I Am Making The MOST Exciting Thing
Long time no post! It's been a pretty awful 6 months with long bouts of stressful/terrible things happening with no more than a handful of days separating them. I'm still going through it, but since one of those things was being laid off from KO_OP (good terms, hope to be back soon once they secure more funding), I at least have a lot more free time on my hands to deal with it all!
I was fairly burnt out from work over the last several months while we tried to get Young Suns to 1.0 on Xbox. All of my personal projects felt uninteresting and I was feeling pretty uninspired+emotionally spent in general. We did successfully hit 1.0 at the end of August, but all of our emotional weight was still focused the eventual Steam launch so releasing YS from Game Preview™ had a very anti-climactic "Oh yay glad that's done, back to working towards something that matters" vibe. Definitely Felt A Way to spend 3 years working so hard on YS with the goal of launching it on a platform that doesn't suck shit, only to leave KO_OP just a few months before it was initially planned to reach that goal. I had a lot of feelings about leaving, but one of the strongest was a hunger to make my own games again, abide by my own processes, and really let myself go sicko mode by flexing my creative/artistic muscles in a way I hadn't been able to do while working a full-time programming job. Whatever I chose to work on post-KO_OP had to be laser focused, the process had to be enjoyable, the work had to be deliberate, and I had to see the project through to the end.
So I've been working on what I've been calling my "Fated Platformer" and it's the most self-indulgent shit I've ever tried to make. A "fated platformer" is a joke I have with myself because I've been playing Flash platformers since I was a kid and I've written a ton of real juicy platforming controllers, but I've never set out to make a game with any of them. (EDIT: Actually turns out I've already written about this and just forgot lmao)
It's something I figured was bound to happen eventually, so decided that now's as good a time as any. My last personal game, Cast Fortune, is finally free to play through the Cartomancy Anthology, and playing it again 4 years later has really encouraged me to reflect on creative roots: I wanna make weird little guys to talk to and hang out with in beautiful environments with lots of texture and style. I got eye rolls describing this game as being particularly self-indulgent to people because I'm someone who's often making self-indulgent things, but that should only speak to the level of self-indulgence I've been planning now. huehuehue...
So Here's What This Thing Is
IDK how to classify it, so I've been calling it an "exploration" game. I don't know if that's actually a genre, but that's what I'm going for on a high level. The core appeal isn't platforming or puzzles or narrative, it's running around in pretty environments, discovering cool/weird secrets, and being a nosy bitch talking to all my lil NPC freaks. I want the experience of exploring the worlds in Dark Souls but without any combat. I want the experience of looking for and finding secret paths in Hyper Light Drifter but I want the NPCs you meet at the end to be interesting and weird characters you can have multiple kinds of interactions with. I want the characters to explore ROMANCE and GENDER and SEX and CONNECTION and SELF-ACTUALIZATION and POLYAMORY! Basically this game is a vehicle for me to go absolutely ham making beautiful stylized environments and weird characters exploring themes I'm always thinking about, so I'm calling it an exploration game instead of a Platformer™ or whatever.
That said, there WILL definitely be platforming involved cause I've got some sick platforming tech I'm excited to use as a means for exploration, but it'll largely be optional even if it looks like the only intended path forwards. The challenge of getting from any one place to another should always being either platforming or hunting for secrets. Should be able to look at every platforming challenge and go "nah I'm not doing that" and find another way around or through.
Production Plan
I've put a couple weeks into this so far and it's been going extremely smoothly, which feels like it's due to the production outline I'm using for this project. I've broken it down into 4 phases, with the tasks of each phase serving a goal to answer any important questions that will impact subsequent phases.
- Core Tooling Pass: Build all of the tools required to navigate the world and interact with it. By the end of the phase I should have built out the architecture I need to execute on all of the high level features I've got planned. Unlike most of my previous projects, this is the shortest phase.
- Personality: Focus on nailing down the art style, asset production process, and the general vibe. Figure out what sorts of effects and aesthetics I'll be using, and by the end of this phase I should know what working on this game will feel like in practice. If I learn that I'm not actually down to follow through, I'll be finding out here before I've delved into it too deeply for me not to be able to just take all of the work I've done into a new project.
- Player Experience: This phase is about bringing people in as early as possible and getting a read on how they feel about the game. I want to learn where the friction is, where the interest is, what things land and what things don't. I want to leave this phase with a confident understanding of what my priorities should be.
- Draw The Rest Of The Fucking Owl: Make a bunch of art! Build out some areas! Write a bunch of characters! Get a bunch of people regularly play testing and make something expansive and engaging!
This plan feels like it's got bespoke room for experimentation and exploration, but it's focused enough so I don't end up putting a lot of work into something I have to trash because I didn't validate it earlier in the process. Unlike Cast Fortune, in phase 1 no task should take longer than a day or 2 unless I'm really not happy with it and decide to refactor. That's meant that in a short amount of time I've got the whole skeleton for a game in place already.
The details of the production plan is outlined a lot more rigidly in my docs, but there's necessarily going to be some overlap WRT which tasks I do in which production phase. For example I prioritized the itch build tool because I want to get people messing around in it before phase 3, I'll be building and iterating on new tools and systems beyond phase 1, and I've already been exploring art styles and aesthetics before phase 2. The thing I'm mostly trying to avoid the mistakes I made while developing Cast Fortune 5 years ago where I established an efficient art style very early on, then spent 8 out of the 9 months of dev building systems and tools to make dynamic areas/interactions possible. Most of the art and writing were done in the last couple weeks of development, and they ended up being the things that people liked the most about the game. They'd put up with extremely mid fishing mechanics in order to bring fish to Gramms, and I ended up needing to cut all planned areas and characters aside from 1 each. Lotta wasted time and I don't have the patience to do that again lmao.
Thankfully 5 years is a long fuckin time and I've helped ship 4 games since then so I'm at least not too worried about the same thing happening. Keeping my stakes low, my lines loose, and my code light means that this is going to be a wholly different development experience and that's really exciting! Hopefully the bought of terrible life shit comes to an end soon and I get the opportunity to share more about this game here as I work on it. I've thought of recording simple devlogs talking about the process like Tom Francis does on his YouTube channel, but we'll see! I recorded some for Regex Wizards a while back but held off on sharing them until I felt more sure about seeing the project through (which turned out to be a good call), so maybe a month or two from now I'll upload a backlog of process vids to the internet.
OK So Where's It At Now
Nearly all of the core systems are implemented! I've blown through most of phase 1 while recovering from Covid immediately after leaving KO_OP, so right now I've got:
- Basic platforming controller
- Interaction system
- "Boss room" or a room with platforming challenges that can reset you back to checkpoints
- Simple Yarn Spinner dialogue setup
- Traversal between areas via doors and scene loading
- World save state
- Simple build and publish to itch.io tool
There's still a bunch left to do in phase 1; I'm currently working on a system for changing camera properties based on various kinds of triggers, and some more advanced platforming mechanics and QoL features than just the standard coyote time/jump buffering.
Neither the camera nor the platforming feel in the environment is tuned at all yet so it still looks and feels like ass, but not for long! It'll feel reaaaal nice even with my lil debug error cat avatar before I finish out this phase and start on the personality phase. All that's left are a couple small mechanics (interactable search & list inventory) and a generic popup modal UI and I'll be locked in and ready to make some pretty art and environments!
I've also started brainstorming characters and their little stories and it's been so much fun. We've got souls trapped inside of swords, witches who study all sorts of things, vampires who are all sleeping with this one vampirism researcher witch, The Great Slime Girl Polycule, dolls forming a body-modding scene, skeletons who fucking hate necromancers, an autistic spacetime folding bug guy who's really bad at selling his Doors of Passage, real-time public transit (trains, ferries, faeries, celestial arthropods), quests to rob wizards, a sappy love story where you help navigate the LDR woes, and a witch cookie researcher (you send me recipes in-game and I bake them IRL then patch them into the game).
I am foaming at the mouth. During my exit interview Saleem asked me if I would accept some unsolicited advice and they told me I could get a lot out of taking a creative writing workshop which is a GREAT idea that I might try to get on ASAP.
Anyways thanks for reading hope to write more soon 
