for), but seeing the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks game appear in the App Store, with narration by John Cleese (meaning he condones it) made me hopeful he might look kindly upon my Fawlty Towers game aswell, so I felt the breeze of my attention go in that direction presently. Also because the scope of that game is so compact that it could realistically be finished in a sprint or two.
I also completed Wolfenstein The New Order which is rad.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
As I write from the keyboard of my iPhone in my new apartment (no internet yet), I’m finishing up some freelance work and doing a bit of painting, while my girlfriend does the same next to me at the kitchen table.
Notes on week 47 were scarce, aside from my visit to the Dutch Game Garden networking lunch, where I saw some friends I hadn’t seen in a while and showed them the Black Feather Forest demo, aswell as hook up some potential new assignments. Otherwise I was ensorcelled by the explosions of news from the E3 games expo, then went on to do chores in the new place.
This past week, while living out of boxes, I’ve been designing revisions on the major systems of the game to tighten up the demo with, and messed with some first-person stuff in Unity for a different project. Lighting alone is giving me headaches so I don’t know if I should stray into 3D territory too far.
Inbetween I’ve been playing some games from my Steam backlog, including the excellent Wolfenstein and Watch Dogs, and Murdered Soul Suspect, which impressed me with its investigative gameplay and gave me new ideas for my own games.
I also wrote a Dutch translation for Fullbright’s Gone Home and wrote a story for the Lowlands writing contest.
Honestly there isn’t much more to fill this update with, but omitting two weeks in a row seemed lame. I’ve got enough earnings now to live comfortably for a while, and I feel no immediate need to do a ton of work, I just want to enjoy the good life right now so I’m thankful I am able to until the next assignment is set in stone and I can get to work on that.
Sometimes that’s all you need.
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<This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
This week I wanted to set a new goal to work towards and just generally figure out what to do next, but everything surrounding me moving to the new place took up all the space in my head, so I’ll defer that decision to the near future. I’ve got some money coming in so I can idle for a little while.
I was thinking the other day about the ol’ saying ‘time is money’, but I realize for me, as a freelancer, it’s mostly the reverse – money equals more free time, the stretching out of my independance.
The good people at Gamesys contacted me to do more illustrations for them, and I’m having fun with it. Their mascot is really turning into a fleshed out little character.
I also tinkered with Unity a bit, trying out Ben Esposito’s first-person drifter package for a project I want to do, and considering whether it would be doable for me to make a 3D game. And I think it is. I would only need geometry, and even with my limited 3D skills I think I could pull that off for a short game. I just can’t shake the feeling that that particular story needs to be in a first-person perspective.
In this lull of a week I decided to take the time to clean my server up a bit. I had originally started out with my first comic at dinerdate.net, and then over the years added on more domains using the same hosting account. As such, my portfolio site was a subfolder on that account, which didn’t make a lot of sense. Plus I hadn’t touched dinerdate in about 5 years? So it was time to drop that resource-hogging wordpress install and database, and reorganize the file tree. And everything seems to work still! It’s a miracle.
As a send-off, here is a small selection of my favorite strips from dinerdate.
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Since there wasn’t much going on the past week professionally I bring you my experiences with The Forest, a new sandbox survival horror game that I’ve been excited for since the first trailer, and which just hit Early Access on Steam.
It’s a super rough Alpha and a lot of things don’t work yet (like the essential saving of progress, so whatever you do now is kinda pointless), but the allure is undeniable. With the survival options at your disposal this could become a really cool game.
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I crawl out of the plane wreckage. Beams of sunlight shine through the trees around me, illuminating the seats and luggage scattered in the clearing. Rabbits hop around between the wreckage. I’m lucky to be alive.
On my way out I pull a small axe out of the chest of a stewardess, and use it to break open some of the suitcases, looking for food and anything I can use. I then swing it at a large iguana crawling up the trunk of a nearby tree. I won’t die of starvation.
Then something else rustles in The Forest. I look around the treeline. Large grey humanoid shapes emerge from the brush. I run.
The island is lush, packed with vegetation and wildlife, I can see a lot of options for surviving out here. I even spy a snowy mountain peak in the distance. So I decide to put my axe to use and build a little hunting shelter to sit under. A nice glen nearby, next to a pond, provides the perfect spot to put something together. While I chop down my first tree I wonder if this is maybe too close to the plane wreckage. My fears are confirmed when I hear something rustle in the tree next to the one I just chopped down. I look over, and a deformed man in white war paint jumps on my head.
Intense music booms over a red screen. DAYS SURVIVED: 1
No wait, that’s not how it goes.
I crawl out of the plane wreckage. Large grey humanoid shapes emerge from the brush. I run.
After a few minutes I reach the coastline. A large cannibal lies next to an abandoned tent with a spear in his back. His head is propped up on a stick in the sand next to his body. I decide this is a fine place to start a new shelter. I flip through my survival handbook and decide to go for a log cabin (go big or go home). This should provide me shelter from any cannibal mans.
I begin chopping down trees around the beach. I need 88 logs to build the log cabin. An average tree can supply me with three or four. Christ, this is gonna take a while.
I work into the night, when it starts to rain and making a fire seems like a good idea. It is quick work and I can roast the iguana on it. When I’ve finished eating, I wonder for a moment if this fire isn’t going to attract the wrong kind of attention. I look up and see three cannibals standing next to the foundation of my cabin. Fear-stricken, I scramble down the beach into the dark, hoping they didn’t see me. They didn’t. But they seem like they’re tracking me. Slowly they make their way down the beach, and I prepare myself from a bloody and most likely deadly fight. Then a horn sounds, and the cannibals run back into the woods.
Carefully I return, and continue chopping down trees. By daybreak I manage to have about 25 logs set up. I do a spot of fishing and dilligently continue my work. Without having to worry about hulking monster men constantly I make good progress. I only need about 30 more logs now.
Night falls again. With each chop of the axe I do a perimiter check, but so far so good. Then three hunting parties move through the forest. Under the cover of a thunderstorm I retreat down the beach again, and start a second fire to stay warm and maybe lure them away from my cabin-to-be.
This diversion seems to be working, and I circle back through the woods to my cabin to continue construction. When I pick up a leftover log I see a small grey figure standing in the bushes. A female cannibal, looks like a scout, is standing there, staring at me. Then she turns and runs away. I put the log away and pull out my axe. More figures approach. The hunting parties have returned. Stumbling backwards over the rocks I climb up a cliff, pursued by the female scout. I’m not sure if she can see me, I think she might be tracking me by sound and smell. When I reach the other side of the cliff I roll in some mud in the hopes that will throw her off, but she’s always a few steps behind me, with what looks like a fire shaman in tow.
On this side of the cliff I find a shipwreck, its contents scattered across the beach. I consider swimming out to the wreck but I’m in bad shape as it is, shivering and out of breath. I try to retreat further but the beach is surrounded by hunting parties on all side. “This is it”, I think, and I charge at the female scout. She knocks me over the head with a tomahawk.
Blackness.
I wake up in a dark cave. Dead passangers from the plane are strung up from the stalactites. I thought I was dead but perhaps this fate is even worse. With the dim light of my lighter I creep around the cave system to find the exit, gathering some much-needed supplies on the way. I manage to escape without incident and rae back to the beach to finish my cabin. Only 10 more logs. I hack and hack and hack away with my new-found larger axe. Dusk creeps up on me. Before I know it I am slithering through the brush again, hiding from more cannibal patrols.
Only four more logs! I will not be defeated!
Just two more!
Yes!
It’s done!
The comfort of the cabin’s interior is a massive relief, even though it provides little protection if the cannibals were dead set on getting to me. Against my better judgement I build a fire pit, which does attract the cannibal patrols, but the just hiss and claw at the outside of my stronghold. Tonight, I’ve won.
When morning comes I step out of my abode like I was living in the english countryside, and gaze upon my construction shimmering in the early morning light. A rainbow is visible overhead. It’s hard to imagine I fought off waves of bloodthirsty mutants here several nights before. I have a fighting chance now.
The reality that I cannot salvage this progress sets in. I sit in my cabin for a while longer, then walk outside and fire a flare into a cannibal patrol sneaking through the forest.
DAYS SURVIVED: 5
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
A tumultuous week! On monday I got to view an apartment in Utrecht with my girlfriend, and we decided to pull the trigger on it right that morning. So that means moving soon! A lot to think about, but aside from the inherent boon of being together I’ll also be closer to the dutch games industry hotspot.
On tuesday Bounden was released to much fanfare. It’s incredible that the game came together with no delays or major problems and became something really special. I’m glad to have been a part of it.
The rest of the week I worked on some freelance drawing assignments, posted about Black Feather Forest in a number of places, and dug up some unused Bounden concept art for fans to gawk at.
I also updated my portfolio, not so much in terms of new projects but mostly the infrastructure. I had “NEW!” ribbons on each fresh project, but those were still scattered across the various pages so it wasn’t real easy to see that stuff at a glimpse. So I added a rotating banners at the top, much like the iTunes Store. And in doing so I broke the lightbox for the images, so I replaced that with something much more lightweight, slick and fast. And you can link directly to certain projects now! I had put in those anchors long ago but they never worked until now. I figured it out!
And the week closed out with some bad news: Black Feather Forest was not selected for the competition I entered it into. With 60 entries I can totally understand the high-quality and cool games they selected to showcase Dutch gamedev (Bounden is in there! And hooray for Westerado), but it’s still disappointing that the outcome of those weeks of hard work amounts to “Sorry, good luck hey.” But I’ll keep working on it and responses for other places are positive, so that’s motivating.
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While I worked on the concept art for Bounden we tried a lot of things. Mainly related to the world- and theme-building. We worked hard to distill all the level ideas down to the best possible ones, the ones that you can see in the game now. But for every ‘world’ that you see in the game, there were like fifteen more designs. Here are some that didn’t make the cut. (click on them for a slideshow with descriptions) :
GULCH – One of my personal favorites. It started out as a ball of bark, but then when the colors shifted it gave off a cold icy cave feel. 
ONION – I liked this design but looking at it from another angle just wasn’t very interesting. Plus Bojan complained it looked like the XBOX logo. 
DESERT – I think this was one of the first ideas we had, and for a long time it was going to be in the game, but we couldn’t figure out the geometry and getting the lighting to look good enough. 
GALAXY – This was supposed to be an inverted ‘planet’, where you gaze at the universe through a hole. But the idea was too ‘out there’ 
FIRE – I made variations on the GRASS level for all the elements. The other two weren’t as interesting but FIRE was okay. We originally wanted to animate it flickering like a flame too. 
NOVA – A radiant sun to glide across. It lacked depth and reference, something that was important to know where on the sphere you were. 
CRYSTAL – At some point I went off the rails and looked at other shapes that would fit within the spherical bounds. But a weird shape like this just didn’t match anything else in the game. 
SKULL – A dance about death. But it was a bit too literal compared to the abstract stuff that ended up in the game.
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Time to pull the lid off a project I have been working on for the past month:
BFF is a 2D adventure game inspired by true events and Haida mythology, aswell as things like True Detective, Fargo, Detective Grimoire, Kentucky Route Zero. It brings together many threads of ideas for games I’ve had over the years and ties it together with real-world influences.
You play as Sofia, a documentary maker, and together with your cameraman Caleb you travel to the town of Augier’s Peak, up in the wilderness of rural Canada, where three people have gone missing recently. You are free to travel around town, where you will meet a handful of inhabitants that all have their own reasons to help you discover what happened – or not. You gather clues by talking to people and combining pieces of evidence and statements to slowly try to figure out who or what is behind all this.
For now I’ve completed a demo that shows the first few locations of the game and sets up the story and gameplay. With that I hope to generate some interest that could lead into the further development of this title. I’ll keep you guys updated on the progress and share some more insights about the development as I go along. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
At the start of this week I had a dream that I ran into an older woman working for a newspaper that had just lost their cartoonist, and I managed to entice her into paying me good money for two cartoons a month. That was a harsh dream to wake up from, ha.
On monday I worked on the pitch document to accompany the demo of my game. Writing everything down properly and readable for others made things a lot clearer for me too. And it spawned a few new ideas at the same time. I also received some great feedback from Niels ‘t Hooft that made the story stronger with a few small tweaks.
The rest of the week was basically polish, adding in some low priority things and fixing bugs. It’s funny how no matter if it’s a 3-year projects or a four-week sprint, the ‘last 20% drag’ always occurs, where you slow down on doing the last few minor things.
When I sat across from Niels in a cafe four weeks ago and said “I want to have a demo ready by the 15th”, I had no idea if I was going to make that deadline. That thursday at noon, I proudly submitted my application. Time to sit back and twiddle my thumbs.
So I can finally say that for the past month, I have been working on a game called Black Feather Forest. I’ll talk more about that in a following blog post.
On friday I did some more painting in Mischief, and otherwise mostly decompressed from my gamedev sprint. On saturday I celebrated my birthday by petting some monkeys with my girlfriend.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
Development on my upcoming game continued this past week. When the demo is done by the end of this week I’ll be able to tell you more about just what the hell I’ve been making.
On monday and tuesday I worked on the first two scenes of the game, writing the dialogue and setting everything up just right. Apart from a few minor things I was very happy with the outcome. The workflow I had established worked well and allowed for a pretty quick setup of a scene. I also iterated on the story and made it readable to people who knew nothing about the project in preparation for the pitch document I’ll be writing this week.
On wednesday I set up the next big scene in the game, which went very smoothly. Because I had finished well on time I set aside work that night to play Kentucky Route Zero Act III. Apart from being impressed as always by the visuals and the tone of the narrative, it reminded me that it is okay to write a little more than bare minimum if it is interesting to read through.
On thursday I applied this newfound insight to finishing the last of the in-game conversations, and it was a doozy.
I’m very thankful for Dialogue System For Unity, a plugin that made the management of these long branching conversations a lot easier. And most importantly, it integrated with Adventure Creator, which made it top choice over things like Dialoguer or Playmaker.
I spent the rest of the day customizing the UI and wiring up things like the fast-travel map and the clue system.
On friday I took a break from development to work on a freelance assignment. I was faced with the challenge of drawing a character in vector, but I’m not good enough with vector tools that I could pull that off in two hours and have it look good too. So I decided to give Mischief another try. I sang its praises before but man it really came through for me this time. I could draw exactly like I would in Photoshop (without all the fancy tricks like clipping masks and blending modes though, so back to basics, time to be a real artist again ha!), but it took the form of infinitely scaleable vectors, ending up with the best of both worlds. I went to buy it right after.
Saturday night I tinkered with the game’s code a bit and fixed a bunch of bugs. As it usually goes, I was ready to make a new build and then suddenly all kinds of things came to light. But I managed to fix a good few eyesores. On sunday I mostly worked on missing art and more bugfixes.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
Week 41 was a beacon of productivity. My body tried to slow me down on tuesday when I started feeling like I was getting sick, muscle pain and nausea. But I refused to give in and by the next morning after a nice fever dream I was fine again and ready to keep going.
I worked through most of the graphics I need for the May 15th demo of my game; at least the essential gameplay stuff like characters and backgrounds. I plan to spend the final days of next week filling it up with extra stuff like menu graphics and animations. I got a little ambitious with the size of my textures which resulted in the display drive crashing when the game was running! I think it couldn’t handle all this HEAT. It’s fine now.
This week will be all about the gameplay programming. I have the parts to make the whole, I just need to plug in a load of dialogue. I already did some inital work on that during last week to set up cameras and triggers and all that, so it helps to have the grunt work out of the way.
Near the end of the week I also snagged a new freelance job, so at least once I’m done with the demo a little money will be coming in again, that’s a consoling thought.
Maybe the most thankful job I did this week was planting a forest made up of prefab trees. I wanted the rees in the background to animate, so going with single trees was the best solution, which also reduces strain on the processor since it only needs to load in one tree and duplicate it. Then I wrote a script that offsets each animation so they don’t all sway at once, and voila, a beautiful forest ready to go!
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
Things really started coming together on my game this week. I’d been living mostly in a test environment last week where every game element was thrown together in one space, so when I created a proper scene with some nice background art it felt like things were going somewhere.
Early in the week I did some resolution tests, and uprezzed and tweaked the characters. I was pretty satisfied with the designs I had made but those were still considered placeholder so not nearly high enough resolution to use in the game, so I had to repaint the edges to tighten things up.
On thursday I sketched out the rest of the locations, and finally got some dialogue in the game so it actually started to feel like a game. It was time to make build 0.2. I also wrote a post explaining deltaTime for some guys on the Idle Forums, an elusive and abstract concept in programming.
On friday I had lunch with Niels ‘t Hooft to catch up and share our current projects. It’s great to chat with someone who shares your passion for a certain thing. After that I squashed some bugs and tightened up some UI elements then left everything be for the Kingsday holiday weekend.
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The concept of ‘Delta Time’ took me the longest time to figure out. It’s a concept in computer programming that helps make sure that every user has the same experience regardless of the clockspeed of their machine. This is especially useful in game development, where you don’t want the player on an older machine being inherently worse than the player on a state-of-the-art machine.
I still have to think really hard when I explain it to someone but it’s basically like this:
Take one second of gameplay from your game and imagine it as a white picket fence.
Each fencepost represents a frame, a still image, so in a regular game your fence would have 30 posts. (30 fps)
If your computer is slower, there are less posts in your fence. This makes the space between the posts bigger. That space between the posts is the deltaTime.
So if you want your guy to move from A to B, and it takes 30 frames to get to B, players on 30fps will get there in one second, and players on 15fps get there in two seconds. Obviously unacceptable, especially in a multiplayer game.
So if you multiply the movement speed with the deltaTime (the gap between the frames), you ensure that every player always reaches point B in the same amount of time, regardless of how fast their computer is.
This is because when you run at a lower fps your deltaTime is LARGER, because the GAP between frames is larger, and so each movement gets multiplied with a LARGER number, which means your dude will move FASTER so he can keep up with the intended pace of the game.
Hope that helps.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
It’s strange how much you can disappear into a hole when you’re deep in gamedev. I’ve been working on it all week, but it doesn’t feel like work. I’m having fun.
Even butting up against a problem that grinds things to a halt was fun because such a situation promises a mental exercise, pushing my problem-solving skills to the max. Each problem is a puzzle, and in an almost detective-like way, again, you have to put the pieces together.
So that was thursday, when I spent about an hour lying on the carpet here trying to unite the design that I had with the tools that I had. The days before that I worked a lot on setting up the basic infrastructure of the gameplay mechanics. Talking to people is an important aspect of this game, and so that system needs a lot of thought and effort. It’s not all the way there yet but it’s taking shape.
The final thing I did this week was work on some idle animations. It’s cool how a few blinks and a head-turn already do a lot to make a character seem alive. I’m looking a lot at Puzzle Agent, or Grickle’s style in general. I’m pretty good at animation but at some point it just becomes such a timesink that I’d rather do things as efficiently as possible. And this is not a case where I have time for tweaking the bounce in a walkcycle – in three weeks I need to have a solid demo to submit for an event. Let’s see if I can make it!
I realize this post does little to clarify what the actual game is, and I’m keeping it that way for a little while, so in the meantime have a moodboard.
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This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
Woops, almost forgot to write a blogpost about last week, that’s how absorbed I’ve been in my work. That must be a good sign, right?
Since I’ve gone indie I’ve been looking for a project that could get me genuinely excited to work on it every day, and I think I finally found it. Not that I disliked what I did inbetween but I had to pass through a Valley Of The Shadows type deal I think where everything felt derivative or lacking zest. Sometimes I still feel a pang of worry about that but then I remind myself I don’t have time for that nonsense because game needs to be made, and I get back to work.
And so far I’m running on schedule very nicely. Instead of planning out the entire project in advance and potentially overwhelming myself I’ve taken to planning out just the month up ahead, setting milestones every friday and generally living from day to day, and it’s working out well. I have a folder with a fuckton of research into style, history, context, culture, mythology and whatnot, a bunch of concept art and an almost entirely fleshed-out story. And even a fancy parallax scrolling prototype. Once I’m done typing this I’m moving on to prototypting the dialogue system.
I’m not ready to share too much info about this project yet, that will happen soon, and I plan to blog more about the development here in the future, but if you run into me in real life feel free to ask and I’ll talk your ear off about it.