I think Even will make more sense to explore in smaller vignette games, similar to the chapters of the book. The general idea behind Even was for me to reflect on various narratives and types of narrative that I grew up around, which probably form some deep part of the way I interpret the structure of my life. I'd been nervous or unsure for a while, actually, about the idea of making Even a "real" character with a long-ish/continuous story and world of her own, didn't seem to quite fit. So this is a relief, but it's nice to know that Even/potato will be missed!

Had a weird week where I helped with a big move and made some beds and a side project game. Will be releasing it later on itch.io probably, but you can get a sneak peek here:

http://kittakaj.github.io/

Back to the writing board soon. It was nice to take a little break to finish a thing, since EtO is so long.

Yeah, I can't really imagine just randomly making a bigger game than Even the Ocean, even as our next "big" project. I feel like we don't have much to gain thematically and a lot to lose practically by making any bigger sort of game. Although we both sorta want to do some take on the JRPG way in the future, maybe.

Thanks for all the support!

For the sake of my pride, I'd like to emphasize that this was a choice made for design reasons first and foremost--we would have made this same choice even if it didn't cut any time off of development. The scope of the project as a whole hasn't really changed from our initial plans, it's more that everything that the concept of Even had to offer we're exploring in The Ocean instead.

Anyway that doesn't matter, it's just me reassuring myself. I like to think that we didn't bite off more than we could chew--just that we're chewing in a different structure than we originally thought! But you all are totally right that it just makes sense as a practical decision as well.

Possible BIG DECISIONS forthcoming! I dunno.

writing this one area... it's time intensive because it's basically like writing a whole small book in itself. Feeling listless because of the size of the project and all these annoying repetitive stress woes that have been cropping up. The main thing that bugs me is that most of the hobby/recreational stuff i want to do on the side to relax also uses similar muscles... and so I feel blah about doing anything.

Actually I'm kinda excited for Necrodancer which comes out today. That might scratch the game itch while using totally different muscles (I have a cheap dance pad).

Also I figured out how to play around with soundfonts in REAPER and I think it will be fun to play around with some music/audio side projects. I've been trying to learn the basics of Flixel... but might try other stuff. I'm most comfortable with Gamemaker for making games, but GM can't export for web without a lot of hullabaloo (and by that I mean money). And if I'm going to make fun little experiments, it would be silly to not have them for web. Might play with Construct 2 free? Just... all of the organizational stuff in normal programming is what gets to me. I can sort of deal with the main game logic itself, but dealing with making organizational decisions adds all this stress. There are a tonnnn of layers of tacit knowledge in programming that prevents accessibility.

I've been really craving accessible tools lately. It's like... there's always this fear in communities that people will find some "trick" way of doing things more easily and that will lead to the deterioration of the medium. But I don't think that's ever how things actually work. There will always be people interested in deep understanding and exploration of a medium so allowing others in with various levels of engagement will just enrich things. It's a thing that happens with art. Andi McClure's art tools play into this dynamic interestingly (see this, made w/ Michael Brough: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=4987).

A lot of the time when you see programmers talking about how you really need to "understand" coding to make good programs, artists talking about how you need to "understand" art to make good art, musicians talking about how you need to "understand" music to make good music... they act like this is the only thing that a person is doing with their life, and so can't understand why they wouldn't engage with all of the moving parts at the deepest level. Also it's a way of justifying the time that one has put into understanding all of those things. But plenty of people can't afford to spend all their time learning art history and in the meantime it can be meaningful for them to paint a picture. And some people do multiple things and can't invest in the more peripheral things as much, but can still be enriched by them or do interesting things.

I understand the impulses though... it's hard not to take other people's lives (their divergence from our lives) personally... as a personal affront. Hard to remove the ego. But basically I want to do everything, and I want everyone to be able to do everything. ahhhhh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

new box art sketch on the first page of the devlog

working on those mystery mini-gauntlets. It's really cool how the different entities totally shift the feeling of moving through space in the different gauntlets.

my arm is recovering I think but still trying to be nice to it. standing desk is working out ok so far. I get better sleep at night because it's tiring to stand all day.

I hate when specific games follow me on twitter. Because it's not even a person's feed, they're just following me so I'll hear of and maybe follow back their game

I feel like if you're a game you should just follow other games/companies.

Thanks SnakeCoiler! I've gotten further tightening up the details in the sand and such since this pic, mostly just the background stuff to nail down before i feel like a still shot would really look finished-ish. But I've been spending a lot of time on this area because I'm totally revamping the way I'm doing the nature area gfx. This was allows me a lot more freedom with the contour of shapes which is fun (e.g. the silhouette of the tree would totally not work tile-based)

But I've kinda run my arm into the ground this week. not sure why. maybe working on these bigger images is more taxing than working on small tiles? More hand movements? anyway soreness shifting around my wrist, elbow, upper arm. Very frustrating! will probably get a wrist or elbow brace to sleep in? took it easy today.

whoa the colors step

Yeah that's where a lot of the mood happens. I think it was just 2 things, a general curves adjust and a hue shift just on the grass to make it greenish instead of orange. Simplifying further from there is then helpful to get at the essential colors in each area.

Thanks Connor!

Here's my latest concept with a process gif. As I was saying, it's very utilitarian so you can see me stealing liberally from random, internet-swiped images, messing with the size/colors, then painting over roughly. Feels like cheating, but all's fair for personal practice and internal production help! I am quite excited to be learning this stuff, as painting/colors has always felt out-of-reach to me and this method is helping to demystify the process.

I still haven't taken any of these concepts into final art yet, and I think that the art will be going in a different direction than it was before (and kind of back more to how it was towards the beginning? But with new skills and strategies.) So we'll see how that goes. Right now I'm just having fun mapping out more satisfying color palettes for the various areas.

Thanks Lucas!

Some concept art... weird how I'm actually sort of getting the hang of this. I always thought I was bad at painting/concept art stuff. All I can say is damn, watch some of this guy's videos if you're interested in making concept art type stuff or just learning how to realize painted scenes efficiently: https://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL

He's the head of this design school and also does a lot of AAA work--totally different kind of stuff than what I'm really interested in, but it's been so helpful anyway. Extraordinarily generous with his techniques, advice, skills, etc.

Probably the most useful thing I learned is how he often throws a bunch of photographs together, blurring, adjusting, and erasing to quickly get to the general mood/colors/shapes that he's looking for. I used that technique for these. It makes a lot more sense than trying to be cool and make everything straight out of your own head just to prove you can. That's what I used to do with concept art and it was always bad.

LAZY BEACH:

We've been sending back and forth some massive idea emails on a few email threads, and are quite close to a having a lot of the main structure set. Up until this point, we've been working mainly on the individual areas that you travel to, which each have their own sorts of themes. But now we're talking about the central, continuing story thread which revolves around a big city.

It's been really fun actually for me, articulating a bunch of ideas that had been slowly building up in my head as we worked, but that I'd never really crystallized yet. I'm glad it's been going as well as it has. I love designing big, meaningful arcs and twists that hit you in a certain way based on the things you've been through.

We're still so far from finishing, but I think we both just really want to get it done because we're starting to be able to sort of taste the whole structure of it.

By "finished" re: dialogue and gauntlets sean means done with first drafts many of which will probably get reworked quite a bit. But those first drafts are pretty important

Wanna play {SPACE DAD}???

Of course you do, it takes like 5 minutes. http://ninasays.so/spacedad/

I worked on this over the weekend. practiced with Dan Fessler's (Chasm artist) technique for dynamic HD index painting on the planets and space stuff and am bringing some of those techniques into EtO

Stressing out about making everythign perfect. just need to make it good enough so i can live with myself. I think I have high enough self-criticism where that will be pretty good.

The game feels hard to market too. How do you market a novel? This game feels like a novel...like getting into it is a slow burn I feeel. It'll be weird for shows and...meh.

Novels are basically marketed by the author being famous and printing the author's name Really Big on the cover.

I think a lot of the narrative stuff is a slow burn but getting an overview of the main mechanics are actually pretty "catchy" all things considered. When we showed at PAX Prime a lot of people seemed genuinely interested in the basic premise and thought that it played well enough to be intriguing.

I can't really help but feel that it will sell just fine because Anodyne did and I feel like EtO is so much better, more interesting, more accessible, etc. But Anodyne's success was helped by a lot of crazy random things happening and a lot of sean's work so i guess it's not as guaranteed as it seems like it should be.

I just got back from a family trip in california. kind of jetlagged with the time difference, disoriented. i think i have a clean stretch ahead for a couple months with no more trips. I've been surprisingly trip busy ever since graduation last year.

Going to work on a secret game jam game this week. who knows what it is~~~

I feel like most of the press gives a lot of sorta strange explanations of the game which is fine because the whole 2-games thing is confusing and there's a lot up in the air still. I think it's fine to be sort of weird and confusing and once people actually play the game I think it'll make more sense and seem a lot simpler than it sounds.

Working on some writing. Like I was complaining about earlier, trying to keep together all the threads of trying to make everything relevant and make sense despite not knowing the order of everything or whether or not people read or remembered all the stuff.

Basically I try to get every bit of text to
1) Advance the themes of the area OR the overarching narrative (both occasionally)
2) Build/describe the character speaking
3) Be a little surprising or at least not super predictable

If it doesn't meet all three of those things, i usually try to rewrite/rethink. And I think in terms of building/describing character, it can be easy to fall into ruts of kind of giving characters a shtick and having them blatantly interpret any situation through their shticky personality. The opposite problem is not making anyone distinct enough by trying to make everyone complex. Maybe what I should be trying to shoot for is that characters deepen or surprise you a bit if they have enough dialogue to get there. There are some NPCs that just say one thing. But trying to have at least 1 or 2 in each area that are a bit more developed.

I dunno, we'll see how it goes. I reallly want the dialogue to be good and worth reading.