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[melos]

thanks!

and woah the layout looks different for tigosurce?

tigsauce

eh. being cynical about games this weekend + harvest moon (which i am surpringsly not super cynical...kind of...hmm..) then working on secret side project maybe

[Jondog]

woah yeah the layout is wide now, I guess it means you can have larger images now and less horizontal scrolling.

[kittakaj]

I always go back and forth about the role dialogue should play. Based on looking around at examples, beefy dialogue only really seems to work in non-action games, i.e. games where the main mechanics are some variant of menu navigation (RPGs). Because text in games is often essentially menu navigation so the different types of interaction are more meshed and feel like less of a distraction from each other. That's what it seems like anyway, because in most games with "actiony" mechanics, I find myself rushing through dialogue, sort of to "get back to the game" or something. Whereas I have more patience and interest in RPGs often.

BUT on the other hand, sometimes I think this is the fault of the individual games and not completely to be blamed on mechanic dissonance. I.e. if the dialogue is inserted throughout the gameplay and is generally pretty run-of-the-mill/predictable, then it makes sense that I would rush through it. If it's well integrated into the flow of action and rest, AND interesting/fresh/unpredictable, then it seems like it could work without too many issues.

Like some action RPGs manage to have pretty full RPG dialogue. Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, for example. They just really section out the action and non-action parts (which I guess most turn-based RPGs generally do as well).

I think just after playing games for as long as I have, it's hard to find games with dialogue that is not either A) totally predictable, perfunctory, trope-saturated or B) so complex, esoteric, bizarre, or dry that it requires a completely different type of attention to  get through (and that attention does not always feel rewarded), e.g. wall-of-text logbooks about minutiae or characters you don't really know.

And what I'm ultimately going for is something in between those gaps... the idea of dialogue that is worth reading, perhaps new or unique in some sort of way, but at the same time intuitively relevant to the game, emotionally understandable to the player. Which is not to say that I can achieve that perfectly, but to the extent that I can do that, I think it should work in the game. I'm basically just trying to reassure myself that the very basic premise of the space for dialogue in EtO is not fundamentally doomed so I can just go back to doing it.

Anodyne had some long dialogue parts and we got a lot of good responses to some of them like the Hotel roof person and the Cube Kings, but at the same time, the people who read all the way through and really liked it might be a vocal minority, and neither of those strands was even slightly necessary to advance the game as a whole. So I dunno if that's any sort of proof. In order to have dialogue that's relevant to what you're actually doing in each area, there's a certain amount of mandatory dialogue that I think we just need to have in EtO. Otherwise everything has to be non-essential and that just gets too complicated to think about unless it all doesn't really matter to the progression of the game like in Anodyne.

[melos]

To an extent player personality is a variable here, but thinking about pacing, dialogue - if it's not falling under things Jon mentioned - can work well contrasted with an action game - if you juxtapose the dialogue sections with an uninterrupted mostly-focused section. This is mostly speaking about action games (not menu navigation games)

What I mean by that is a passage in the game that you can't back out of without losing all progress in it. Zelda doesn't fall into this category (lookin' at u, OOT) because you can leave dungeons whenever - thus there's no sense of "well I just need to finish this, OR if I quicksave I'm still going to need to finish this."

If you can't just back out and do something else, then there's a larger sense of relief when you reach the end, and so the mind is a bit more receptive to the next not-action-y section, because most people won't be like "okay now let's do the next one and put my mind through the same sort of stress again". Funnily enough, even though we're super mixed slightly-negative feeling about Shovel Knight, I think that it actually sort of did well with its inter-stage rest things in terms of structure (not content though), even though the dialogue was mostly tropey and pointless: shopping is a sort of funny-but-works contrast to mega-man platforming.

The reason dialogue can't be tropey is people will just skip through it no matter what because it's boring. Even if it's 'good' under the definitions Jon gave, it will still be skipped through if the action sections of the game were easy enough to want to rush right back to.

This is reminding me of Mega Man ZX, which I haven't played since release. But I think there was rests between the action. The dialogue was probably kinda tropey, but I don't remember.

As for Anodyne, didn't really work. If I was somehow playing Anodyne blind, I think I would be talking to NPCs mostly to try and figure out stuff about the main storyline. I probably wouldn't be in much of a receptive mindset unless I really forced myself to.

That being said it's just a hypothesis so we'll have to wait and see if it works, but it's a hypothesis based off of playing lots of games and working on a few, so it's not completely blind and made-up.

[melos]

tried a new technique where i ask twitter to pick numbers for me to decide what to work on out of my list of things to work on. it works actually sort of well which is odd.

[melos]

ah i forgot about this.


programming a lot. progrmaming is tiring. oh well

[melos]

oh wow i forgot to post this

[Connor]

wholycrapthatsnice

[melos]

playing around ideas for a theme for Even. it really does depend on the entire tone of the Even game, but if it's similar to Even alive then someting like this might fit.

this is really rough, in general the bass voicings are pretty bad atm and boring and the right hand is messed up (this is where i wish i had a midi keyboard large enough for me to just record in - the big one i have doesn't really work with midi all the time)

http://tindeck.com/listen/fixd

occasionally I get weird visions of doing a hous-y nakata-esque sort of intro theme but that really depends on what happens o__O

[Jondog]

That music sounds pretty nice, sucks that you didn't get into the PAX10

[melos]

yeah :/ - but i guess it's fine. idk. contests sort of just suck all around unless you win it. it makes the losers slightly upset, promotes certain kinds of games, and there isn't much of a visible competition. just secret judging, etc. oh well.

worked a bit more on the song

http://tindeck.com/listen/amsa

[melos]

TOday

Yesterday

I mostly worked on music at night.

i'm going to do some writing now.

we might have new art later, maybe.

[melos]

The weekend was pretty busy for me, so all I did with ETO was fix a few audio bug things. I just plan to do level design today etc.

[melos]

I posted this on Twitter (twitter.com/eventheocean)



I'll post more if we get more followers!


I also started working on level design again. This time, with our previous knolwedge and the new Buffer mode levels will be better:



This is because we can build out deisgn ideas in one map, then copy paste them into other maps later very quickly. This way we can design a bit better (After looking at some ideas from Richard Terrell and  http://www.thegamedesignforum.com/ etc) . It's exciting! Before, we just made maps and sort of filled them in...but that won't do.

[melos]

Is it just me or is the devlog forum moving weirdly faster than usual? Notsure. I don't really pay attention to when the topic's off the 1st page or not, but yeah. who knows...time passes fast.

[kittakaj]

Making a new Aliph sprite in an updated style and also different character design. Old Aliph sprite was made Soooo long ago! Back when I was still doing that limited color palette business.

[William Chyr]

This is because we can build out deisgn ideas in one map, then copy paste them into other maps later very quickly. This way we can design a bit better (After looking at some ideas from Richard Terrell and  http://www.thegamedesignforum.com/ etc) . It's exciting! Before, we just made maps and sort of filled them in...but that won't do.

What are some of the ideas from Terrell that are relevant here? I took a look at the site, but there is ton of text to sort through...

[melos]

This is because we can build out deisgn ideas in one map, then copy paste them into other maps later very quickly. This way we can design a bit better (After looking at some ideas from Richard Terrell and  http://www.thegamedesignforum.com/ etc) . It's exciting! Before, we just made maps and sort of filled them in...but that won't do.

What are some of the ideas from Terrell that are relevant here? I took a look at the site, but there is ton of text to sort through...

Mostly a lot of the basic stuff wtih variation/counterpoint etc that I looked through. thinking about level design in terms of music is useful. I'm not sure how useful it would be for a larger scale puzzle game though that has fewer 'setpieces' overall, but they're worth skimming (it IS an incredible amount of text, though.) Even the ocean, in only the gauntlet areas, probably has somewhere from 300-400 setpieces total, from a rough calculation. Multiple setpieces make a map, multiple maps make a gauntlet.

[Fuzzy]

This game looks really smooth and flowing. 

[melos]

Thanks Fuzzy! It looks that way and it indeed plays that way too! And is paced that way...ah.



Anyways today I did more level design while also moving some stuff out of my old apartment to my new apartment. Moving is great


I also found if I compile the game in release mode it runs really fast. I guess that should have been obvious. I'm not going to release the game in release mode, though, it'll be shipped with the debug flags (b/c i need stack traces - though apparently I can change exactly what debug information gets added to the code). er anyways.