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[melos]

i added a sound effect today...er..and did one event script, a tiny one. then some planning of future thingies. not too much iguess overall, kind of tired.

[melos]

Jon did some important story stuff today. I did a little bit of scripting. Game..is...complex...

[kittakaj]

Been playing Chrono Trigger on my phone. It's really nice as a handheld game. It's kind of intimidating, too. Chrono Trigger is a really well done game. And as far as RPGs with fairly traditional combat go, it's quite varied, virtually every battle is at least slightly different, every boss has different flavor and "gimmicks".

Been thinking a lot about the writing style. I think this is def one of those constraints breeds creativity things. The dialogue is just very light-handed and snappy. Trope reliance/subversion is used heavily to support the light dialogue. Most conversations are just a few short text boxes. But of course, the experience of the whole is ultimately quite complex with all the intertwining threads. And--this is really good for a game with multiple endings--You don't feel like you're wading through the dialogue. It just gets the point across really quickly. Although sometimes the light hand of the dialogue leaves me wondering where to go or like what's going on at all. But overall it's quite skilled.

The dialogue in EtO is quite different. At times it can be fairly wordy. I'm hoping that this wordiness is justified. I'm trying to make it pretty non-trope reliant and nuanced. Instead of the emotional mood of a scene being telegraphed overtly by music and events of sort of unarguable significance ("Th-this is where my mother died..." *mournful music*) I'm trying to create situations and thoughts of ambiguous significance, because that tends to be how life feels before people try to overly package it. So I'm trying to do that with the dialogue, and it takes up some extra space. I do worry that it's not enough like X or Y or Anodyne or not weird enough or funny enough, but hopefully what I'm trying to do comes across and is interesting. I probably keep saying stuff like that over and over. Sorry! just comforting myself as I work. Anyway I'm making good progress on the main story dialogue. That's exciting, should be done with it pretty soon.

Might make it slightly less good to replay? or maybe I'm just thinking of what it means to replay a game through too limited of a lens. People reread long nuanced books of course. I tend to think of replaying a game as being more focused on a game in an arcade-y power-maximizing way and paying less attention to the story, but of course that is a biased perspective. Also of course we will have dialogue speed up options.

It will be interesting to think of what *types* of speedruns will exist. There aren't really collectibles, so you can't really 100% it besides like... finding all the hidden dialogue/story? but that's diff than discrete items.

[melos]

http://pastebin.com/kEh9GRvF

Here's our feedback from Indiecade Rejection. It's actually good in the sense of "oh good,we actually did all these things on our own already", because the criticisms in it only arise from stuff we've already fixed or stuff missing, mainly:

- "can't see connection between nature/gauntlet" - narrative and pacing in the final game fix that
- 'can't see Even part of the game working' - we removed it a while back anyways as outlined earlier in the devlog
- Starfish thingy was surreal - that's something that works better in the game's context


etc etc etc. there was praise for ambience, visuals, the gameplay core itself (yay).

so if that's a review, the game should be very very good in the end!!! maybe!!! *pats self on back*

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re music and signifiance at times - ambience is helpful here, it's really...ambiguous at times. music's always a hard one to do...i think in scenes with only aliph i tend to err on the traditional what theplayer might feel / what aliph might be efeling, but with multiple people it usually is more ambiguous? at least so far

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will talk about the replay value stuff next post...mayb@

[melos]

As far as speed runs go...I've thought - well - already implemented - a way of measuring what energy you use more of over the entire game. so, there's something (it would just be a lil' counter or whatever). i could see speedruns :


going for some target # of energy absorbed (I'd have to program things like :if you're getting hurt while the target energy is a max, this counter deosnt increment).

minimum energy runs (+ speed, somehow).


max energy runs + speed limit. Like, uh...idk what a fast time to beat the game is yet, bt say 3 hours. so max energy in 3 hours + game finish


there's going to be extra stuff in the game too, some of which I could see speed runs being bult around. idk. we'll see. it's not out of thee question that the speedrunning community might be interested in some stats being tracked and I can just add that in later!

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Replay value: ETO really to me, seems like it will play like a long novel . you can't take it all in the first time around, even jon and I have (well at least me) trouble grasping i guess...all of the thematic complexities that have kind of arisen from the game/narrative systems mixing. which is a neat feeling i guess, to have a work growing out of control in some sense (though still very much in control!)

so...it won't have replay value in like, new game plus...but...there are , of course, post-game things...maybe....some things planned.


and i put an option into the game  (well, post-game) to warp to any gauntlet to re-paly it. so people could just time theirselves i guess.

[kittakaj]

I'm at The Ending in terms of "main story" writing! Maybe next week I'll finalllly take a break from writing and work on some graphics stuff? Lots of interesting stuff happened in the writing and story structure this week. A lot of characters became more interesting and defined... almost just of their own accord? The initial ideas were pretty functional and straightforward, but when push came to shove, the characters pushed for more complex narratives than I set out to give them. Hope it works!

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Max/min energy speedruns seem weird to me. Well, Min seems to make more sense to me--it's very natural... avoid everything you can from touching you as you go fast. But max... feels weirder. No, maybe they could both work. It's just like... with a normal speedrun you have a very discrete goal (any% or 100% usually measured in discrete collectible items) and just maximize time. Energy collected is so fluid and non-discrete that it would be like maximizing 2 quantities at once instead of just time. Feels like it might be sort of messy and... confusing to compare "scores", which would be de-motivating.

Probably any% will be by far the most common... although I guess that's often the case, with all kinds of games.

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In terms of the theme complexity... I probably have a better grasp on the main story themes, just from stewing all these ideas around in my mind since the very beginning of dev. But yeah, it'll be REALLY interesting to see how the "main" story stuff intersects with individual area story threads, particularly throwing in the player choice/variable order into the mix. Because those two processes were quite separate. Hopefully it'll work, in an odd sort of way. I'm thinking it might kind of speak to the dissonance that a lot of people can experience growing up--going off to school or spending time on the internet--changing in all these complicated ways... but then you go home, and there's a feeling of just falling into old patterns or roles and not knowing how to incorporate any new parts of yourself into the old context?

That's my fancy way of explaining how the individual areas don't have much effect on the main story 

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New game plus you get to keep all your weapon upgrades from the start

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Instead of the emotional mood of a scene being telegraphed overtly by music and events of sort of unarguable significance ("Th-this is where my mother died..." *mournful music*) I'm trying to create situations and thoughts of ambiguous significance, because that tends to be how life feels before people try to overly package it.

That's really interesting to me! I'm curious to see how the rest of the game (art, music etc) will complement that style of writing.

Hmmm yes... how to do that? We'll see!

[melos]

yeah, the main complexity to me i guess is...what is the game 'about', as a whole. like, we have these narrative and gameplay aspect sand we know what they are about - main story stuff, smaller areas. and they tangentially relate to these core values we had with starting the game, but as for the interactions between everything and the end result on the player? who knows! that'st he interesting part. Well, we can guess pretty good I think but it's hard to say, until we play the whole thing throuhg. Like the feeling for me of playing the intro areas in a row with the music and stuff is differentthan theorizing about it in my head, I guess.

i think things will mix enough, since we usually used one aspect as a springboard for another.


re: the max energy: It would bbe...weird, and sort of unnatural. But I could see someone doing it. I could only imagine though it ight be like playing the game fast, then spamming getting hit by spikes over and over o_O

OTHER SPEEDRUN IDEAS!!  > 70% white, > 30% dark runs...with time limits...idk...I realized that just measuring energy intake doesnt work since it'll average out over time, UNLESS i count eneergy you get once the energy bar tarrget hits max. anyways it'll be weird if someone can actually do a "max white%" run where you try to see ho whigh you can get time spent in white or time spent in dark. ETc.etc.et.c

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more on music next time

[kittakaj]

Yeah the going through the game fast and then bouncing on spikes example really gets at the issue for me... what is the relative importance of spending that extra time vs getting more energy?? It seems impossible to quantify. And as a speed runner, you'd REALLY want to be able to quantify what is a better run vs. a worse run.

In terms of the "averaging out" issue, you could have a counter for like the absolute value of energy obtained. So a good absolute value speedrun is one where you just hit everything in sight, green or purple, and also try to make it through quickly. Would be fun because it's risky and disorienting. Eventually you'd still run into the same issues though... spamming spikes at the end... the relative value of time vs. energy... it's unsatisfying to think about.

One weird speedrun would be an every-interaction-point run, where you have to talk to (or maybe just touch/overlap with) every NPC/memory in the game. Turning the interactions into collectibles, basically. It would be weird. Could have a special mode where NPCs have a floating indicator that shows you've never touched them to help.

[melos]

I'm sure there would end up being some method of enforcing you can't do repeats. On a map every entity has its own unique ID, so I could just (map-locally) cache a list of all the entities you touched. Make it reset after you leave the map - so in a peer-reviewed speedrun, it's easy to verify you don't go back into maps to repeat (vs the other way which would be somehow watching the hwole run to make sure people don't repeat entities). Anyways I'd have to add stuff to that but i'd only do it if a big speedrun community popped up.


NPC interaction speedrun could be implemented similarly (yay for infrastructure helpin)g

[kittakaj]

Whatt a no-repeats thing for each entity would be wayyy convoluted and I don't think very fun. Also it would be weird because what if a speedrun route cut off a big chunk of the game? Would it just not be worth it because of the lost  opportunity to get energy?

The NPC/interaction thing makes sense because it's literally equivalent to collecting a bunch of items so 100% is a clear discrete and very achievable goal.

[melos]

this thread has temporarily become an e-mail thread for us, but this topic is sort of not core to the agme so it's fine


I guess I like the idea of

- Maximizing energy
- Maximizing time spent in an energy alignment

Maximizing energy needs a limitation on hitting stuff. Speedrunner-imposed would be like - no backtracking paths or spamming objects - and would rely on honesty of speedrunners, but that shouldn't be too hard? When I said the map-local, I mean when you're in a map, things hurt you as normal but the count towards total sum of energy collected only goes up the first time you touch an entity. If this being-able-to-touch-stuff for points resets with map exit/enter, then a speed run it's much easier for a peer-reviewer to verify that you aren't going back and forth on spikes over and over.

Of course then you'd have to have the speedrun community set things like "Max energy WHILE completing game in X minutes"...so time is sort of this resource you use. Idk. let the speedrunners figure it out o_O  

SO if the time limit is balanced well (not too low to where you basically have to speed run, not too high that it's sort of a chore) then if you can only get "points" from an entity on the first time you hit them, it could be interesting, IF the time limit DEFINITELY doesn't give you enough time to well, hit everything - interesting routing. Like you might have to go fuss around a pit of spikes for a bit, etc. It's interesting and a different dynamic from Minimizing energy (with no time limit) or just having a lowest time. etc.

Having objects only "scorable" once (but still always affect energy) would be neat, because it's like a treasure hunt where you always have to finish the game in some amount of time.

So as a speedrunner, the quality of the run is only determined by the amount of energy you get (while beating the game)

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As far as your question on "what if a speedrun route cut off..." - that would help all speedruns - like the max energy people could use it to plan routes and decide "resource-gathering areas" (non-beating-the-game-necessary areas where you can spend extra time to get more points), and the use for any% is as normal.

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So the types of speedruns that I see are

- Any%
- Minimize energy (with or without time limit)
- Jon's NPC idea which is cool and item-collecting-like
- Maximize energy + time limit which is item-collecting like but on a finer grain
- Maximize time spent in white or dark sides of the bar + time limit (to avoid "idling" in one end of the bar)

[melos]

some ask.fm things on game structure!!!

http://ask.fm/EventheOcean/answer/115660856949
http://t.co/G64f0qTHvd


also, new song thing.

https://soundcloud.com/seagaia/even-the-ocean-ost-breezen

[kittakaj]

I FINISHED THE STORY

with lots of qualifiers... there will be revisions, and there's tons of non-forced optional dialogue left to be written. But as far as getting out all the ideas of the whole plot backbone?

I FINISHEDDD

[melos]

It's exciting!!

msuci
http://tindeck.com/listen/cbsj

[melos]

I did a little event programming today and some other misc stuff...


and a silly devlog

[melos]

whoa hwo did I not post in here for 2 days

uh, i did more event programming. jon and I decided to use full screen drawings for the non-gauntlet areas for a variety of reasons i'm too lazy to type. I did some optimizations to help with that. it looks really nice!

have some music


"river_in_4-001"
http://tindeck.com/listen/qowi



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"playground_space2"
http://tindeck.com/listen/zhwf

[melos]

We need more posts in here!

I was gone fort he weekend but I did some coding ands cripting yesterday. More scripting today I guess - gonna do the skeletons (set up event triggers) for everything up to the ending, hopefully.

[rj]

this game looks rad and you should feel rad

[melos]

Please reblog / answer the poll in the link!

if you REALLY want a 10-15+ hour indie game,what’s the max full price you’d pay?

http://strawpoll.me/2643990

[melos]

Yeah, same with me. Right now just about the only game I'd do this for would probably be The Witness. Maybe a few more if I thought enough.

Also, new poll. Everyone please take it! Ignore the previous poll.

http://strawpoll.me/2645447