I was actually saying I like it just the way it is, particularly because of how the dialogue mentions his face so centrally. I think, for this character and that dialogue, it's a better characterization than a full body would be. But for other characters, full-body might be the way to go. But if they already have a full-body portrait elsewhere like the Butler's in the demo, than a large face here really seems fine, and I like the visual immediacy of having that face extend past the letter box. Hope that makes sense.

I think it would actually look worse if you put the portrait inside of the letterbox. This way is good. And I agree it would be cool to have full-body silhouettes, although in this case the text "the regrettably familiar face" does, along with the portrait, cleverly characterize the player's fixation with his face and its annoyingness. If later characters are shown in full-body mode, it would be an interesting contrast.

EDIT: Just read the rest of the log, and I found all of it quite interesting. I think it would be cool if you wrote about how you do scheduling, especially because you're also traveling during development.

And, I've never read any Raymond Chandler but he partly inspired one of my favorite books. It's a religion-inspired sci-fi noir mystery called Something More than Night. If you haven't read it, I think it'd make great inspiration for this.

Partial interior of a spooky farmhouse in The Whisperer in Darkness (pseudo-ASCII art):

[Progress Update #42 (July 28-August 5)]

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

Yeah, pretty much. Another dev I know was telling me he thinks it's based entirely on a magic number of page impressions (2000 or probably something bigger?) and that votes and vote percentages don't matter at all. I don't buy it, but it would be funny. 

Ooh! A great example of one that uses typography in the UI to make it more expressive, is Emily is Away. The player has to mash keys to get the protagonist's dialogue to be typed (simulating a chat window), but this is also used to express when the player is emotionally conflicted, because the player will type something, but subsequently delete it as more keys are mashed. It's evocative of that moment where there's something you really want to say, but you just can't. Pretty emotionally powerful.

Or the presence of romantic interests, but the play is asexual/aromantic and ignores them. Or characters the player can try to romance but is denied no matter what.

Adding to what Prinsessa said: writers (not just game writers) tend to write heterosexual characters without even thinking to include more sexual diversity. If you're part of the LGBT+ community or have friends who are, you could make the cast of your game fresh by representing groups of people we don't usually see in media. If you don't know people you can talk to, read some books or play some games by LGBT+ authors and if you feel comfortable writing queer characters into your game, go for it!

[Content warning]

For some reason this question really sparked my interest. Let me list all the good examples I can think of before I give my shameless self-plug.

Since all Twine games are based on text and hyperlinks, I could argue that every Twine game uses UI as a form of expression to some extent. Some notable examples:

Even Cowgirls Bleed: Play this one on a computer, not a mobile device. The player triggers hyperlinks simply by hovering over them, and this is used to evoke the feel of being a reckless, trigger-happy woman.

Depression Quest: The game disables certain player options based on the protagonist's emotional state. It's a powerful metaphor for going through literally debilitating demotivation.

Everything You Swallow Will One Day Come Up Like a Stone. The player only gets two buttons, + and -. The significance of the control scheme is more ambiguous in this one, and I'm not totally sure how I'd interpret it. Content warning: the game is about suicide.

Aside from Twine, Inkle did a podcast episode about UI in narrative games: Soundcloud link. I haven't played their games except for part of 80 Days, but it seems like they would be good examples as well.

Lastly, my game (The Whisperer in Darkness) is text-based and does a bit of (hopefully) cool stuff with typography. I haven't mentioned much of it in the dev log, but if any of you would be interested in that, I could get into it with the next post.

Replying to follow. Gonna go back and catch up on the log when I get the chance! 

This looks extremely interesting. I haven't actually played any of their games, but this reminds me of Tale of Tales' work. Is that an inspiration?

http://gamescriticism.org/articles/smith-3-a

Someone linked to this essay on Twitter and I got around to reading it this morning. I think it's extremely insightful, and I'd love to get a discussion going about different ideas for diverse procedural systems/your responses to the article/etc.

I've only played 2 point-and-clicks (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and Secret of Monkey Island, 3 if you count Kentucky Route Zero). Based on what was fun, and what was frustrating in those two games, here's what I think.

From a casual perspective, I'd probably want objects' clickability to be fairly obvious. Because point-and-click puzzles can be obtuse enough WITHOUT missing important objects, and it's really frustrating to get stuck on a puzzle simply because you literally can't see part of the solution.

The classic adventure games I mentioned both give hints about objects because when the cursor touches an interactive object, it will appear as a noun in the action sentence at the bottom, i.e. "Look at hanging corpse." This is pretty similar to what you're doing with the cursor highlight. The problem is, like your players mentioned, it might be difficult to notice, and beyond that: the player still has to sweep the cursor around the whole screen to test what's clickable and what isn't. So they still might miss something. It could be made more accessible if the objects themselves were highlighted, too.

What you could do to avoid making the player sweep the screen for objects, is add a Hint ability where the player holds down a key to highlight all nearby clickable objects. The hint ability could be unlimited, or you could make it a mechanic where the player can run out if they overuse it. Hardcore players could just avoid using the hint system.

From a hardcore perspective, it was fun having to pick out for myself what was clickable and what wasn't, because the visual language of those classic games involves subtly distinguishing interactive elements from background ones.

Didn't give exact numbers in that last post because I couldn't remember.

If you're interested, this is the devlog post where I shared all the final numbers. Only 536 yes votes, but, based on the experience other local gamedevs who've done Greenlight, it had a pretty huge amount of positive comments.

My game was greenlit with way less than 3000 votes, for the record. It's very niche and publicity was pretty nonexistent, but after a while (much longer than yours), it got the greenlight anyway. I think their decision making is much more mysterious. 

This appeals to me in almost every way. I'm down.

[Progress Update #41 (July 18-27)]

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!

This looks like the kind of game that (if you pull it off right) I would have my friends over to play along with Nidhogg/Towerfall/Smash Bros. I like the depth of technical discussion you're doing in this log, too!

Are you planning on finishing it as a smaller project inside the time you two have living together?

[really]

The game looks cool! I'm glad you posted about the different places that have covered it, because I'm also making a horror game, and when I get ready to release, I'll make sure to contact some of those sites that I didn't know before.

I'm also interested in how your strategy involves going to so many conventions. That's got to be really expensive, especially with how you mentioned traveling from Asia to western shows is costly. How do you budget for that?

I would have voted on Greenlight, but I'm too late!

I can tell that the gate opening is going to be sick. As for the pit boss, I agree the texturing is looking good in that last one. And I actually kinda like the first one in the list of "failed ideas" with the three spiral-hooking mandibles.

@chriswearly @standardcombo: I found out this morning that I can't secure rights to use the font I was using in my own ASCII game, and I immediately thought of the pixel font work you two are doing for Stone Story. Could I chat with either of you about some font work for The Whisperer in Darkness?