[Console Consolation]

Console Consolation
sean it looks like you're talking about WWII. WII is actually kind of a funny idea. War 2. The Second War. Yeah I have mixed feelings about consoles... I'm scared of getting drawn into cycles of consumerism... I've never actually bought a console (besides GBA and 3DS). And I worry that I won't end up using it enough to feel justified? But at the same time, I feel weird never being able to try any new "AAA" games ever. Could be fun to have a sort of entertainment center besides my computer. Maybe a nice thing to do when friends come over? A lot of the time I just end up eating out with friends and that adds up. We just bought scattergories, which is a fun game!

Current Work
Been working on nature areas design/graphics. For nature areas the design and graphics are a lot more mixed together than in the gauntlets which are all about the design first and foremost. But with the nature areas, it's definitely more about the idea of creating a feel of "hiking" through a bunch of distinct areas. I'm doing my best to translate different movement experiences into 2d. I don't want it to feel like a bunch of different graphics but everything is just floating rectangles with a consistent design style.

I've been getting Basic Structure and starting the graphical style for an area each week. I think that's a decent pace. I might just keep doing that, going to a new area each week to create the structure and basic graphics. Then coming back through again and filling out the graphics in another set of weeks. And... yeah there are a lot of areas, so this will take months, unfortunately. I'm kind of sad about how long this is going to take. But every time I play a game and see the long list of credits, I'm like... we're doing good work at a good pace. I shouldn't feel bad about it.

[I read everything]

I read everything
So anyway, I went back and read the whole devlog. Partially to answer the question "What is devlog?", but also because I wanted to see how things are going. And now I feel really dumb for what I said, because you guys dropped the Even section about six pages ago, and it was listed on the first post. You're clearly taking steps to make this manageable, and everything I wrote was pointless... XD

No worries! I don't expect everyone to read the entire devlog before posting! We always appreciate thoughts/observations.

Outland, enemy design
It was an interesting idea, basically Ikaruga meets platformer. The platforming was good enough, and you'll be glad to know the path light leaves after the tutorial section. Towards the end it gets pretty difficult and that was a good thing most of the time, like when it introduced new, harder ways to move through obstacles you had seen before. But those darn platforming bosses and enemies were so boring, it basically made the whole game unmemorable. I had to watch a youtube video of the boss fights to remember them.

Yeah, I think the game has a lot of flaws, but still kinda fun. Like, I thought the bosses had generally fun, exhilarating visuals, even if the actual stuff you did to fight wasn't super great. I dunno, if I take off my designer hat I can have a good time with it. Oh also... weird--the guiding petals have been staying with me the entire game! Maybe that's a setting somewhere.

Castlevanias solved this problem a while ago with leveling up. Some enemies were puzzles when you first met them, and took 2-10 hits to kill. As you leveled up and backtracked, you could one-shot most things, making the enemies more obstacles. I'd argue this is why backtracking works in those games, because it's more about speedrunning at that point than solving enemy puzzles. Three hit enemies are just a mark of bad design.

Interesting... normally I don't like leveling in games (esp in games with real time action mechanics), but I can see how this makes sense for a non-linear game. Well, if it's really non-linear. Some Castlevanias/Metroidvanias are actually irritatingly linear, just getting each new item allows you to reach the next new item which allows you to reach the next new item, etc. Some of them feel just like a linear game with more backtracking. Others do it well and feel exploratory.

But I think I prefer the Metroid model of gaining power through discrete item upgrades, rather than an EXP system, which feels more grindy.

I read something else recently about the five act model of storytelling, and how it is so much more useful than the three act model.
...
The sense of mystery is often an unresolved conflict, and by adding urgency to a story you can distract people enough to keep them from getting bored on the big thematic arcs.

Hmm... I wonder how the plot and characters of EtO fits into that structure... too tired to think it all through right now, but I can kind of see the pieces. As far as characters... some of them function as initial stereotypes that are then complicated. Some... are kind of hard for me to pin down... and I think will be a lot more up to the interpretation of the player. Two of the main characters, Aliph and Yara, I don't feel like I strongly pressure the player to feel a really specific progression of feelings towards them. It will be interesting to see how people respond.

We've definitely been thinking about mystery vs. urgency. Those 2 aspects are sort of explored in the main story centered around Whiteforge city versus the smaller narratives at each of the power plants. The city stuff is all about orders and getting stuff done!! The individual areas have their own, complex issues and character relationships at stake... and an interested player can dig more deeply into those nuances or sometimes barrel through more directly to get the job done ASAP. We want to provide a range of different types of motivations so that a wider range of players can feel invested in the game as a whole.

It didn't really matter what the NPCs and environments were representing, they just felt like they had thought and weight behind them.

That's a nice way of putting it. A lot of the dialogue was formulated from conversations or ideas that I'd heard about that for various reasons had stuck with me. I felt like if these weird snippets stuck in my mind and affected my life in all kinds of subtle but persistent ways, then they were worth sharing. Definitely tried to avoid anything perfunctory... same with Even the Ocean.

Anyway, whew, I hope your journey through the devlog was fun and interesting!

[For balance, I'll say nice things about Outland.]

It's a bit obnoxious to say "You got a cool piece of outland concept art!" as if you might think it's not "cool" and they have to assure you that it is. Draws attention to the 4th wall break.


For balance, I'll say nice things about Outland. Because I like it well enough. Definitely want to finish it, which doesn't always happen these days for me.

Movement feels weighty and unique. It's a bit odd and takes some getting used to, but it's distinctive, which is good.

There are some really cool bullet patterns--the spider boss fight is kind of beautiful.

There's low... friction? to playing the game. Sure you can get a bit bogged down in repetitive collection and fights, but mostly the game moves very smoothly and allows you to make good progress in a reasonable amount of time. You can jump by a lot of stuff without much penalty. I don't particularly like the story or level design, but it's much better to be ho-hum but quick and to-the-point than to be ho-hum and drag on for a long time being boring.

Also the core ideas... turning on and off platforms and absorbing bullets, are pretty fun.

Comparison to Even the Ocean
It feels similar to some early drafts of EtO at times, but they definitely go in very different directions, because of the selective invulnerability and uni-drectional health in Outland. EtO has a shield, which blocks damage but the shield blocks both types of damage and only faces one direction. So EtO can't really have anything like the overlapping bullet patterns that are the bread and butter of Outland's design. It would just be a mess and sort of cancel itself out if you were barraged by both energy types at once in EtO.

I think the pitfalls of Outland's style is that the more designed/unique encounters with the alignment mechanic almost always rely on waiting for repeating patterns--color-switching bullet patterns or moving platforms. This can make things a bit irritating especially to repeat if you fall or die.

The pitfall of EtO's style is that i think it can be easy for things to get mushy and confusing. The design has to be really clear, or else it just feels like your health is going back and forth all over the place? And you also want to avoid making it JUst about white section-purple section-white section-purple section because then it's basically just a health system. Also want to avoid any points where the player is just "grinding for health" by sitting on a pod... that's boring, but not totally unavoidable. I'm not being eloquent anymore, but I did want to say that there are pitfalls to both takes on the "dual energy" mechanic.

[A School of Level Design That I Don't Like]

Eh, no need to retroactively add stuff. I just think it'll make it easier for people who are just browsing to get a handle of what's going on in our devlog.

I have huge issues with both [Outland and Swordigo], but those concerns lay outside of a traditionally formalist view of the games, of course, some of it relating to that loot-grinding aspect.

I actually have a bunch of purely formal "gamey" issues with Outland. (Also bigger cultural/philosophical issues, but...) I really don't like the basic theory behind the level design. It reminds me of playing FFX, which I am sad to also dislike.

A School of Level Design That I Don't Like
It's the same thing over and over: a linear path to progress the game, blocked by repetitive enemy encounters, and made to seem less linear by several optional off-shoots, which don't contain anything really interesting but which you feel compelled to go down anyway, because you're a silly human animal. Now, many games could be described in this way, but some games mask it well or only use this structure lightly in order to frame more interesting ideas. Outland DOES have more interesting ideas, but does a very very poor job of masking this basic flow.

Minimaps Often Make the Difference
Maps reveal the structure of the level design, so a reliance on minimaps strongly accentuates poor design. You end up just constantly pulling up the map, then making the (not very interesting) decision: "Do I feel like going the 'wrong' way to get the extra loot, or just going the 'right' way to get on with the game?" Travelling through passages, having the same enemy encounters over and over, making this same path decision over and over... is not interesting to me.

But you can't just get rid of the maps, because that would be annoying. You would then just be choosing between random paths and likely getting very lost even though the space isn't thaat complicated. And this is partly because of the Silhouette Graphical Style which unfortunately makes every path and area look more or less the same. Don't get me wrong: Outland looks good and has a lot of nice visual flourishes. I like to look at it. But the graphics just don't help at all in guiding you or giving you a sense of the shape and geography of a space. Everything is just floating black rectangles all the time. My thinking is that visually and structurally distinct level geography allows people to think in terms of feel and landmarking and reduces the reliance on maps, allowing exploration to feel more organic (The fact that Outland needs to guide you through the levels with a cluster of petals is just a reallllly bad sign, from a design perspective :/ )

In terms of the enemy encounters being repetitive, how can this be avoided? I think that some games have a philosophy of "Every Enemy is a Puzzle", where each enemy has their attack patterns and tells and you need to get in a bunch of hits when they are vulnerable and not get hit yourself, etc. Other games have a philosophy of "Every Enemy is a Component of a Puzzle", where the question is not "can you kill a goomba?" but rather "can you kill a goomba under the constraints of this particular level shape, and under the threat of these other obstacles and enemies?". Even though the first method (Outland) seems like it will lead to cool complex battles with "better AI", the result is that you play the same gameplay idea over and over instead of the endless different combinations that occur when enemies are merely cogs in a unique encounter. Outland's enemies are too complicated to fight many at once--it's best to just avoid or pick off one-by-one if there are a bunch. And the terrain rarely has a significant effect on the encounters. If you want every enemy to be a puzzle, I think you need to make fewer encounters with less repetition (keep going in this direction and you get Shadow of the Colossus! )

Anyway, that's just a few thoughts, sorry this became Outland critique hour. I should maybe put this on my tumblr instead but it doesn't feel like a full review... just some specific thoughts. Like I said, I definitely like some things about it, and am interested in playing through the rest. I like the boss battles so far!

[Note on Headings]

I wrote this before the most recent posts from Innomin and Catguy! Whoops, well I'll just post it anyway. Whew, bummer about that artist, Innomin! And thanks, Catguy

Innomin, you raise a lot of good points. I do think we have things under control though. I avoided doing anything like the new art style specifically because I thought it would be too time-consuming. But now that I have a better sense of the scope and purpose of the different areas, it's actually a lot simpler doing it this way. We don't really have good enough infrastructure to do the older ways really efficiently.

Note on Headings
I notice that devlogs can be difficult to skim/jump into because of a bunch of wall-of-text posts. So I like the idea of giving little bold headings to my paragraphs, even if they aren't super structured, just to make things a bit easier to scan. Nobody else needs to worry about doing that, though, except maybe Sean.  

Older Graphics Methods
Trying to come up with tiles and non-tile repeated elements and backgrounds that all will scale and mix well is really stressful in the initial stages. It required a lot of going back and forth between different files, creating tons of metadata, and doing lots of tedious placement *after* making all the assets. I would constantly make a number of tiles in a working document, only to find that they didn't look good in the formation and scale of area that I needed.

Newer Method
This way is a lot more What You See Is What You Get, which removes a lot of the extra steps. Switching mental gears between steps is where I find my productivity getting laggy, so this helps with that a lot. I also think the end result is significantly better this way, which provides a lot of motivation and fun. Even for these initial areas, the process is already faster.

Playtime
I'm actually pretty sure it'll be longer than 10-15. Plenty of people took 10-15 on Anodyne, although I guess some players were closer to 5. So maybe I'd guess 10-25. Although I'm sure we could play it in much less time. It's actually reaching the size where I'm like, hmmm.... would I even want to play a game that long? But I guess I would if it was good. Hopefully EtO will be good enough to warrant that kind of investment. At least we can say that that playtime is not at all padded out by repetitive combat or money collection. I used to be super excited about big long games as a child. Now I wish games would get to the point more.

Combat/Loot Padding
Been playing a bit of Outland (PC) and Swordigo (Android, got in a Humble Bundle at some point). Both have some pretty good stuff going for them, as well as stuff I don't like. But what I wanted to talk about is that both have a lot of money collection and repetitive combat to just provide the basic meat to the experience of the game. It's generally effective, but at this point in my life, It makes me think, "I could do this in any game, why am I playing this one specifically?". It just feels so familiar at this point, it really could be any game for most of the playtime, and then occasionally it has moments where more of the main ideas of the game shine through. (Well, Outland has more character than Swordigo. Swordigo is REALLY by-the-book Zelda/JRPG fantasy with village elders and stuff. But--what it does have going for it is surprisingly natural feeling controls, for touch, anyway. I wouldn't say it's better than keyboard/gamepad, but it feels a lot better to play than i expected.)

Thanks for the art compliments!

Catguy, there are 2 types of areas:
-exploratory/NPC-filled areas, which will be completely handmade without tiles
-gauntlet/Dungeon-like areas, which will have a mix of hand drawn stuff but will also have tiles, to convey a clearer, more "designed" space for platforming challenge-focused interactions.

thanks onebitpunch!

and yeah it was nice to have you around, mush!

I'll be doing more streams. Even if like nobody's there, it's just a focus technique. Most of them will probably be week afternoon EST though... that's the time I'm working and everyone else is too :/ but might do some weekend ones here and there. I'm not sure how much i'll want to do yet overall though

Yeah it's not good to try to impress everyone. It's partly just an internal struggle--different threads in my own person with different values that are competing.

Also, no way, Anodyne's colors were beautiful. The Van Gogh-y main field area, the evening light in the cliffs - maybe it's not color theory perfect, but when a piece of art is, I just get this overwhelming mental image of a highly-trained artist, surrounded by tiny wooden mannequins and color wheels, mixing the perfect shade of blue for this gorgeous shadow in a commissioned piece of FPS concept art and making thousands of dollars. I mean - there is nothing wrong with that. It's just that, sometimes the theory is so well-practiced and executed, the artist's meticulous training is all I can think about, vs. his personal expression. Personally I prefer the latter, though yeah I suppose the two can co-exist. Anyway, tangent.

Thanks! I feel similarly, although I go back and forth between wondering if I'm just jealous? But like... that's a real significant thing to think about in how art comes across. Jealousy can be artistically distracting. This is a random example that I think about sometimes: I feel like Scott McCloud's comics theory (in Understanding Comics, etc) is extremely approachable to many artists, because his actual drawings are good, but not masterful. And, of course, he has a lot of good ideas. It's hard to talk about these ideas without being either jealous or condescending, which I think leads artists to avoid conversations about the artistic meaning and purpose of certain types of skills like draftsmanship, color, polish. There's sort of an assumption that art consists of an idea/meaning wrapped in a package of artistic form. And that the form should just be as "good" as possible. When of course, the form is really part of the meaning, and any value judgement on the objective quality of the form is wrapped up in a lot of cultural assumptions. It's hard to get away from everything being both personal expression AND competition, the competition part is so ingrained in Art and capitalism that it's easy to forget about how big a factor it really is.

I definitely get the creative bubble idea, and think it's pretty good. I was able to do that with Anodyne, working on it to the exclusion of thinking about hardly anything else. But that's not really possible for EtO, since I'm in a really different stage of life and it's a longer process. I kind of wish I could just bang it out, but it doesn't seem really possible.

[Anodyne Colors and Childhood Story]

Thanks Josiah! Color is something I'm not super comfortable with, although I been learning and growing quite a bit on the color front through this project. Doing rough concept paintings by shoving together, adjusting, and painting over bits of photo reference, has been really helpful. This concept artist Feng Zhu does a lot of really helpful videos: http://fengzhudesign.com/tutorials.htm

This ended up being really long so I added headers so you don't get lost as much:

Anodyne Colors and Childhood Story
There was this whole neogaf thread that popped up around when Anodyne was releasing that was shitting on Anodyne's colors ("The artist needs to go to color theory school" etc). I get why. a lot of the time they're not really perfectly pretty in a trained-graphic-designer sort of way. You can tell when someone just is spot on in making perfect, harmonious color palettes, and that's not me. I grew up totally focused on contour and form, I always shied away from color because I felt like I wanted to master single-color stuff more before I worried about the infinite possibilities of color. It's funny, when i was a kid my Mom would want me to add color to like thank you cards, to just make them look like traditionally cheery children's drawings, and I'd be too into just using a pencil and getting the contours right or making a functional pop-up card.

Anodyne Colors
But anyway, I chose Anodyne's colors for atmosphere and theme, more than just beauty. Maybe if I was less limited I could do both? But choosing color to fit the other aspects of the game is most important in a game, and that doesn't really come across in a few screenshots on neogaf. It really bothered me at the time, because color is something I was self-conscious about, and I do sometimes judge other games for their color choices (and sometimes "get" them more after playing the actual game), but now I think I'm less bothered. Or maybe I'm just more confident now, I'm not sure.

Screenshot WIP?
That screenshot is WIP, but not thaat WIP. I think what I'll end up doing is a sort of selective polish. Certain little focused  areas I'll zero in on the detail and then leave the player's mind to extrapolate. I think that will make sense from a variety of perspectives. Of course, anything to save time is a bonus in this big ol' project. But I think it also works to engage the player's imagination, de-emphasize polish in my own mind, give up some control over the conversation, and represent the "story" nature of the game. Because you see from the very start of the game that there is a storyteller framing device, and the game itself is a story being "told" to you. And stories are all about a collection of selective details.

Thoughts on Polish, EtO's Context in Games
Been thinking a lot about scope and polish, and about where a game like Even the Ocean really fits into the video game world. It's strange to be in a situation of such relative security from Anodyne and to have the kind of background and skillset to be able to make a game like Even the Ocean? In many ways, it is sort of rough/amateurish, I feel, but also really good and really big/ambitious...? Amateurish in the sense of... it's like only our second major game, and a lot of parts will feel rough about it in some ways? Even just like the promotional materials, like i dunno, I'm no good at that stuff. Although I know it always feels different on the inside, you can see all the rough edges more clearly.

Competing Influences
It feels like it's in an odd space between classically polished, predictably-financially-successful game, and alt, weirdly personal, unpolished game. So point being, I go back and forth throughout the long process of development taking in various influences... when I see bigger polished games, I'm like, "It has to be perfect, it has to be impossible-to-ignore, everyone must love it and be amazed!" and then I see more alt and marginalized work and I'm like, "No! De-emphasize polish, subvert capitalism, focus on the personal/flawed!" and so I feel jostled back and forth between all these different worlds and can just hope that somehow it comes out being some sort of true or valuable thing. And hopefully that it can make some money too. It's a rollercoaster. But in the meantime, all these forces end up having a sort of subtle/subdued effect on the actual day-to-day work. I mean... a lot of it is just going on how it would, I think. But with my mind shuffling through all these competing desired. I'm just really itching to get closer to finishing and start to be able to see what Even the Ocean will be.

I'm not sure if this would work for all variations, but seems like you could use character-specific theme music for most alternate square music? So have a basic square theme, then maybe it sometimes plays the Mayor's theme or H's

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

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.

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.

[The Ending]

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!

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.

http://bossfightbooks.com/

Oh wow, I had no idea this existed.  Thanks for the link, I'll be ordering some of these for sure.

Oh yeahhh I forgot to mention I got these in this bundle which is actually still going I think:
http://storybundle.com/games

I'm showing ETO at Bit Bash today (Chicago's first games festival)  - whoops, I meant Saturday, not today. So I'll need to make a quick demo build. Unfortunately we're missing SFX and art assets from the intro bits, so it'll just have to be some scrappy-looking debug gauntlet and intro area. Most of the past weeks has entirely been lots of writing and event programming and music, so there isn't a lot visually to see .

Oh noooo another placeholder art demo. Oh well. People will be more surprised when it finally comes out wheee... I actually kind of feel better about a more placeholdy thing than like unppolished "real" graphics... even though those are probably better "marketing". whatever.

I was gone for an exhausting week helping with and attending a wedding. Did some writing while I was gone. Some reading. Read Anna Anthropy's ZZT book and the Chrono Trigger book from bossfight books. Both were interesting. Was inspired to play chrono trigger again (i don't know if I've ever beaten it? Got stuck on the final boss battle the last time I tried i think). I'll def just like cheat if I can/need to to gt through it again. I'm just interested in story and how the game works and stuff.

http://bossfightbooks.com/

2) I don't mind lots of dialog. In fact, I liked most of the dialog for Anodyne. Especially The Village Elder and the Statue's lines, and the whole bit with Mother in the Blood World. The best part of finding each card was the little quip you gave each enemy. In short, don't worry, you can write much better than any boring AAA dev.

Also, *please* include fast text. Pressing X once to display all dialog, twice to advance is my favorite system - I read fast. If a game doesn't let me advance text, I often end up mashing the controller. Or worse, games that skip dialog if you press any key. I enter button withdrawal with those games (some of us just like pushing buttons)

Thanks suddensight! There will definitely be different options for text settings, since different people have very different paces and styles of reading. We're trying to make the game very accessible in a lot of different ways--e.g. to people who have and haven't played a lot of games. When my mom used to see me reading through RPG dialogue, she was like, "are you actually reading that??"

Wow - I'm really curious to see how that much dialog is going to be incorporated. Is most of it incidental stuff, or more of the cutscene/story progression variety?

Like many RPG-ish style games, the balance is going to shift throughout the game. In the intro parts, where the player is learning about the story/world as well as how the game works, there's a lot more mandatory cutscene-style dialogue. Then after the intro, there gets to be more and more incidental stuff (but still periodic cutscene style stuff). We'll see how it goes!

Finished a draft of all the main intro dialogue (up until the point where the player leaves to choose which of the first 3 main dungeons to take on). It's definitely shaping up to be a more JRPG scale than we initially thought, though I guess we've been predicting that for a while. Hope you'll like it! I always get nervous... thinking about all the people irritatedly mashing through dialogue... but we'll probably have a lot of customization settings to change dialogue speed... and like... the story and characters are a big part of the game and really important to it so I should stop being so timid about it. I'm really committed to there being no filler in the game, so I don't think it should be boring.

There are certain touchstones that I always come back to when I start worrying about these things. 1) Analogue: A Hate Story, which is literally just reading but was both good and well-received. 2) Bravely Default, which is a 60 hour RPG where 90% of the dialogue is boring, predictable, superfluous, literally repeated... but I and many others still played through the game just because the battle system was OK and we wanted to see what happens.

As bad as it sounds, I honestly do take comfort in how terrible Bravely Default's writing was... I honestly think I can do better than a huge fancy Square Enix production, and that thought motivates me. Sometimes you need a little petty motivation working day in and day out on a long project.
 

Sorry if I have overlooked this question being answered previously but is the game directly linked to Anodyne's world? Anodyne is one of my favourite games of all time and is hugely inspiring!

Thanks! And yeah, like Sean said, it's not. It WAS initially more related... the nebulous original ideas were sort of that the "Even" section of the game was a story about a normal person in a "real world" sort of setting, while "the Ocean" was the character Even's dream. So we were sort of seeing it as parallel to Anodyne, which we saw as a dreamworld of Young's. But as you'll see a few posts up, a lot has changes, long story short: The Ocean became much more of a self-contextualized world, rather than a vague/abstract dreamworld, so the connection to Anodyne more or less faded away.

I'm having a hard time thinking of how to name places, settlements, etc. It's like... weird. No matter what you do it tends to feel really obvious? Like if you try to avoid using structures/words from real human languages it feels really obvious that you're just making shit up like "DURGADORR" or something... it's just like... of course it's gonna sound weird and kind of silly because the whole point is that it's intentionally not based on real stuff which would sound normal.

But naming things in humany-language ways also really sticks out... and brings up all kinds of questions about why you'd name a certain area with a certain language inspiration... lots of baggage.

I guess I'll do the made-up ish one but also stick to a lot of just literally descriptive English words for place names (like "Nightmare Gully"). Similar problems with naming characters... made up names are easy to just sound silly... but names from real cultures are tricky also. Have to be careful with that.

edit: the other funny thing is that phonetic symbolism and whatever totally affects even made-up stuff... like I could probably pick apart DURGADORR and find that there are plenty of real-world roots and connections and relations that affect the "feel" of how it comes across.