Devlog entry 6:
Wow, time flies. Fast. What did we do since beginning of March?
We extended the game, of course. We planned levels, and worked more or less hard on one of them in order to be able to show *something* finally, for our Kickstarter campaign. The level we chose should have mainly the elements from the original TRI, creating triangles and reflecting light rays - you saw it in the last devlog entry. There would also be a small section with the Kami ghost thingies, so we could show them in the video.
And then, the
Indie Buskers happened. Even though it was just a weekend-long game jam, earning us a little bit of money, we didn't have time for Tri 2 for pretty much three weeks, as the Indie Buskers thing demanded additional work before and afterwards. We had to do marketing, build some hype, feed the twitter account ... and after that special 48 hours there had to be bugfixes and updates. This robbed a lot of precious time. Of course we don't regret the game jam - what we regret (to some degree) is Tri 2.
Left: The Indie Buskers busking together
Right: Our game The Sun Is Deadly we made for the jamBecause when we finally started the "real work" again and also showed the weeks old prototype to a friend, who didn't have much positive things to say about it, we realized that the game wasn't much fun right now. It was neither much fun to play nor much fun to make, and not even much fun to show it around. Besides the obvious reasons (several features missing) it became clear that the level was just too big, and it became too much of life-draining work to plan it, model it, texture it and fill it with gameplay.
Yep, too much.This why we decided to take a step back, and rethink our current way of doing things. Our main conclusion was: KISS. We, or at least myself, abandoned this principle far too early, with the far-too-big scope of the level and its visual storytelling.
What we try to do now is
a) recycling more content and trying to keep everything in a neat grid.
b) doing less stuff in 3dsmax ("only" the basic meshes for the level, and of course the prefabs), and more in Unity3D.
c) working on a demo for alpha funding instead of a trailer for Kickstarter.
The last point might seem strange, with all this Kickstarter craze nowadays, but one should not forget that still only the minority of game projects on this platform gets funded. You really need a fan base, a little hype, and/or something cool to show. And this is what we want to achieve now first, before risking the crowdfunding adventure.
For us, this means doing a smaller demo, with much more focused sublevels (one for movement tutorial, one for wallwalk, one for light rays), and trying to polish this within some weeks. And this also means that we will let testers get their hands on it pretty soon, instead of trying to generate attention just with a video. The advantage of our new course already showed: I added much more gameplay elements, like water and acid pits, which make the game instantly more complete, instead of still losing time with a fat level which would be complete in 2016.
And somehow, the KISS principle helped us to develop a cleaner style.
New textures with reduced complexity
Gameplay elements and physicsOne question may remain: Why didn't we step back much sooner? Well, the reasons are numerous, but one of the main reasons might be the fact that we already did it before - we had a crazy story with a professor imprisoned in a mental home, drugged by evil rivals in order to get his unbelievable invention of a triangle generator ... Then we stepped back, looked at the story, and replaced it with one which would allow us to be more creative on the way. Yet, this wasn't the ultimate solution, as in this phase we only did the concept and didn't even start to work on real stuff.
Another reason for our blindness probably were the many distractions, like the Indie Buskers thing and the
A MAZE. festival in Berlin. This way we saw the flaws in us, not in the general development of Tri 2. Only after a break it was possible for us to analyze it objectively.
And we're happy we did it. We still think the gameplay can be fun, so we didn't throw the whole project into the bin; instead we refined it a little bit and changed the setting. The new levels are more random (which might change after the demo) instead of "logical" structures, so we don't have to worry about things like "Would an old culture really place this specific statue at this corner, and why is it still looking so new?" - Yet we want to have some kind of background story, but for the demo a sandbox-y type of mission design is more than alright.
Also, there still is much to be done before we can give out our demo (it's going to be more like a "tech preview" really), but the TODO list becomes shorter every day. The character controller has to be redone, the triangles have once again to be re-designed, the Kami aren't implemented with the new system. But now we have a level change system which saves states, some kind of water/acid, doors and switches, teleporters, a new perspective, cooler textures and hopefully a bright future.
Regards,
overhead
