Eureka!

I've done it! I've finally bolted down my game's story and gameplay. I know what the player will be doing and why, and how this will present my world and themes. How did this happen? It was a combination of two things:

1. I've had a lot of ideas and tried out many of them, narrowing down the things I liked and the things I didn't, forming a nebula of concepts and fragments
2. I employed one of my best friends to sit down and "rubber duck" for me while we talked over my game, distilling down my ideas finally into a single liquid

We wound up in a tennis themed bar at the end of the night after spending most of the evening in the botanical gardens; I left grinning ear to ear with exuberance that I had finally solved the great challenge of my project. I am endlessly grateful for my friend acting as my sounding board, and thoroughly recommend the tactic to anyone else stuck like I was, with a cloud of concepts but no tangible solution.

I'm not going to lay out my entire story here in this blog (spoilers!), but I'll go over some of the ideas to lay down how the process unfolded. 

Our conversation started like this: my game looks like an RPG game. So, we talked about our favourite RPG games (mostly Fallout: New Vegas), what made them fun and interesting, any flaws we noticed or things we loved. We then talked about my original idea for my game's story (the 7000 word "timeskip" version involving massive branching faction decisions that affected the whole world), and my ideas I'd had since then, before talking about what I actually wanted to get across in the game. I talked about various "scenes" I wanted to have take place, how I wanted the player to feel and what I wanted them to be doing. We came up with a few problems that were at the core of my dilemma:

1. The player needs to feel like they have something to do, a reason to take actions
2. I want to have the player project themselves into the decisions they make in the game
3. The purpose of the game is to make the player consider what they think humanity is "for"

We then decided to work out the start of the game. What's the player's motivation? My friend suggested that we reused my original concept from my first draft from the "timeskip" version; the player belongs to a neutral settlement caught between the Union and Arcadian lands. The settlement is slowly being destroyed by the Union's expansion, while the Arcadians are murdering the people of the settlement to stop them polluting "their" lands. My friend said perhaps the player is the leader of this town, and they have to broker a deal with one of the two factions to take their now homeless people in, this being a challenge because both the faction and the settlers would have to agree. I did really like this idea, but there was a fatal flaw in my eyes: by making the player responsible for the wellbeing of a town their decisions were no longer based entirely on their own wants and needs. They might make decisions they personally disagree with (without considering whether they agree or disagree with them at all) in the interests of the settlers. 

So, we tweaked this premise: the town is entirely wiped out. There will first be an introductory segment/cutscene/scripted scene where the player is introduced to the settlement, and the player character's life. They are shown the Union via tourists that ogle the settlers and wonder why anyone would live like this when anyone can join the Union and be looked after forever. Drones would also arrive and start disassembling parts of the town for parts to carry back to the Union. The Arcadians are met too, as murderers in the night who kill townsfolk and burn buildings. The player leaves town, or there's a fade to black timeskip, or a voice over or something, and the player finds themselves all alone in their destroyed settlement. There would be an Arcadian or a note from one letting the player know that by being the only survivor, they have proven themselves strong enough to survive and will be left in peace. The player is now thrust into a hard wilderness knowing about the two factions and being given hints that they can join either. 

At this point we talked about another concept a friend of mine had suggested earlier. And that was the survival concept. When I was in the early stages of my second story draft I talked to this friend about the themes and ideas. He suggested that a good way to make the player appreciate the factions and force the decision to join them would be to make them see what life is like surviving on your own. I liked this idea, but considered it to take too much away from my concept of a dialog and theme driven experience. I didn't want the player doing stat and inventory management busywork when they should be talking to people and thinking.

But with careful planning and a new direction, I think it is the way to go. So, after the player is thrust into the world with little to go on, survival becomes a problem. I haven't decided how this will work completely yet, but it will be fairly simple. The player will need to find shelter, food, etc. The goal of this section is to make it clear to the player that survival on their own isn't an option. The character will fail to light fires, or get food poisoning from berries and so on. There will have to be some reminder here to the player that the Union and Arcadians exist to prompt them, probably though roaming drones and Arcadian Journeymen. If all goes well, they will make their way to one of the factions.

At this point I'll bring up New Vegas again. One thing my friend and I loved about that game was the player's ability to hear most of the story of the various factions before committing to one side or the other. That is a requirement in my game, and what it needs is the player to see both the good and the bad of each faction, before being given a chance to leave (and come back if they want) or join. The Arcadians were fairly easy to do this with, their faction lending itself to having very simple markers for both their "good" and their "evil" aspects, and their complex initiation rituals making it easy for the player to see where the point of no return is. The Union were more of a challenge. My friend and I discussed various things about this, without any real result. We got side-tracked and talked about other things for a while, before I off-handily mentioned I was hoping to find a way to fit a Union "re-education centre" into the story somewhere as well. In a wonder eureka moment, my friend suggested that after talking to enough people in the Union on arrival the player would be flagged by the Central AI as a problematic citizen (asking weird things, making people uncomfortable) and they would be dumped into a re-education facility. This was a glorious victory! Not only does it let me show the player the ominous "evil" aspects of the Union, it also allows me to temper it with nuance. The "re-education" is sincere - perhaps unexpectantly unlike something like 1984 - with the AI asking the player things such as "are you aware that your actions caused discomfort in those around you?" with the goal of helping the player be a more empathetic and civil person. They can pass this test and are free to re-join the Union - but on the way out of the facility they meet some people who though genetics or accidents are mentally unable to pass the test, living their entire lives in forced isolation. This would serve as a potent reminder that nothing is perfect. 

The end goal of the game then is to join one of these two factions. Once that's done the game is over. This might happen very fast. Perhaps too fast. I'm not sure yet how much time I have to have my game take up. I'm happy for it to be fairly short. The goal isn't to speedrun it, but to take your time and reflect on your own. Perhaps the time can be padded by smaller "sidequests" or through making the survival aspects more challenging. I'll worry about the fine tuning later. The point for now is that I'm finally ready to lock this down. The game is go!

To wrap this blog post up I'll talk a little about what I was doing before I had this story breakthrough. Basically, I was spinning wheels again, just working on sprites. I ended up drawing more variations of my grass and natural sprites and tweaking my existing ones:

I also went and drew my initial ideas for the Union drones. These are the suckers the Union central AI sends out to do all the work required to keep the Union running. They'll mostly be seen by the player mining, digging, welding, and carrying things. 

It's difficult to get the amount of detail I want for my drones across with such a small canvas. The look of them is meant to be dirty and functional, sort of like flying lawnmowers. I ended up giving them jets in this version because of the limited space, but that doesn't make sense given the amount of fuel they'd need. Instead I'm going to try to redesign them again to use propellers. I think this will also give them a more "power tool" look. 

Things are looking up though, and I'm going to spending the next little while writing up my story while also tweaking some of the more specific sprites. I still haven't started tackling the industrial zone sprites, the Arcadian sprites, or the neutral zone sprites. 

Some more sprites

So I was supposed to just work on my story and my gameplay until I actually knew what they were going to be. Oops. I instead went back and worked on my sprites...

New exterior building sprites for the Union, and some new groundcover varieties

I've made a few observations and discoveries since writing the last post. The first, seems to be that I'm stuck on a "scope see-saw". You hear a lot about scope creep - where as the project goes you keep thinking about new things you could squeeze in and before long your project is way over scope and impossible to complete - which is a real problem, but I've been having a new problem where I recognise myself scope creeping, counter by cutting down massively on scope, and start creeping all over again. Hence the see saw metaphor... I started this project with a very simple gameplay idea which slowly grew into something much more complicated, before I cut it all back to a much simpler idea. Only to start thinking of new things to add once again...

In the interests of preserving some of the ideas I've had that I will most likely abandon for scope creep here's a short list of some of the tangents I've taken the gameplay concepts:

• A survival concept where the player character has to manage their various survival stats like hunger or sleep, and this provides the impetus to join one of the factions and gives the player something to do (this was suggested by a good friend)
• A complex series of player choices all over a large free to roam world that interlock and affect each other. Such as blocking a drainpipe that might cause somewhere else to flood.
• Playing with 3D/2D by having the 2D world "expand" into a 3D world at some point in the game. This could be a fun metaphor for something like Plato's Cave, with the game presentation suddenly and unexpectedly becoming much richer. Alas it would require a massive amount of work to redo most of the game's art in 3D.

Until I manage to finally lock down how my game is actually supposed to play, I don't think I'm going to be able to get off the scope see saw. It frustrates me not yet having that sorted out, and I feel almost like complaining about the story guy on the project for slowing down the art and programming, before I remember that I am the story guy ;_;

I'll talk a little more about my sprites now to take my mind off that again. I spent a lot more time than I expected during this sprite cycle redoing what I was working as I was doing it. I found I would draw something, place it on my demo scene, move on to something else, and then come back and tweak the lines and colours of the first things I drew for a while. Of all the new sprites I've drawn, I would have substantially redrawn about 70% of them. Here's a comparison shot of a small section of the above photo as I was working on it:

Note the small changes to e.g. the lightglobe or chimney

A lot of these changes were to increase or reduce the contrast of certain sprites relative to other ones. In the above one of the most obvious changes was the dimming of the ceramic tile texture from white to beige. I might end up undoing this change. It seemed to make the building easier on the eye and more harmonious, but when I showed this building to some new people that had never seen them before, they had no idea what the tiles were. They guessed they were small windows or bricks! The brighter white texture was clearer, I think. 

In terms of sprites I want to try drawing either some of the industrial textures for the Union wastelands, or instead jump back into unity and try to make some simple particles for things like butterflies or smoke from the chimneys. While I could do these with animated sprites (and indeed I will include some animated sprites for things such as ventilation fans or television screens), I would prefer to do them with particles where possible. Particles will allow me to add a lot of variation programmatically instead of through countless sprite variations, which will greatly ease my sprite workload. I enjoy drawing the sprites, but I can't spend all my time doing it!

So next on the agenda is more sprites, unless I get a brainwave and manage to clear up the gameplay/story mystery.