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[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #36 (June 17-28)

I implemented some fixes and new features to handle Marc's translated text for chapter 1 requiring more space than the English version in some places. After that, the only things needed for the demo were to disable save files (to avoid issues with file permissions on the school computer he'd be presenting on) and to fix a few last bugs and typos.

Marc should be presenting the demo today, so we'll see how that goes!

I also added a few more error checks and log print-outs, along with finally finishing implementing the blinking text cursor that appears in scenes where the player is typing on a laptop. Quincy started working on art revisions after her classes ended, and I made it possible in release mode for the player to speed up dialogue by holding down any button.

That's all for now! I've been taking a break since Thursday when I had college orientation, and following that, vacation in Monterey to celebrate my grandparents' 50th anniversary. I've got a bit more time to work today, and hopefully tomorrow I can jump back into my daily schedule.

Thanks for reading! (Sorry for the total lack of screenshots lately... next time I promise some pictures!)

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #37 (June 29)

In my post yesterday, I forgot to mention some of the research I've been doing. After reading a fair bit of Burleson's H.P. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, I decided that his method of textual analysis was too abstract and convoluted to be useful to me as inspiration, so I returned it to the library.

After writing yesterday's update, I had a really long chunk of time sitting in a car, which I took advantage of by forcing myself to read the rest of the dissertation I first mentioned when I started doing serious research ("H.P. Lovecraft and the Modernist Grotesque" by Sean Elliot Martin). It was full of inspiring connections and observations, especially one section that analyzed the characters in "The Whisperer in Darkness," helping me realize what my adapted writing lacks in terms of characterization. Plus, the dissertation mentioned a few stories I haven't read yet, making me add them to my research reading list.

I finished with the anthology of comic adaptations. At least one of them really impressed me with the art style they took--I think it was Shane Ivan Oakley's art for "The Haunter of the Dark" but my memory is fuzzy for some reason.

I think that sums it up. The rest of my reading/research list looks like this now:

• "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (Lovecraft)
• "The Shadow out of Time" (Lovecraft)
• Supernatural Horror in Literature (Lovecraft's own thoughts and analysis on supernatural horror!)
• H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (S.T. Joshi)
• Research camera disruption technology
• Research nanotechnology
• Research the possible (new) 9th planet of the solar system

The purpose of the first four research items is to keep strengthening my understanding of Lovecraft's style, themes and ideals. The last 3 are for finding ways to adapt Lovecraft's sci-fi concepts into current scientific knowledge. Specifically, "The Whisperer in Darkness" features aliens that cannot be photographed (originally because of the "vibration rate" of the electrons composing their matter (total bogus)). The solution I'm currently considering is that they've actually incorporated nanotechnology (or some advanced mechanism) into their skin, which detects humans' cameras when they shoot a picture, and employs a burst of electromagnetism or somesuch to prevent any kind of photographic evidence.

I'm researching the ninth planet because in the original story, Lovecraft's alien Mi-Go visit earth from the planet Yuggoth (a.k.a. Pluto, and not actually a planet--which violates scientific believability because we have images of Pluto's surface, which is not, in fact, composed of remarkable black stone, magnificent spires and alien architecture). To make this adaptation more believable, I need a location for Yuggoth that scientists haven't actually explored enough to disprove the possibility. The possible existence of another ninth planet is almost too good to be true, because the original story was published at a time when Pluto had just recently been discovered, playing off scientific curiosity and fear of the unknown. To have almost the exact same scientific occurrence happening right as I release the game, playing off it just like Lovecraft did, would be an incredible coincidence. So, fingers crossed on that one. (I haven't done really any research at all yet as to whether the 9th planet would make a plausible homeworld for the Mi-Go. Could still turn out to be totally unworkable.)

[jordanchin]

Man, Nathaniel! This game looks fantastic, form the visuals, to the concept and sound design. The world needs more Lovecraft inspired projects,so I'm ecstatic that this is going to be a thing! Congrats on being greenlit.

[nathy after dark]

Thanks, Jordan! Comments like that are great to hear.

Progress Update #38 (June 30-July 2)

Marc showed Chapter 1 to his professors and got his final grade on the translation project. YUSS. Since Marc's project only covered an in-progress version of the revised game dialogue, he'll still have to translate the revisions I make until I'm satisfied with the story and writing as a final product. Luckily, he's still happy to stick with the project and help out with that. Thanks, Marc!

I started outlining exactly which plot changes and other modifications I'm going to make to each chapter before I call things good. This is extremely helpful in terms of contextualizing how much work is really left. Which brings me to the next order of business:

So far in the project, it's been good for me to set concrete expectations for when work needs to get done on the game. If I'm going to release on Lovecraft's birthday (August 20th), It's time for a new deadline. In order to leave time for sufficient playtesting and proofreading, as well as the Steam certification and release process, plus writing a massive amount of press emails, I need to have a beta build done really soon. For now, I'm saying July 15. This deadline is probably a bit unrealistic--although honestly, it feels doable with the right amount of crunch--which is why it still leaves a bit of wiggle room as far of the rest of the release process.

The fact that I'm close enough to finishing the game to be actually planning for beta testing, feels amazing. I've been holding off on marking 70% completion on this thread for quite a while, because I would rather overestimate the amount of work left than underestimate. But now it feels like time.

Today I spent a good few hours hacking away at the script for Chapter 2, and I can say that I'm very proud of how improved it looks. I got into a groove where writing and coming up with ideas felt amazingly fun. One of the best feelings in a project.

I'm not going to share any of the new dialogue just yet, because I'm not sure if I want to spoil it for those who might play. Maybe some snippets later on.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not officially announcing an August 20 release date. That's just a target I'd like to hit.

[nathy after dark]

There's one more interesting thing I forgot to mention in the last post. While thinking about how to include the possible 9th planet in my game, I realized there would be a contradiction in the game's timeline if I try to reference the actual papers.

The problem is that I've placed the game somewhere vaguely in the early 2000's. So, at the time the story takes place in, scientists would likely still consider Pluto a full-fledged planet, and the possibility of a different 9th planet wouldn't be put forward for another 16 years or so. Part of the original story is that the main character is frightened when he reads about Pluto's discovery, because he knows this was part of a plan by the Mi-Go. In my version, if I want the same thing to happen, I would have to re-position the events of the story in 2016. This might not be such a bad idea, but it will have other consequences I need to consider--for instance, that one major object in the story is a tape cassette, and this would be very out of place in our year.

I might go through with this big change, because I love the idea of making direct reference to the real study. One of Lovecraft's signature techniques is referencing real books and authors at the same time as fake ones, confusing readers and blurring the line between fact and fiction. This could be a cool instance of that.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #39 (July 3-15)

So it's July 15, the day I said I wanted the game beta-ready! It's not, but the deadline still worked wonders for my discipline. One of my goals is to treat self-imposed deadlines with as much (or more respect) as I treat the deadlines other people and organizations set for me. To give an example, I still made time this week to hang out and play games with my friends, but I set a specific time for myself to leave and get back to work. When my friend told me to stay longer, and asked "Don't you make your own schedule?" I responded "Yes, and that's exactly why I have to stick to it." Because to me, working for myself isn't the same as working free from structure or obligations. It's hard to stay motivated and productive without a boss, and keeping semi-rigid structure with goals and deadlines, helps me.

So I managed to do a terrifying amount of work since the last progress update. Much of it, I won't discuss in detail because it has to do with overhauling the game's story, and I don't want to spoil much, because the story is the whole point. Plus, there's so much of it that I won't have time to focus on explaining my choices until I'm done crunching on the beta build.

So here's the basic list of things I got done. If any specific part is interesting, let me know, and when things calm down I'll try and come back to these points and discuss the cool intricacies.

• Added the ability for dialogue frames to be defined inside of ASCII art files, such as Wilmarth's open journal encoding the frames for its own pages, and Wilmarth's laptop specifying the frame for text on the screen. This is better than having to carefully change hard-coded coordinates in separate script files if I ever want to change these sprites and the size or position of their frames.
• I went through several iterations trying to make message dialogs' sound effects stop right when their text finishes scrolling, instead of finishing the next loop. So now, when Wilmarth stops writing a paragraph in his journal, the pen scribbling sounds fade out instantly, and it never sounds like he's writing when he's not. I'm happy with the method I settled on for doing this.
• Hid access to the Spanish version. Marc and I agreed it'll be best to support only English at launch, so that we'll have time to work together on Spanish marketing and testing before releasing in Spanish.
• Finished removing (hopefully) all of the outdated/offensive references to gender, race and culture
• Lots of little tweaks and improvements to the dialogue system, solving problems such as accidentally skipping dialogue, allowing for multiple pages of dialogue in newspaper scenes, etc.
• Totally remodeled the last ASCII location in the game. Lots to say about that process, I'll probably make a post for it.
• Added a feature for beta testing: the player can press "Q" at any time to leave a mark in the game log at that moment. So, when trying to explain when and where something went wrong, testers can send me the log and say "I pressed Q during this scene," and I can look at that specific location for a problem. (Kind of like screenshots, but more specific.)
• Removed references to a tape cassette, so the game can now be set in 2016.
• Did the necessary refactoring to let the player open the Options Menu without exiting the current chapter.
• Fully overhauled chapters 2-6, and most of chapter 7.

I'm really proud with how close I came to meeting the deadline completely, but I'm also impressed with a few decisions I made in the way of acknowledging when I needed a break to take care of myself. Theoretically, I probably could have finished the beta build, but it wouldn't have been responsible in the long term, where I would have incurred too much strain on my mental health and overall wellness.

So, as I expected I'd have to, I'm extending the deadline for the beta build until Monday. Then, I'll be sending out beta keys to the first couple of testers. If anyone here wants to help playtest the game, just respond in this thread, or send me an email. And please just link to one of your games, or a blog or devlog that proves you're actually a gamedev.

Thanks for reading!

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #40 (July 16-17)

I just finished implementing overhauled content for chapters 7 and 8. There are 2 pieces of placeholder art still in there, but it'll take 2 seconds to replace them with Quincy's final work when it's ready. I'm going to declare the game ready to be seen by beta players. For having the game (99.9999%) content-complete, I'm gonna bump the progress up to 80%. It'll be 90% when I have all the bugs and other issues from beta testing sorted out, and 100% after the English version launches on Steam.

Still, there's quite a bit of work left to make sure the beta process will be efficient. I might not actually start the beta tomorrow, if it takes too long for me to implement the QA features that are still missing (log saving, comprehensive error checks, etc). Not to mention I still have to do release builds on all 3 platforms and put them on Steam for testing. So, realistically, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday.

I'll gonna start by sending it out to a few friends and family, and then depending on how many problems they find, assess whether I'll need to start seeking more testers. It's just a walking simulator, right?

And because I keep promising pictures, here's one of Quincy's revised pieces:



There's a few others, but I'll spread those out over future updates.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #41 (July 18-27)

Things have been coming along well, and it's getting really exciting despite one or two setbacks that are going to push beta testing and launch back a bit.

After my big push to be beta-ready by the 15th, I was way more burnt-out and exhausted than I would admit to myself, and I tried to keep working straight through until I had the beta put together. In reality, it would have been more efficient to take a day or two off completely to regenerate my energy, motivation and stability. I've realized that taking breaks when I need it, is a lesson I'll be struggling to learn for a long time. It's a life balance skill that will always be important, and never be easy.

So I finally realized there was much further to go, and decided to let up on the big deadline. This was the healthy choice, both for myself and for the game.

Since then I've been consistently fixing little bugs, adding error checks and other features to help me debug, and obsessively tweaking details in the dialogue, text formatting, etc.

I wrote some cross-platform code that should make sure save files end up in whatever directory is correct and accessible on the player's operating system. Plus, I directed log output to a text file, so I'll be able to diagnose problems my testers come across while playing.

Then I directed my attention to the actual Steam build. (I think I'm pretty much prepared to have the Windows version uploaded and ready as soon as everything else comes together.) I threw together a license file with credit given to all the open-source libraries I used, and while doing so, I realized I wasn't sure I had license to use the font I had always used in the game. It's the default Terminal font for Windows. After doing my research and contacting the company with ownership from what I could tell, I learned that they couldn't give me permission to redistribute the font in the game.

This is extra bad because I couldn't just swap in any other free-licensed font. My game is completely designed around the dimensions of Microsoft's Terminal font, because Quincy's painted art uses fixed size to conform to the ASCII grid. I wasn't able to find a single free alternative 8x12 font.

Luckily I've been following Stone Story,
and based on standardcombo's use of pixel fonts to support multiple screen resolutions, I realized I could simply re-implement the part of my rendering engine that handles the text, so that it renders from a pixel font. This allowed me to remove one of my game's library dependencies, and it turned out way easier than it could have!

The only problem...



...is that I cannot draw a pixel font.

So, I'm seeing if I can get someone to help out with that. Also, to take advantage of the situation, I'm going to implement support for multiple different fonts, which will make the many different dialogue styles in the game appear more authentic. One of the earliest criticisms I received about Whisperer, is that it was jarring to see a typewriter-like font appearing in a journal that's clearly supposed to be handwritten. Way back when I heard that, I decided to leave it as it was, because the terminal font was part of the game's quirky charm. But since I've had to remove it, I might as well take the chance to further improve the game aesthetically!

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #42 (July 28-August 5)

There was a local meetup last Thursday and I realized, coming so close to full beta mode, that this was a fantastic opportunity to get free playtesting and good feedback. Strangely, it took me until that afternoon to realize my current build with the placeholder pixel font was unusable. I had just enough time to revert the pixel font code and cherry-pick the new bugfixes from that branch, ending up with my demo. 4 people played it, leaving me with plenty of good feedback and minor bugs on the to-do list. It never crashed over the course of the night.  

After consulting a local community member who runs a free font site, I learned it would be legal to use the original typeface as long as I didn't distribute the original copyrighted font file. (Weird, right?) Luckily there's a public domain clone of the font I was using: Terminal Vector.

After considering the cost (both in time and cash) of continuing to implement original pixel fonts in the game, I decided to scrap that branch and simply slot the clone of the old font into the build I used for the demo. This led to one extremely baffling bug (which I still don't understand) caused by the font actually constructing characters that were 8x13 pixels high instead of 8x12. My workaround was simply to apply a source rectangle before drawing those characters, which excludes the row of blank pixels that gets added for no reason. The Terminal Vector font also had the added benefit of unifying various code pages from the default Terminal font, providing Unicode support for most European alphabets. So I was able to scrap my previous workaround which detected special characters and rendered their accent marks separately.

Yesterday I spent several hours on the build process for Mac, which generates a .app package including all the necessary library dependencies. Documentation on doing that with SDL was annoyingly sparse/nonexistent!

Besides that, I've started working on the to-do list from the 4 playtesters' feedback, and I'll also have to solidify the release build process for Linux.

Here's some of my work on the art side that I've wanted to show off for a while now. Please give feedback if you have any!

The last level of the game was one of my most rushed/shoddy parts of the game jam version:



Most of the important features are basically unidentifiable. Several of the rooms are shown in the painted scenes to have totally different color palettes, dashing the sense of consistency/realism at a crucial part of the story. Plus, when the player revisits this location again in the dark, their flashlight illuminates through walls, which is terrible. I didn't want to implement any level of sophisticated raycasting for light in an ASCII cell grid, and I realized I couldn't easily fit all 4 important rooms with their own color palettes on one screen-sized ASCII scene, so my solution to all of the above problems was to split the level into 4 separate rooms, each with its own screen. (Only showing 3 here.)

The lower hallway



Designed to match with this scene:



Stairs



Upper Hall



The player's flashlight still illuminates cells through walls, but it doesn't matter with these new designs, because there's nothing on the other side but more black cells. Clever, huh? 

I'm not showing the last room here because the level editor doesn't work on my Mac, and it only appears in the game in the dark, so I can't get a good screenshot of the full design right now.

Bonus screenshot: a hilarious game-breaking bug I had to fix

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #43 (August 6-August 22)

Big news! I moved into college! 









Sadly, not much big news for the project--I've been moving into college, and I decided to take the last couple weeks of summer purely for rest and enjoyment. Which was a great decision, because now I can approach the game with fresh eyes and less "just-shove-it-out-the-door" burnout. Now that I'm in school, I'll have to change the pace of development, which gives me more time to think, appraise, and polish things up with less pressure. I still hope to release early in October.

I've basically moved forward with beta testing in a low-key informal format, where I send Steam builds to a friend or two, and fix the bugs and respond to their comments before sending the beta to anyone else. This should let me make the most of my limited access to good beta testers I can trust. When I feel like I have a real release candidate, I might open it up to a bigger group of people to get a good variety of platform compatibility testing.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #44 (August 23-27)

I didn't want to add extra stress/pressure to my first week of college, so I stayed away from gamedev this week until classes were done on Friday. Then I met up with some local devs for co-working, which I was planning on all week.

It... sucked. I forgot to bring my notebook which had most of my remaining to-do list in it, so I spent the whole time trying to fix a bogus backwards-compatibility bug on Mac OS. After 3 hours, I thought I had done it, but when I got home to test on my desktop that can reproduce the bug, it was still there.

Hopefully those changes to the Mac build system have solved some other potential bugs down the line, but none that I know or care about right now!

It's really, really frustrating to have the game so close to releasable but have my time bound back up in school. I have a few other ideas for fixing the bug now, but I should probably post in a help forum before I subject myself to the pain of playing around with them.

[TheWanderingBen]

I'd been following this game for a while, but only just realized that I hadn't commented on the thread. I promise I'm not replying because you looked at my work -- I've been tracking you since I was just a lurker on here I love your Lessons Learned sections, and your passion shines throughout the devlog. And what you're making -- Narrative Lovecraft Adventure?! Yes please!

Posting to say "well done so far!", to say "good luck!", and to not miss any more posts that apparently I hadn't been reading the last few months!

[nathy after dark]

@TheWanderingBen, thanks for the reply! It's wonderful to know that I've had real followers on the log, as it's usually quiet around here except for me. It's also especially cool to hear, because your game looks awesome and if you found my work on your own, I must be doing something right.

And I'm gonna quote your questions from the other thread, so I can answer them here:

You're still in school right? Balancing that with gamedev must be challenging -- and your solutions are probably helpful to others in the same boat (or for me, who might want to start freelancing at some point!). You're also working with an artist and a translator? How do you set their tasks -- is it rigid, or more whenever they can get whatever done?

My personal time management techniques have never really been codified into a consistent system, meaning that my schedule is generally too unpredictable to have certain days and times dedicated to gamedev. Over the course of this project, though, I have made some important discoveries to do with gamedev/school/social life balance:

• Working from home can get depressing, and sometimes all it takes to double my productivity is to leave the house and walk to a coffee shop and work from there. It feels better to be surrounded by other humans quietly talking, and not shut up and confined in the house where I sleep.
• Working in a coffee shop is even better if I can get other local gamedevs to meet up. Sometimes this leads to getting crucial help debugging, interesting conversations about the industry, and learning new important things about Steam and whatnot. It's also directly social, and helped me become much more involved in the local community.
• Gamedev time that isn't scheduled, rarely happens. Gamedev is an equally important part of my life with school, so it deserves as much of a place on my schedule with respected deadlines and dedicated time.

To manage my day-to-day schedule I mostly rely on Trello. The reason for this, is that I've never found an online calendar app that suits all of my particular needs. My routines often occur on irregular intervals, not simply "once a week at a specific time," sometimes "every other weekday" (i.e. M/W/F/T/Th/M/W/F...) or "once a week, but I might have to put it off a day or two, and the time doesn't matter."

Most calendar apps don't sit well with me, because to-do list and scheduled events suddenly have to be split between two different apps, and I can't remember when I have events scheduled and when I might have time to get other work done. I need the two to be in the same planner, and also to be able to make routines repeat on oddball patterns like the one above. As far as managing due dates, events and to-do items in the same place, and flexibility to store all kinds of information, Trello is extremely flexible. The one thing missing, is automation. My solution:

I learned the Trello Python API and wrote a program that runs nightly, performing automatic operations to generate an ongoing week planner. It assembles lists like these:



Then I can add or remove whatever I want from what's generated, and I can easily drag and drop cards between days. (Why don't any other calendars let you drag and drop?!?! (I know some do, but it's not nearly as pretty))

The part that gives me superpowers, though, is that the system has support for modular repetition cycles. I can write scripts using the Trello API, that can be slotted into the automation and used to decide when a certain event should be repeated. It's freaking sick. 

This isn't really applicable to most people, though, because so much of it stems from my specific needs and preferences, and that I was dumb enough to sink dozens of hours into writing my own time management software. (I'd wager that over the last couple years it's saved me at least half that amount of time the real payoff being that I don't get frustrated trying to change myself to fix productivity systems, it's the other way around.)

As for my teammates, there is an artist, a sound designer, and a translator. The artist and sound designer finished 80% of their work 2 years ago, when we released our game jam prototype. We're working remotely, and they both have tons of other obligations, so I've had to work around how little time they can dedicate to the project. A few things absolutely needed to be revised to match the level of quality I want to bring, so I sent them emails requesting specific changes, and they send the work back on their own time. Aside from that, it's all been clever manipulation on my part to bring the overall quality up without having the resources to remaster every single asset. Hope I've done a good job!

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #44 (August 28-October 5)

I'm back! Sorry for the long delay since the last progress update. I've still been working on the game, just slowly, whenever I can find the time. The big news is that I have a release date! 

The Whisperer in Darkness will (hopefully) launch on Steam on Tuesday, October 18.

Holy shiiiiiiit. 

I'm freaking out.

Here's what I've done over the last month:

• Added music to the main menu and pause menu (it's just the trailer theme played softly). When the player pauses, the current music of the chapter stops (remembering its playback position) and the trailer music fades in. When the player unpauses, the trailer music stops and the chapter music resumes where it left off. (Every time you pause, the pause music starts over.)
• Added a headphone recommendation to the main menu:
• Fixed my Mac build system to generate binaries compatible with older Mac OS versions (thanks in part to Eigenbom's advice from developing Moonman)
• Wrote platform-specific code for Mac OS filesystem operations
• Cut a scene which was using placeholder art, because Quincy no longer has time to work on the art
• Chapters are now introduced with a fullscreen title, like the acts of Kentucky Route Zero, instead of being written only as small headings in Wilmarth's journal. (This magically makes Everything feel more dramatic, especially chapters with powerful/cliffhanger-y endings.
• Updated the writing to reflect newly-learned facts about the ninth planet in our solar system. (The game is totally educational now! )
• When changing the sound volume in the options menu, you'll be greeted by a delightful barking sound! (So you can tell if the volume is where you want it)
• The game no launches in fullscreen mode by default, and fullscreen must be explicitly disabled in the options menu.
• Fixed filesystem bugs in the Windows release build.
• The game pauses if you use ALT-TAB while in a chapter.
• Fixed a couple of music tracks to loop better. (Without access to my composer, I did this myself in Audacity by fading out the tracks at the end, and extending them with a few moments of silence before the loop starts up again.)
• Meticulously arranged the dialog boxes and position of the player input indicator in all 8 chapters.
• Fixed a mysterious Windows bug caused by Visual Studio automatically including a useless Windows 8 header file.
• Made an EXTREMELY subtle change which adds some absolutely DIABOLICAL foreshadowing and I can't get over how great it is. 

Those are all the little things! Finally, a big one:

I removed the explicit gender of the player character, Wilmarth. You may have seen me in other devlogs encouraging devs to improve gender diversity in their characters... yet my game always starred a pretty generic white dude. I finally realized that Albert Wilmarth's gender was completely irrelevant to his personality, so now the main character is called Alex N. Wilmarth, and NPCs refer to them as "Professor Wilmarth" instead of "Mr. Wilmarth," so any player can insert their own identity when playing.

I want to talk specifically about the file system errors I had to work through on Mac (and possibly also on dynamic library problems), because I'm 100% sure this has happened to other devs, and it's almost impossible to find good solutions! Which is ridiculous! But I'm going to put that off for when I have more time to give code snippets and screenshots.

I'm updating the progress bar to 90%!!

And to repeat: Release date is Tuesday, October 18!

The Whisperer in Darkness: coming Tuesday, October 18
It gives me the chills saying that. 

[nathy after dark]

The store page is live!

[nathy after dark]

We got a lovely write-up in Rock Paper Shotgun this morning! Check it out!

I also made several changes to the first log post to reflect the most current news for the project! (Check it out for at least one awful pun which I don't regret writing in the least.)

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #45 (October 6-10)

Yesterday I showed up for the last day of the Utah Indie Game Jam to see what my local community members had made and be a judge. During the morning and afternoon before judging and presentation, I solidified a release build of The Whisperer in Darkness for Linux. So far there have been few to no new bug reports on each platform, which means things are looking good for October 18.

I've also been writing emails and sending review codes to as many games writers as I can, hoping to generate press and reviews around launch. So far the two links in the original post are the only coverage we've gotten (that I know of).

Lastly, I'm going to be at Steam Dev Days this week! The trip is only within my budget because tickets are some of the cheapest out of all big gamedev events, and I'm carpooling with a group of fellow Utah developers. I'll try and write a detailed post about the trip and the experience after I get back.

Anyone else gonna be at Dev Days? Send me a message if you'd like to try and meet up! 

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #46 (October 11-23)

The game is launched!  

I should have posted this about a week ago, but our Steam launch date went smoothly and now we're on Steam! If feels positively unreal to be writing that here, and marking this log at 100% complete after more than a year. I'm getting the shivers. It almost feels crazier than the release itself!

At Steam Dev Days I talked to a bunch of other developers about what they thought would be appropriate for my price, and I was able to personally speak with a Valve representative which was really great. I drove home settled on $4.99 because it would give a decent payout per copy sold, and a lower price point would make it difficult to keep discounting lower over the coming months/years. The Valve rep assured me that refunds are a much smaller issue than I thought. $4.99 probably would have been a decent choice, but...

I finally changed my mind because of this video review which came out 2 days before launch:





It's pretty favorable of the game, but near the end they discuss pricing, and they pretty much assumed it would cost around the $2 mark, and recommend it if the price is low. I think this is a pretty fair thing to say given the game takes under an hour—what really clinched the decision for me is that they show a playthrough of the game in the background while they talk about it, and about 70% of the story is shown in under 9 minutes. That was just a little freaky to me, and I ended up with $2.99.

I think there's a couple of good lessons to take away from this:

• If you're unsure about pricing, do what you can to send press copies and if anyone writes a review, see what they say. It could be useful advice as to what players might be expecting to pay for your kind of game, especially if the reviewer is well-versed in the genre and audience.
• You might want to envision ways video reviewers might present your game in their videos. This might be highly specific to my game, but it never occurred to me that a video review might just be 2 people talking while one of them clicks through the story at a relatively fast pace. What would I have done differently if I anticipated that? I'm not sure, but possibly asking reviewers (especially pre-release) specifically not to show anything past the game's halfway mark would have been a good idea.

I've also put it out with a launch discount of 15% because I obviously want The Whisperer in Darkness included in the Halloween sale this month, and the only way to do that without angering early buyers was to keep it on the same discount from launch till the end of the sale. (I had to have explicit permission to do this from the Valve rep I talked to.)

The number of sales is modest as expected, but certainly satisfying! I wouldn't have been shocked to sell under 50 copies including sales to friends and family. NDA prevents further specifics, but let's just say it's better than that, but also not high enough for SteamSpy numbers to be extremely accurate.

I appeared on a local gaming podcast which was a cool first experience. I haven't gone back to listen yet, but hopefully I come across as smart.

My segment is around 35 minutes in. (Warning for adult language and stuff.)

At this point I'm still hoping to generate more press by continuing to contact Let's Players and games writers, plus I've identified a few ways I can improve the game based on Steam reviews so far.

Did I mention all 7 of our reviews have been positive? I don't know whether to be proud or whether it owes to the lower price tag. Probably a bit of both.  

[TheWanderingBen]

Congrats man! I'm sad I missed your last post until after Dev Days, as I was there as well. I'm sure we'll run into each other soon! Continued luck with sales and future work, duder! This game was exciting to follow!

[nathy after dark]

Finally had my first solid work session on the game since release!

The top feature request from players so far has been better resolution options for the graphics. I may have talked about this previously, but early in the project (as far back as the Public Domain Jam when we started) I dug myself a deep hole by trying to emulate a console game with a small fixed resolution based on the size of ASCII characters. All the art is done at the small resolution we chose, and because of the way I designed the graphics engine, I can't increase the size of text without making a corresponding increase in the size of images. This results in scaling which runs the risk of producing very low quality images. Plus, with the font I had, scaling the text less than double (bringing the screen to a resolution too large for most common monitors) was impossible.

Chris Early very generously helped me out by making different-sized pixel fonts for scaling the text without ugliness. I found out how to make SDL upscale the images more gracefully, so now 1.5x and 2x resolution are working in the engine. Just have to integrate them into the options menu so the player can configure them.

Everything Else

School has kept me extremely busy: last semester, in a bad way, and this semester in much better ways. I'm learning some awesome stuff and taking advantage of the university resources to read more books about games and other media I draw inspiration from. Most notably:

• How to Do Things With Videogames by Ian Bogost
• Girls and Their Comics by Jacqueline Danziger-Russell
  
  • Which already led me to read an amazing comic/children's book: The Arrival by Shaun Tan. I recommend it extremely for visual inspiration, and also very salient, well-expressed themes for people in the United States right now.

Saga Chapter 42 was severely traumatic. I also read all the existing Firefly comics which was a satisfying nostalgia trip. Now following the current ongoing series, plus getting into Black Panther and World of Wakanda.

I'm planning to start on a new episodic visual novel for Steam. This one will feature original story and writing, not an adaptation. Should be a new devlog for that as soon as I've published an update or two to Whisperer.