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[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #20 (February 26-March 10)

This update's gonna offer more in the way of goals and inspiration than it will actual progress. The past couple weeks slammed me with schoolwork (it feels like I'm saying this in every post!) but I'm now glad to say the bulk of it is done and will stay done. Until finals season (1-2 months out).

Someone introduced me to SteamSpy and I read this article about using its data for marketing research: Understanding your game through data. The article hit me like a thunderbolt and while it might be a little late for market research on The Whisperer in Darkness, I will absolutely consult it before embarking on my next big project. I wish I'd read it earlier, but at the same time, Whisperer was really a passion/experimental project and when I started on it I didn't care at all about finding an audience. That's mostly a new phenomenon with me (finding an audience)! So maybe it's a good thing that I wasn't concerned with market conditions or financial success when I started making the game.

My friends threw me a surprise birthday party on Oscar night! That was a really cool experience and a morale booster towards the end of the winter.

In terms of actual progress, I've been able to put a couple spare hours towards revising old writing, and experienced actual pride in my work. This is a rare and beautiful thing. Reading the passages to myself and comparing different versions, I actually felt chills that I could use to measure which word choices were more effective. Definitely a high point of the dev process so far.

The big news is that I'm gonna try and show a demo to the public next month! The local indie organization has been putting on group showcases at a science/technology museum in the city called the Leonardo. This means I have to make a solid plan for getting a demo ready, and probably cut together a revised trailer that at least reflects the fact that the game is Greenlit now. And coordinating technology for the demo should be a valuable experience for bigger/more stressful conventions that I'll surely be showing games at in the future!

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #21 (March 11-14)

Publicity

The Leonardo representative emailed asking for all the press info we have on our games for the showcase. They're gonna do extra marketing on the games/exhibit for us! I wanted to update the trailer to reflect that the game has already been Greenlit, and no longer have the video asking for votes.

This turned out to be more work than it should have. I edited the original trailer on my dad's computer so I could use Final Cut Pro--it was only after finishing the first version that I realized I could install Final Cut on my own Mac because our Apple accounts are linked as a family. When I went back to my dad's computer to update the original trailer project, he had deleted all the files. :O

So I re-cut the whole thing on my own computer. Ideally I would have done this from the start. The lesson here is not to avoid relying on anyone else's hardware if possible, and if you do, make sure you retain access to the project files for later.

This was also a good opportunity to incorporate my composer's revised trailer theme music, so the new trailer sounds a lot better. Doing my own audio ducking and amplification stuff on the first version, there was some bad distortion I created. Thanks to Mark that's gone now! And the moment when the title appears, lines up fantastically well with a new creepy sound. So, I like it.





After I was done with that, I updated the presskit which I made with presskit() by Vlambeer. Then I just sent the press kit link to the museum representative, and now I'm waiting to hear back and see which parts they choose to publicize! They said they're going to be posting our trailers on their Facebook page throughout the next week or so.

Development

Today I spent a few hours attacking an insidious bug in the code for revealing large chunks of dialog instantaneously (such as when the player reads an email).



It's all working now, which might mean I've finally ironed out all the bugs in the dialog system and paved the way for myself to implement all the chapters (and the demo I need by next month) unimpeded. But I've been consistently surprised with problems that require more coding, so we'll see.

I spent the rest of my dev time today implementing little bits of Chapter 2 that recent code made possible to put in the scripting engine. It's much longer than Chapter 1, and it's taking quite a while to implement.

I think for the demo, I'll be implementing at least the first four chapters according to the way they were written in the game jam version. Then I'll settle on a good cliff-hangery point in those chapters, at which I'll put the ending of the demo. I don't think I'll be implementing a stand-alone thing for the showcase, it will probably just be a limited version of the same content in the actual game.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #22 (March 15-30)

The first three chapters of the game are fully implemented! I pushed myself to get them done in time to demo tomorrow at Utah Indie Game Night. I still have to make a proper demo build to keep players from discovering unfinished parts of the game, but I should be able to get that done today and tomorrow. This means I have an opportunity to show a demo to other developers two whole weeks before the first public showcase! I think I'm in pretty good shape.

I revised the dialog for a conspiracy newspaper article, hopefully making it a lot less cheesy--and I also redesigned the background and formatting to make it look much more pleasing/like a newspaper.

Before



After



Aside from centering the whole thing and making the newspaper title look better, the main difference is that all text is justified now as it would be in a real newspaper. I hope this makes a visible difference, because it was a bit of a hassle. (Thanks go out to the local dev who helped me work through the spacing algorithm).

I think I'm sticking to a minimal ASCII art style where large fields of solid color are preferred (so the desk beneath the newspaper is just one shade of brown). I could add some slightly off-color cells, or use differently shaded ASCII characters to give a more detailed appearance of wood grain, though--what do y'all think?

Here's our skeptical narrator's rebuttal to the conspiracy writer, also reformatted:

Before



After



An important difference with this one, is that the portrait of Wilmarth has been shifted to the bottom right corner, and that (although you probably can't tell) the gibberish characters have been dynamically placed, instead of pre-drawn by myself. This will ensure that this screen can be trivially localized into other languages without modifying any script or customizing any of the ASCII art between language packs. It's nifty, trust me.

I also had to redesign a sequence from chapter 3 to allow localization.

Before



After



The old version used a piece of static ASCII art I made in my custom editor. The problem there is I want translators to be able to localize the game completely without ever touching a script or opening the ASCII art editor themselves. So I revamped this scene to use the dynamic dialog system, and rewrote things a bit to accommodate that. (There's also a scene before this where Wilmarth types the package ID into a text box).

In addition to allowing localization of this scene, I'm happy with the change in dialog. I feel "Package does not exist" adds another little point of existential confusion to the story, which is always good.

However, I'm also aware of a trade-off here, because I've removed the authenticity-adding details of name-dropping Townshend and Newfane (real cities in Vermont). This post is already pretty rambling, so I'll save the detailed discussion of authenticity in Lovecraft and my adaptation for another time.

Hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. 

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #23 (March 31 - April 2)

After implementing the first three chapters I managed to scrape together a demo build which just loops between the main menu and the first 3 chapters. In the demo build I removed every method for the player to quit the game (except ALT-F4, Ctrl+Q, etc.) because when I demo the game I don't want players exiting the application either by mistake or on purpose. I want players to take their turn playing through, then for the game to return to its starting state, ready for the next person. I learned a lot about game demoing at events from this MAGFest writeup by Josh Sutphin, a friend in the local community.

Last night I took this initial demo build to Utah Indie Game Night, and was lucky enough to have 3 local community members play through chapters 1-3. They all gave wonderfully useful feedback, and I learned a lot by observing the way they played and learned as they went along. All in all the night filled 8 pages of my notebook. My major takeaways:

• Steam customers paying $6 will expect a level of visual quality the game does not possess as it stands. I only heard this from one of the players, but I'm taking it very seriously and will have to find further feedback. Surprisingly, he was more critical of the painted art than of my ASCII contributions. If this is accurate, my two options will be to either enlist Quincy for much more updated work than I planned, or to lower our price point.
• The game needs critical improvements in teaching players how to proceed. I need some kind of tutorial to make sure players understand which keys/mouse buttons proceed with the story, and probably add a prompt to make sure players know when the game is awaiting their signal to proceed. (This might be difficult to do without reducing immersion.) Players were also confused with the movement controls, something I can fix by adding visual cues to the first movement tutorial.
• People really liked the writing. This one is a huge relief, because the writing is my child and I've been intensely critical of it myself. Pleasantly surprised.

Going over the notes today, I've added a number of items to the to-do list on the initial post which should help me improve the game in these aspect.

Before I demo the game in earnest at the Leonardo in two weeks, I'm putting my priority on addressing the feedback from Indie Night and polishing the demo build as much as I can. I'm also going to start a Facebook page for museum-goers to like and follow updates leading up to release. If I can get all of this done before the 15th, I'll get back to scripting chapters 4-8. It feels like I'm getting really close to the end! I counted the items on the to-do list, and have officially passed 50% completion.

Scrapping a feature: chapter recaps

Earlier I wrote about a proposed solution to the loss of immersion when players step away from the game for long periods of time while playing. In theory, a recap system would avoid this problem, but realistically, the chapters are already very short and it doesn't quite make sense to shorten them further. I think this problem is unsolvable, not to mention a minimal one, with an average playtime as short as this game has.

Recent Inspiration

I beat finished I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (is winning even possible?). It was an excellent experience--brilliantly written and designed to show poignant points of human brightness even in the face of omnipotent evil and darkness. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in adventure games!

To cleanse my palate of No Mouth's bleakness, I also beat The Secret of Monkey Island (original). Definitely deserves to be a classic, although I'm taking a break from point 'n' clicks for quite a while now.

I also beat Firewatch and Undertale, both very noteworthy for reasons other people have already said far more about.

Listing all of these, it really feels like I've been playing too many video games (jk lol).

Research

Started reading an academic dissertation on Lovecraft's work entitled "H.P. Lovecraft and the Modernist Grotesque." It's ridiculously educational/insightful and I'm asking myself why I didn't start doing academic research earlier! It has a few sections specifically analyzing "Whisperer" but I haven't gotten to those yet. There's also an essay book I need to pick up, because one chapter analyzes the choices Lovecraft made when revising the original story--which should be very illuminating for me when it comes to making choices about keeping this adaptation faithful to the original work. The book is called H.P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifice, and Reality.

I bought the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's film adaptation of "The Whisperer in Darkness" and I'm gonna try and schedule it in one of these nights as soon as I can.

Back to work, now.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #24 (April 3-4)

I watched The Whisperer in Darkness movie the same night as I wrote in the last progress report:

I'm gonna try and schedule it in one of these nights as soon as I can.

How's that for making good on promises in a timely fashion? Anyway, it was really well done and a great inspiration, getting to see the decisions a totally different team made in adapting the same work as I am.

I've also been making great progress on the goals I set for improving the demo. Yesterday, I added visual cues to the exploration tutorial in response to seeing demo players fumble a bit with the controls.



The previous version simply said "Hold the directional keys to explore: <keys>" which I learned wasn't enough direction for players to understand that they needed to hold the keys down in order to get anywhere. Players were still tapping the keys and expecting to move that way. But I want players to move slowly at a natural walking pace for our protagonist waking up in the morning, so that's not how the player moves. I spiced up the tutorial to have the words "Hold down" instead of just "Hold" and to react to the player's input by changing colors and showing what they're doing. I think with this change, players will pick up on the movement system with less confusion.

Most players will probably still end up frustrated with the slow movement speed, but I don't think I'm going to change that, because the interactive exploration scenes are meant to evoke very specific feelings, and I think the movement speed is crucial to that.

Today, I added a little tutorial which appears before players start Chapter 1:



I'm hoping this will alleviate confusion my demo players had over which buttons they needed to press (especially after leaving the mouse to use arrow keys in the exploration scene) by explaining it to them clearly before play starts. I am aware of the possibility that this method fails due to requiring player attention in order to learn the material, but that's something I'll find out in future tests before release.

Like the movement tutorial above, the inputs shown in this tutorial are dynamic and reflect the input mappings the player has configured. So "Return" and "Left Click" just happen to be the default configured buttons.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #25 (April 5-16)

I managed to pull it together and meet my goal of showing a demo at the Leonardo Game Night! This was my first time showcasing in public, and I was nervous going into it, but ultimately the whole thing went really smoothly and it was a great experience. I got to keep the poster they made for my table:



I think it's pretty cool. Gonna pin it up somewhere in my house as a souvenir.

So let me break down what I did, along with the good, the bad, and the lessons learned.

Prep

After talking with my friend Josh from the Utah Games Guild, I decided to bring two computers: one to run my game demo, and another to loop my trailer and hook visitors' curiosity. The morning of the 15th, I got both computers set up and performing their purposes in my living room, with all cords and accessories gathered together to stop me from forgetting anything. Josh offered to bring a big-screen TV for my trailer, so I exported my trailer at the TV's native resolution and simply tested everything with a spare monitor I had at home. I made a release build of the demo for the other computer, and ran through it by myself to make sure nothing obvious was amiss. Luckily, the demo itself was essentially ready from my prior playtesting of at Utah Indie Night, and changes I made the week after. The process of getting both computers set up and running as they would took a lot longer than I expected.

Mistakes/Lessons learned

• I showed up 40 minutes early. The coordinator's email said to come half an hour before the showcase, leaving time to get ready. Somehow I got it into my head that I was supposed to be an hour early, and even then, I would have been 10 minutes too soon. This would have been a waste of time if I hadn't brought the Lovecraft essay book I've been reading. 
• When testing my setup at home, I mistakenly assumed my VGA->Lightning adapter would be enough to connect to Josh's TV, because I knew from Josh that the TV took VGA input. In fact, I also needed a VGA cord, because unlike my monitor at home, TVs don't have their own VGA input cords! Luckily Chris, another of the showcasing developers, brought an excess of miscellaneous cords and was able to lend me the VGA I needed. Woot!
• I didn't bother setting up a speaker system for the trailer at home, because I knew the TV would have speakers for me to use. Because of this, I never thought to bring any audio connector cables. After saving me once with the VGA cable, Chris was also able to supply my audio cord. The broader lesson here is that ideally, I would be relying on my own hardware so I could test everything before arriving at the venue. Hopefully I'll be able to reach that level of a budget by the time I'm doing more important showcases with future games!
• I didn't make my game's Facebook page until after sending the Leonardo my press kit and promo images, so when the game highlights went up there was no link for people to follow the game. Even setting up a Facebook page and verbally telling people who liked my game to like the page, has resulted in 0 likes so far. In the future, I need to bring info cards to hand out, and have a full game website with a convenient URL.

That reminds me. Like us on Facebook!

The Good Parts

• Networking! I talked in person with two writers from Enemy Slime, who previously covered the game after email correspondence. They said they're interested in having me on their podcast at some point, which should be a cool opportunity. I also met the woman who's heading the upcoming Utah Games Guild User Research Lab, and that'll probably also lead to cool stuffs. Plus, getting to spend more time and become closer with the other devs who brought games. Every chance to feel more welcome and connected in the local community, is a huge plus.
• I met a girl my age who's entering the same Freshman class as I am next year! She's super into games, wants to learn gamedev, and I was able to give her all of my advice and links to all the Games Guild resources and everything. I was super happy to make my little contribution to increased gender diversity in the Utah scene, however small it was.
• One guy came to the event just to see my game! I think I have a #1 fan now. He said he loves visual novels and Lovecraft, and that after seeing my game announced as part of the Game Night, he felt like he absolutely had to come. He really really liked the game, too! In fact, everyone I talked to said positive things. Of course, maybe no one said anything negative because they all wanted to be polite, but I could tell this dude was extremely sincere because he definitely didn't have to praise it so much if he didn't like it. I know it's best not to pay too much attention to the glowing reviews, and to instead focus on the criticism as long as I can keep improving things. But damn, it was validating to hear!

I crossed a few showcase-related items off the page 1 To-Do list, and the current totals put me well over 60% towards completion. I'm bumping up the status.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #26 (April 17-23)

I've fixed the broken fullscreen mode, and removed the option to have all graphics scaled to 2x resolution. After testing at double size on a 1080p screen, I realized the paintings just don't look good at that size. So the only two graphics options are going to be Windowed mode, and fullscreen (which just displays a black margin around the default 800x480 game window). It's not the best, but the game is so fundamentally rooted around the ASCII grid dimensions that I don't have much choice.

I also made the first significant progress on the game's Windows build in ages! I have ASCIILib (the game library) compiling and linking with SDL2, and now I'm only getting linker errors when I try to build the game itself against both SDL2 and ASCIILib. I should be able to figure it out next time I hazard working on Windows. Then I'll just have to make sure the game keeps working the same across all 3 platforms.

I scripted Chapter 4 in the new system, and it's technically complete (along with the gender swap I'm doing on Akeley's son, a background character) but I'm not ready to call it "finished" yet. I'll probably leave it alone for a bit, then come back and confront the little design/pacing/style issues I have with it, and just can't pinpoint yet.

This morning I had an idea for what optional/discoverable content to put in the game's first exploration level. I'd long ago decided there would be a series of messages describing the books in Wilmarth's personal library, but this morning I felt inclined to use this as a series of references and acknowledgements to good horror and sci-fi I've been reading during work on the game. Wilmarth's library could essentially be an author-insert for my own taste in horror stories. I wrote up some dialog for these encounters, and now I'm going to build them into the level. Obviously I'm not sure whether this approach will come across to players as annoying, self-indulgent, or out of place, so I may scrap it all later!

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #27 (April 24-25)

I've translated the scripts for chapters 5, 6, and 7 now! 5 and 6 were both very short, because those two chapters are much more rushed and lacking in substance than I remembered. So I have 7 of 8 chapters in the game running in (at least) content-parity with the jam prototype. What does this mean??

Well. Turns out, the later chapters (4 and above) get much more complicated than the three chapters I brought to the showcase. They're overflowing with interwoven story details, which is why I decided to keep re-scripting the chapters before I stop to revise the writing in any of them. At this point, the writing changes I make are going to have big implications for the tone of the game, and I need to have all 8 chapters running so I can take a more holistic approach to revisions. So far I revised the dialogue chapter by chapter, but that's not going to be good enough with so much going on. I want the plot and character motivations to be extremely solid, and there's at least one major plot point that lacks greatly in this department (in my adaptation and in the original). I don't want to spoil anything here, but improving this element of the story could require changes in dialogue across all 8 chapters to compensate.

My dialogue scrolling system has been riddled with bugs from the start, and I'm losing count of the times I've fixed and re-fixed certain broken behaviors... it seems like there's only 1 bug left, but who knows, maybe fixing it will re-open a few old bugs? I'm getting progressively more annoyed with it. Lesson learned: don't code your own visual novel text-formatting engine from scratch. There are so many weird edge cases I never thought of before I started this... It feels almost like I've spent more time on the dynamic positioning system then I did in the prototype, manually positioning every single piece of text. I guess the up-side is that the dynamic solution will make translation implementation much simpler (which was kinda the point).

I also want to show off the evolution of one of Quincy's art pieces in the game, an alien clawprint:



She ended up rushed in finishing this one for the prototype. That's how it appeared in what we shipped for the Public Domain Jam.

I asked her to revise it with reference to the specific descriptive passage from the original story.

The worst thing of all was the footprint—a view taken where the sun shone on a mud patch somewhere in a deserted upland. This was no cheaply counterfeited thing, I could see at a glance; for the sharply defined pebbles and grass-blades in the field of vision gave a clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double exposure. I have called the thing a “footprint”, but “claw-print” would be a better term. Even now I can scarcely describe it save to say that it was hideously crab-like, and that there seemed to be some ambiguity about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh print, but seemed to be about the size of an average man’s foot. From a central pad, pairs of saw-toothed nippers projected in opposite directions—quite baffling as to function, if indeed the whole object were exclusively an organ of locomotion.

She was understandably struggling to conceptualize how this might look, and--this next part makes me so happy--made a mockup outside. In actual mud. :D




After seeking feedback on these images from my local community, I gave Quincy the go-ahead, and she came back with this, the much-improved clawprint now seen in the game:

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #28 (April 26-May 3)

Last week I solved a longstanding problem with dialogue formatting, where popup dialogue bubbles (for Wilmarth's journal excerpts, etc. when appearing above Quincy's images) needed to be sized perfectly to avoid line breaks appearing in undesirable places. Now dialogue bubbles can size themselves dynamically, which means different-language dialogue won't run into formatting problems all over the place.

Tonight I re-scripted Chapter 8, meaning I'm ready to really sink my teeth into the revision process. One thing I've realized since starting to rewrite the game, is that there are several sci-fi elements from the original story that really have been totally invalidated by modern science. I didn't give these elements much thought and several of them exist in the current form of the story unchanged. One of Lovecraft's creative principles--as I've learned by reading Lovecraft essays by Steven J. Mariconda--was that all the fantastic elements of his stories be theoretically possible without violating known facts about the natural world. I've started brainstorming and doing research into how I can adapt those elements of the story so they can stand alongside the scientific knowledge we have today. I've already taken some inspiration from one of my favorite sci-fi books, Blindsight by Peter Watts, which just might have some hints as to how the aliens in Whisperer in Darkness are visible to humans but not to cameras.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #29 (May 3-7)

Researching science to justify the story's more fantastic elements... is so much fun. Along with making some larger adjustments to the story to clarify character motivations, it's made me feel much bolder with regard to updating the story and taking it in my own new directions. I feel like I know myself better as a writer/designer now: background research is really empowering and inspirational. With future projects I'll make sure to immerse myself in research much earlier in the process.

I added the ability to give dialogue bubbles a minimum height based on their style. This lets me ensure that every time text in Wilmarth's journal is shown in a bubble, the bubble is never so thin as too look ugly. Additionally, I enabled dynamically sized bubbles to stretch upwards, not down, which averts a very specific scenario where the tail of a certain character's voice bubble becomes awkwardly detached from the bubble itself. Fixing tiny details like this in the game's presentation has become a pretty big part of the process at this point, which makes it feel especially like I'm reaching the end of the project. So far, I'm not bored/frustrated with polishing things up. Hopefully my attitude stays that way right up till the end.

Yesterday I made several minor adjustments to the dialogue, prettying up certain phrases so as to make them gender-neutral, not unnecessarily refer to Native Americans of the Pennacook tribe as "savages", etc. I also spent a couple hours drafting some of the much larger changes to the dialogue. Some of them actually require large structural modification to the narrative, which leads me to make more changes in other chapters, doing my best to keep the whole picture in mind at all times. I like it.

Next I improved the dialogue system to put a brief pause in between revealing each paragraph, which makes everything seem much more natural, as if a human is actually handwriting the story, and taking breaks to gather thoughts before continuing. I left the duration of these pauses configurable in JSON, so I can tweak the duration obsessively to get it just right.

Today I implemented the credits screen.



Translators are credited automatically by looping through language packs in the game's data files. I left a lot of empty space to prepare for adding more names in the "Special Thanks" section from the other team members and as I think of more from myself, as well as for playtesting credits.

I think the layout is pretty okay, but like the rest of the game's UI it's subject to change.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #30 (May 8-11)

I've done a ton of refactoring in my UI code (especially for the options menu) to remove hard-coded coordinates that could have caused janky positioning against labels with different-length text when displaying in other languages. In other words, I added some code features to make relative UI positioning a thing!

I also implemented the option (enabled by default) for the player to continue the story by pressing any key, not just those configured to trigger UI elements.

And lastly, I got a working indicator in the game for when it's waiting for the player's input. This is definitely going to make it more clear to players when they are and aren't supposed to advance the story themselves! Which is one of the design issues that's been with the project since the PDJam. The reason I didn't add an indicator in the first place, was I thought it would mess with the immersion. The reason I'm allowing it now, is to make another feature (which adds more immersion) less confusing to the player!

Here's what I mean. In the prototype, when paragraphs would be added one after another (without a pause for player input), they was absolutely no break between them. I noticed that this detail was a little off, because no human being writing by hand would move immediately between paragraphs. My recent solution was to add a delay between paragraphs that would appear like this. However, this posed a problem, because the player would never be sure whether the game was paused waiting for their input, or paused in between writing two paragraphs automatically. Adding the indicator clears up that confusion, because the player knows exactly when the game is waiting for their input. Overall, I think these two changes make the game more immersive, not less.

Here you can see the indicator in action, in the bottom right corner:



Thoughts welcome!

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #31 (May 12-20)

25 commits later, I've finished one of the absolute most painful parts in this project: Unicode support. I am overwhelmingly happy not to have to work on that for a while.

A bit of research led me to choose ICU as my cross-platform Unicode library. I'm not sure if it was the best choice, but it got the job done. Eventually. Thanks to my past self, who neglected to implement Unicode support from the beginning of a multilingual project, I had to gut every source file having anything to do with loading text files, processing JSON, and rendering text, in order to handle all of these things not as regular "char" and "string" but as ICU "UChar" and "UnicodeString," the latter of which quite unhelpfully defies every convention for standard library strings, forcing me to carefully rename every call to size() with a call to length(). The CMake file I borrowed to link ICU wasn't well documented, forcing me to spend a couple days grappling with linker errors when I tried to use any of ICU's IO functions. (I might never have solved that problem without help from a couple of local gamedevs over Slack, and if they're reading this, all credit goes to them!)

The default Windows terminal font doesn't have characters for Spanish's accented letters, so I got creative and implemented a system that identifies those Unicode characters from a table I define in UTF-8 plaintext, rendering them as a combination of a simple ASCII character supported by the font and a "flair" sprite from a spritesheet I created myself with all the accent marks I should need.

I recognize that ultimately, I most likely shouldn't be using the Windows terminal font at all because it's ugly and the whole ASCII thing is a bad gimmick. A modern, non-monospaced font could handle the accent marks for me and reduce a lot of other headaches involved in creating my own "ASCII" graphics library. Also, now that ASCIILib supports both full image rendering, a full color palette, and Unicode I might ironically be making the least ASCII-confined game every to call itself an ASCII game. Despite all this, it's one of the constraints I made fundamental to the project early on, and it's way too late to change the decision. 

The impetus for this whole change was adding Marc (the Spanish translator)'s professor to the Special Thanks list. Gisela Abad García, thanks for helping me get this horror over with.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #32 (May 21)

I just finished implementing the last game configuration option I'm planning to include: the player can switch between (at the moment) 3 dialog speeds to make game text scroll at a suitable rate for their reading speed. Playing a bit of chapter 1 with a slower dialog speed made me realize it's odd how dialog doesn't pause after Wilmarth (the narrator) finishes writing each sentence. It should be easy to add that using the same system I devised for pauses in between paragraphs.

I thought this little change was worthy of its own update because it means I'm marking yet another whole section of the To-Do list (Accessibility and configuration) as complete. #FeelsGood. 

Also I'm on weekend vacation and I wasn't planning to turn it into a gamedev thing, but now it is! So!

[foofter]

Hey, I just wanted to say I love "Whisperer in the Darkness" and am excited to see you're making a game based on it.

I liked the original story so much I once tried to make a short comic based on it (but taking place in Japan): http://wzackw.com/?p=184
Anyway, just liked you on facebook, good luck!

[nathy after dark]

Thanks for taking interest, waru99! That manga page is honestly really cool and if there were more I would definitely want to read it. Back when I released the game jam version, another person who played the game thought it was similar to manga by Junji Ito and linked me to The Enigma of Amigara Fault. I don't know if that particular link is the best/most legal place to read it, but if you haven't read it, definitely take a look! This Wiki page (with spoilers) also links it to H.P. Lovecraft in a way I hadn't thought of which is great. I'll probably read it again soon as I get more back into the creative writing part.

Maybe I've mentioned this before in the log, but I'm reading tons of stuff lately! Including a lot of comics. I think it's worthwhile to record some of the media that inspired be while making this game, so I think I'll make this post into a roundup of the things I've been reading/watching/listening to, because to me as a developer, consuming lots of good media is essential to making imaginative and original work.

Inspiration roundup

Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein is an amazing memoir I finished a few weeks back. It turned me onto the music of Sleater-Kinney which is now my favorite band, and composes 90% of my gamedev playlist along with Grimes, Savant, Modest Mouse, and Virtual Riot.

Two days back I finished reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl which had me crying for maybe 10 minutes during the epilogue which described the fate of Anne, the Franks, the Van Daan family and Mr. Dussel after being caught. It's one of those books that brings the reality of the Holocaust into focus in a way that's hard to handle. Just unbelievably tragic how a young girl could spend so many years in hiding reading entire encyclopedias, writing beautifully, and becoming an incredible person in the face of such a challenge, only to die in a concentration camp for no good reason. Really powerful stuff.

I read the collected Ghost World comic by Daniel Clowes (I think because it was mentioned in Cara Ellison's Embed With Games or somewhere similar) as well as Bryan Lee O'Malley's Lost At Sea which turned out to become my favorite of his graphic novels. I got hooked on Saga by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan and after reading all 5 collected volumes I bought issues 31-36 in single issues. (I'm young and new to comics as a medium--I had never bought single issues before!) Now I'm up to date and eagerly anticipating the next arc.

Lady of the Shard is a really cute self-contained web comic and now I'm reading Cucumber Quest as well.

There's all the recent inspiration I can think of! Hope someone found this interesting.

EDIT: I forgot all sorts of things.

• Steven Universe. It's much darker than you would expect, and full of all kinds of subtly grotesque imagery and themes hidden beneath the superficial cuteness of its world.
• The Designer Notes podcast. Lots of great episodes, especially the ones with Chris Avellone, Nina Freeman, and Chelsea Howe.
• Recently started listening to The Inklecast which is more specifically about narrative games.
• 
  
  about game narrative featuring Emily Short, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman. The Versu project Short talks about sounds revolutionary but I haven't been able to find and play any of those games yet which is a bummer.
• I beat Silent Hill 2. 
• The Walking Dead: Season 2 (game)
• Ever seen one of those "Free Library" boxes around your hometown? Last week one near my house had a giant volume of Isaac Asimov short stories which I snatched and so far have only read a couple. Of the ones I've read, "Not Final!" is excellent and very Lovecraftian.

[foofter]

I have read Enigma of the Amigara Fault! It and all of Junji Ito's other stuff makes me feel deeply disturbed and visually grossed out! Have you read Gyo (Fish)? Talk about disturbing!

And Cucumber Quest reminds me of Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (NES).

Thanks for checking out my manga, too.

[nathy after dark]

@waru99: I haven't read Gyo, but it looks very interesting. Can't find it at my library but maybe I'll find another way to read it eventually.

Progress Update #33 (May 22-June 3)

I filled another jar with finished sticky notes!



This is probably because I mostly spent the last couple weeks focusing on bugs and little details in the game that could be fixed and improved. I write all of these things down on sticky notes. A friend wanted to play the game, so I warned him it wasn't finished and there would be problems--taking notes while watching him play, I nearly tripled the size of my stack of notes to fix.  Dedicating time to make things work, look and read better based on what he found, I think I greatly improved the game as a whole and it didn't take as long as I thought it would to get that stack back down to usual size.

All the little things I did:

* Working on making the postage tracker system I mentioned in Update #22 look more realistic by having Wilmarth type in a security code in addition to a package ID, making a responsive "Submit" button (that doesn't actually work as a button--it activates given any input to continue the story), and trying to show a blinking text cursor in the package ID and security code text boxes. (Still haven't totally figured out the last one because of weird bugs.)

* I made all of the accent marks a bit bigger. They weren't visible enough before.

* Deleted source files for a voice-over related class that I haven't needed in forever, since I scrapped voice-over.

* Tweaking the way mouse and keyboard input compete for focus in the chapter selection screen.

* Allowed different scenes in a chapter to define a custom position for the input indicator. This lets me specifically position it in each scene to be readily visible and not cover important dialog or visuals by accident. (Another opportunity for obsessive tweaking! :D)

* Allowed dialog bubbles to be stretched left or right in addition to up or down. Also added a script command for placing a dialog frame relative to the last one (mainly used in the postage tracker sequence to place text boxes next to input labels so far).

* My friend had to finish playing a few days after he started, and had forgotten how the controls for movement work. I changed the movement tutorial to appear not only in the first exploration sequence of the game, but in the first exploration sequence the player starts since launching the game. That way players who take breaks in between sessions will be re-introduced to the essentials they might have forgotten. So far this doesn't apply to the controls for continuing/pausing the story because they are much more trivial and my friend picked them up intuitively.

* Thought of an alternate ending for Chapter 4, and implemented it to see if it worked. I think it's much more powerful, and makes a good conclusion to "Act 1" of the game (if we're to consider it as a story in 2 acts.)

* Removed the feature of adding translators to the credits automatically, because I don't want the English version of the game to say "Español translation by Marc Tamarit", I want it to say "Spanish translation" and it seemed best to remove dynamic credits entirely to solve that, since they were only used for translators in the credits anyway, and realistically there won't be many more translations. I haven't heard from my Polish translators in months, as if they've been abducted by elder beings, so I'm going to scratch that one off the to-do list for now.

* I created a system that pauses when revealing dialog if a natural pause is written, such as a comma, colon, semi-colon, period or emdash. This makes the dialogue's appearance feel much better, and I can tweak the amount of the pause later.

* Fixed a bunch of little contradictions in the writing, made the main characters seem a little less idiotic, and made sure the word "odour" is spelled consistently (not "odor"!) after the way Lovecraft did originally, out of respect.

* Improved the sprites for Wilmarth's journal so its flipping open appears natural, and it's more readily identifiable as a book.

* Removed the text "The Journal of Albert N. Wilmarth" from the journal's sprite, so instead it is now parsed in the current language and will be localizable.

The Utah community is starting to hold indie co-working sessions at big coffee shops, and I rode the train to the first event where we saw 4 people show up in total. It was a great time (although we expect more to come in the future!) and one of the other devs was able to give me a lot of useful suggestions while I was working on getting the game's Windows build in order. (I knew the meet-up would be one of the best opportunities to do this part, because I have little experience with this stuff and frequently need help, which is why I put it off so long in the first place.)

Despite all that, the game still doesn't build on Windows... it's getting there, though! I've learned a ton about compilers, linkers and libraries, which should make all this stuff go much smoother on future projects. I might not choose to use CMake again. It's been kind of a hassle, so I'm open to trying new cross-platform build systems once this project is over. Anyway, probably the best piece of advice my dev friend gave me is to start by trying to build the bare minimum Hello World project, only linking in your library dependencies one at a time so it's easy to see where the problems lie before you try to compile the entire game. He also advised me to keep text files explaining exactly how I've gone about the different builds, to help myself remember in the future when I've forgotten but I need to make a new build. It's all great stuff. 

I've also started talking with my brother and a scientist I know about my different ideas for new speculative science to put behind the fantastic elements of the story. Composing my thoughts about these things has me generating loads of brilliant ideas for ways to work everything back into the story, keeping things interconnected in ways that might keep the player thinking and discovering new implications to the story long after playing. I won't share any of these ideas here, though.

I'm graduating from high school today! This is probably why I've been so prolific in the past weeks, because I wasn't actually required in class and I ended up finding good time almost every day to work on The Whisperer in Darkness. I'm in an extremely energetic phase of the project right now, and it's awesome. :D

[nathy after dark]

I've just updated the first post to better organize and reflect the upcoming demands of the project. The outdated To-Do list was actually making it harder for me to remember which parts of the project actually needed my attention when I sat down to work, so hopefully things will be a bit smoother now.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #34 (June 4-9)

Short update this time. I finally got the game to build, run, and work on Windows the same as on Mac and Linux! I'm very proud.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #35 (June 10-16)

Engine Stuff

I added support in the code for accepting and responding to runtime arguments. Enabling console output is currently the only runtime option, and it's enabled by default. I also refactored my log functions (which check the runtime argument before writing anything to a console) into the game library, ASCIILib, so that library classes and functions can use the proper channel for log messages. That way, when I modify the log functions to save output in log files, ASCIILib's error messages will appear also.

I also had a fair bit of repetitive code as a result of my roll-your-own StringTokenizer and FileReader classes being located outside of ASCIILib. Having my game's code reuse those classes, while my library's code had to handle these things itself by essentially duplicating the code wherever those things were necessary, made debugging ASCIILib uglier than it needed to be.

Localization stuff

Marc turned in his final project on the translation process, and in 2 weeks he has to present a working build of the game in both English and Spanish, so he can defend his choices in the translation. He asked me for a build with just Chapter 1 implemented, so that's what I'm working on right now: Chapter 1, fully localized, along with all of the game's menus and UI. Luckily, I already had most of the necessary work finished! I expect I could have it done by next week, thanks to all the planning and programming I did for multilingual support in the last few months.

To get the menus working properly, I had to allow the JSON files containing menu design to define layouts differently based on the current language, because some of Marc's Spanish UI text was causing buttons to run off the screen.

I realized that despite implementing comprehensive support for the Spanish alphabet, I forgot to make sure special Spanish punctuation marks could be rendered by ASCIILib. ¡Ave Maria! This turned out to be fairly quick to fix, though. In addition to detecting accented characters and rendering them as combinations of regular letters and sprites for the accent marks, I extended ASCIILib to detect special characters which need to be rendered as inverted versions of existing characters. So the Spanish upside-down exclamations and question marks are simply drawn by flipping the normal ones. It's pretty neat.

Research

I had a great conversation with a PhD scientist I know about different ways the Mi-Go of the story could be invisible to cameras, and where in Space they could feasibly originate, and how they might travel from their homeworld to Earth. He was full of great subjects to research, such as military camouflage technology and different methods of animal camouflage. He also recommended a number of sci-fi books and movies that explore space travel, wormholes, the folding of space, and also how alien languages might work. These recommendations included Dune, The Book of Strange New Things, and They Live (The John Carpenter movie, which I rented on iTunes the same night to watch).

I'm almost finished reading H.P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact and Reality, the first scholarly book about Lovecraft that I've gotten to research. Yesterday I checked out two more (which are mercifully much thinner). H.P. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe by Donald Burleson, and H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West by S.T. Joshi. The campus library already had these two in their collection, which was a pleasant surprise.

Beyond that, I've been reading more Lovecraft stories and also a collection of comic book adaptations of them. I finally read the entirety of The Call of Cthulhu (having tried many times before, and never quite getting hooked). It was worth reading, though not my favorite. I'm not sure why it's so well known out of all his other work, although the opening paragraph is brilliant and almost perfectly summarizes the genre of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. I really liked Hypnos and The Colour Out of Space. As for the comics, I don't want to sound overly confident--but the ones I've read seem fairly uninspired, almost completely refusing to modify the original plots and writing. Basically, I would say they don't give much reason for a Lovecraft fan to read them instead of the original stories. This makes me feel pretty good about my game, because I honestly do believe there are some great innovations and enhancements over the original story, and while I would never claim to have surpassed Lovecraft himself, I think this project might truly stand out against similar Lovecraftian adaptations as something special.