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[Niteris]

Your game looks great!

Let me know if you need trailers or other promotional videos for it, I'm a freelancer audio/video editor (and voice actor if you need it) and I work extremely quickly and at a fair price.

Send me an email at [email protected] 

[nathy after dark]

December 14: SNOW DAY 

School district announced that attendance today is at student's discretion due to weather conditions in Salt Lake. 



I'm spending the morning on self-care, the afternoon getting on top of schoolwork, and the evening with my family or programming. Brother's home for the holidays, which is awesome.

I finally have a PlayStation console and I picked up Journey to get in on the cultural hubbub. Apparently that should take the next 2 hours?

@Niteris Nice job copy-pasting/bot-posting your message in this thread. Much appreciated.

[Niteris]

"@Niteris Nice job copy-pasting/bot-posting your message in this thread. Much appreciated."

Just trying to find work man, some people need good video editors to give their games justice in trailers. No need to be a dick about it.

[nathy after dark]

Yeah sorry for being so cold about that... I probably could have explained myself better. I totally respect that you gotta find work, it's just when I saw the exact same message posted to so many people, I had no way of knowing you were human or that you read anything about my game. That might be harsh but it's also true. Next time I'd recommend highlighting at least one specific thing about each game when you're reaching out to a developer.

Once again, I'm sorry. Hope that helps, though.

[nathy after dark]

Reality Ensues: I'm cutting features

The last month or so has been a slow burn of demotivation and discouragement. I've had to reassess the project and make tough decisions to ensure the game gets made. Some of my feature plans were simply too ambitious and it's time to admit that.

Full optional voice-over: I've been reading and learning about game diversity and accessibility for a while. That's why I was impassioned to localize the game and help people play it from other cultures. In the same vein, when I was given the opportunity to add voice-over, I thought I could use it to provide accessibility to players with severe visual impairments or blindness. This was always kind of weird, because I'm making a visual novel. Can it ever be truly enjoyed without the gift of sight? It's sad to say, but my game is never going to be enjoyed in the same way by someone who can't see it. I was essentially trying to release two products in the same package: a visual novel and an audio book/radio drama. As a solo indie developer, I can't afford to split my focus and my target audience like that. Perhaps more importantly, scheduling around another student with plenty of other commitments to record 8 chapters' worth of voice over is a source of more stress than I can/want to handle.

I'm considering cutting others, but I'm not ready to make them official so this is most likely the first in a (hopefully short) series of such posts.

TL;DR I'm not a superhero or a genius, and I'm definitely not too good for scope control.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #13 (December 9-22)

I haven't been spending a lot of my time on the game. Commit history shows I did some bug fixes in the days following my last update, then dropped off the face of the earth until yesterday. Taking a 10-day break obviously isn't a terrible thing for the project. In fact, it's allowed me to come back with renewed vigor (so far so good). The only concern I have is that this break wasn't premeditated. I just kind of slipped into it. That's not the kind of work ethic I want to have with gamedev. Now that school's on break, I'm putting myself on a regimented work schedule, with at least 3 hours a day devoted to the game. I've found visiting coffee shops to be wonderful for my productivity, because the music and social buzz really mitigate feelings of loneliness that a long programming session often brings on. Also, natural lighting! A different view out the window every day! 

Yesterday I got really enthused and spent 4-5 hours working on the game's settings menu, which is 95% finished (unless I add more configurable features). Sound and music volume can be adjusted with cute little volume bars like on old TVs.

While I'm trying to get solid work sessions in every morning (except Christmas/New Years), I may also try to write daily progress reports for the duration. I find that writing a dev log is a good warmup before I get to working on the game itself. Gets me re-focused on the project.

[foreignsubstances]

Keep it up, man! Maintaining scope, human contact during working, and breaks are things we all need. You've inspired me to get out of my house and get to a coffee shop during my next solo work session!

[nathy after dark]

We're Greenlit

I'm signing into Steam Friday evening to check on the slow trickle of upvotes, thinking Have I gone up another one? Two, even? Instead:



Like, what? I was actually super surprised. I'm sort of at a loss for writing this post, even. This has gotta be the biggest thing to ever happen to me as a gamedev, and it really came out of nowhere.

First of all, HUGE thanks to everyone who voted and has been following the log! I couldn't have done it without the support and the reassurance that someone was watching. Seriously thanks.

Rather than go into some detailed analysis on the game's time in Greenlight, I'm just gonna dump the complete stats here for those who are interested so I can move onto telling my team/friends/family, becoming a Steamworks partner,  then working on the game itself.







I don't have an exact number on what % the game was sitting towards the top 100 when it was greenlit, but in the month or so leading up to it, it was up and down between 67% and 62% with the tide of submissions and acceptances.

I don't think the stats really need analysis, because the low vote count really shows how attainable Greenlight has become even with minimal resources. For a game that looks decent, it seems like it's really a matter of time nowadays. Especially because I cut together my own trailer without any video editing experience. Other than that, I really don't want to make any pronouncements on Greenlight or its future because there must be hundreds of other people doing that, who have put a lot more thought and analysis into it. These are just my stats, and take my opinion with a pillar of salt!

My next post is gonna be a progress report on my toils with the options menu and input mapping system, so yeah. That's enough more ebullient celebration for now.

P.S. The game was also rejected from GOG.com just this afternoon because it's too niche and small-scale. Fair enough, and I'm not too upset!

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #14 (December 23 - January 16)

Most of what I've accomplished lately has been related to the game menus:

• I decided to merge the planned Accessibility menu with the regular Options menu. I made this decision because I'm removing a number of accessibility features, and Accessibility no longer warrants its own menu because of this. (Sad to admit. But also, I can't deny that the relief of cutting features that were taking huge chunks of time is really nice.)
• I added the ability to remap the keys attached to each of the game's inputs. This took a lot longer than expected, but was surprisingly fun and was very satisfied to see working in the end! I've never programmed customizable input, so it was a great learning experience and most definitely a valuable one.
• I added the option to switch languages from inside the main Options menu. This was pretty crazy because of the architecture of my UI code, which simply handles one state at a time, rather than a stack of overlapping states as I've used for past projects with deep menu hierarchies. I didn't anticipate that a stack would be useful in any situations, but I was wrong, and ended up spending more time on this because of it.

I've got a lot of time to work today, so I might spend some of it working on the Windows build. A local community member suggested I use Visual Studio's command line tools to call my Cmake scripts, which sounds much simpler and better all-around than trying to use CygWIN like I've tried previously. The reason I didn't do this in the first place is I wasn't aware Visual Studio could interface with CMake scripts and run those builds from the command line only. Setting out on this project, I really wanted to avoid platform-specific IDEs altogether, and that led me to ignore some possibilities early on that I probably would have been better off considering.

I also want to close as many issues from the GitHub repo as I can, since I've almost entirely transferred my task tracking to organized sticky notes which are much more flexible and cathartic than the GitHub tracker.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #15 (January 17)

So far I've been making solid progress on the game each day of the long weekend. Today was mostly bug fixes. I realized trying to select a language by clicking the button with the mouse wasn't working anymore, which led me to discovering I never updated my menu code to reflect the new customizable input system. (It was a surprise to discover a bug with mouse input resulting from changes to the way keyboard input functioned.)

The culprit: Directly checking if the left mouse button was clicked. Whoops! The language menu inherits the base Menu class but does some trickery to fire two events when its buttons are clicked: one to open the next menu, and another to actually update the current language of the game. My UI system doesn't allow for chaining events, so I basically resorted to this hack which was only being triggered when operating the language menu with keyboard keys. I did some refactoring of Menu and LanguageMenu so it's fixed now, and the Menu input is working properly now. Which means when I implement customizable mouse button mappings, they will actually work!

I also implemented dialog/animation skipping in Debug mode, which is going to be ridiculously helpful when I start implementing chapters in earnest. This helped me fix a couple bugs with my dialog system that were bothering me for a while. I also realized the source of weird sound effect issues that popped up a while back. I was careless when refactoring my game engine, and when adding the ability to pause all sound effects (preparation for the new pause menu) I inadvertently introduced bugs which I'll have to fix next time I get to work (hopefully tomorrow morning).

Lastly, I just realized I've been committing on the master branch. Switching back to the dev branch while I mess with stuff!

I spent the last couple hours of the day playing an old horror game for inspiration: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It's a dark point-and-click adventure based on another of my favorite short stories (titled the same, by Harlan Ellison).



Linking to the game Steam page up above, I pulled direct inspiration from the game in that I've just decided a $6 price tag feels perfect for The Whisperer in Darkness. I've been thinking $5 for a while but I've been on the fence because I think it's worth just a bit more than $5, yet not as much as $10. Comparing my work with IHNMAIMS in terms of theme, quality, and being a new release... $6 feels good. Let's go with that.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #16 (January 18-19)

I had to spend most of yesterday finalizing a 4000-word essay about Gone Home. I turned it in today, and after getting home from the gym managed to marshal my discipline and get to working on the game. It's unusual for me to start working on it after a day of school. School takes a lot out of me.

Today I implemented this pause menu:



It interrupts the sound effects and music, which was the main thing that actually required programming work to implement. I might later decide to have music continue playing, only at a lower volume.

I tried to add a "Quit to Menu" button but for troublesome reasons, it's impossible unless I do a significant amount of refactoring. The problem is that chapter scripts load and release their own assets, but the assets are stored in the main Game instance's content managers. So quitting a chapter outright causes memory leaks, and makes bad things happen when the code later tries to load the same assets it already has. I'm sure there's a solution, but I'm also not sure a "Quit to Menu" button is necessary. We'll see.

Here's the key mapping screen I finished recently:



The fun part was letting the player "record" key mappings. When the player tries to attach a new key to one of the mappings, the game has to check to make sure the key doesn't already belong to another mapping, and if it does, the new mapping must "steal" the key. Then there are other checks to make sure the player never leaves any input action without at least one key mapped to it. All in all this took several days of programming to accomplish! I'm proud because the system is extensible, and I could trivially add new inputs like "Shoot" or "Punch" to the game if I needed to let players kick some Eldritch Ass. (Not happening. )

Also, here's the Options menu which I never posted here. I think the volume bars look pretty cool, like the big green volume bars on old TVs:



Around the time it started snowing around here, I started going to climbing gym and learned to boulder. It's incredibly fun, and compensates for the physical exercise I lose when it gets too cold to bike to school. If I don't exercise during the winter I go into a horrible funk and lose all energy/motivation. I go climbing almost every day now, and it's made winter so much more bearable! I climb around a V3-V4 level, any other climbers on TIG?

EDIT: Something is broken in my GIF recording process. The "resume" button on the pause screen is showing up discolored.

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #17 (January 20)

I finally finished implementing the last feature in the game engine: exploration scenes. Here's Mr. Albert Wilmarth walking from his bedroom to his study:



And here he is making the same trip with the lights out:



The trickiest part was rigging it to allow event scripts to play inside an exploration scene without disrupting the original chapter script. Event scripts are mostly used for playing message dialogs while the player explores a couple levels near the end of the game. I want to explain exactly how I solved the problem, but it goes really deep into technical aspects of the game engine that would require very long explanation.

I'll do my best to sum it up quickly: ExploreState, the state the game enters when the player starts to explore a location, inherits from the Scene class in addition to the State class. This allows ExploreState to create and show MessageDialogs using the same exact functionality as any other Scene. Rather than manage both an ExploreState rendering the map and player, and a separate scene rendering the MessageDialog on top of that, we combine the two into one. Make sense?

Honestly I'm not 100% sure why it works myself, and this section of the code could easily come back to bite me later. I'm a little concerned it might not function the same across platforms, cause it relies on some sketchy quirks of polymorphism which I inadvertently took advantage of.

[Ayrik]

Hey Natman it's looking good, keep it up! Congrats on getting Greenlit too!

[nathy after dark]

Interlude: Global Game Jam (January 29-31)

This weekend I took a break from school and The Whisperer in Darkness to do the Global Game Jam. I had a great time, and even managed to get about 11 hours of sleep! As a result, today is not fun.

I decided to work in PICO-8 which turned out to be a great choice! It was a real pleasure. I made 100% of the game by myself, and learned a lot about tiny-palette low-rez pixel art, as well as wave-form SFX creation and music trackers (which PICO has built in. It's really awesome).

I'm embedding an image below. Those of you unfamiliar with PICO-8 might be surprised to learn that this image is my game. It contains all source code and other assets, and this image file alone can be interpreted by the PICO-8 to play Apprentice Quest. It's called a cartridge.



You can also play the game online in any web browser from a computer.

[nathy after dark]

A brief note on sticky notes, dev logs, and motivation

I watched a TED talk a few mornings ago that I thought was really inspiring and informative:





I recommend watching it and applying Ariely's discoveries to self-motivation. I realized there are two useful techniques I've already been using in my development process that totally match the "Meaningful" condition in the experiments Ariely describes.

Cathartic task tracking (sticky notes are fun): I used to use GitHub to track all of my project to-do lists. There are a lot of advantages to the GitHub issue tracker: issues automatically integrated with the larger project history, and all discussion is recorded for later review when something goes wrong or it becomes necessary to understand past decisions regarding architecture and design. For a collaborative project, the issue tracker is a huge advantage. However, I've found that when working solo, sticky notes are a much more rewarding form of tracking tasks remaining and completed. The feeling of holding a jar you've filled completely with your disciplined effort, is amazing (at least for me). While the GitHub tracker conveys a feeling of tasks coming in and out, and leaves little room for acknowledging progress, sticky notes preserve tangible physical evidence of how far you've come, and that feels great. In terms of the experiments in the video, sticky notes are like putting finished bionicles under a table, and the GitHub tracker is like taking them apart and moving on.

They're also great for remembering little ideas that pop into my head while programming! The kind of bug solution that pops into your head while you're working on another feature, never to be recalled? Just make a sticky note (it'll take like 5 seconds) and keep working.

Here I am after the Global Game Jam with a dazed grin on my face. All thanks to the sticky notes!



Bonus points & extra catharsis if you use colorful (maybe even color-coded!) sticky notes that make an aesthetically pleasing mix. 

Public dev logs save your effort from the shredder of invisibility: In the second experiment, Ariely shows the way having your work seen and looked over makes a huge difference in your willingness to do work. As creatives, it's often difficult to share our works in progress at every step. For instance, my game is still completely unplayable because I've only been working on UI lately. Through this log, I still get to feel like my work is meaningful and that people are paying attention to what I do. For me, this dev log is the difference between hard work being appreciated, and hard work being shredded before my eyes.

[Lares Yamoir]

Hey your game caught my interest. Really like the artworks presented on the steam page.
Have read a few Lovecraft stories myself. Although not that one, at least I can't remember the content based on the title.

Also thanks for being so open about steam stats and inspiration. Am currently watching the TED talk you linked.

[nathy after dark]

Thanks Lares Yamoir! I'm really glad you like the art and I hope the TED talk has some useful information in it.

Progress Update #18 (January 21-February 12)

After taking time off to prepare for, participate in, and recover from, the Global Game Jam, I'm finally back at work on the game. On Thursday I finished scripting the first chapter, which really didn't take very long. I'm optimistic that content implementation is going to go by very quickly. This is one of the reasons why I've been saving it for so long: implementing the 8 chapters based on material already written for the game jam version should be faster and more rewarding than the engine and UI work I've been doing.

However, getting Chapter 1 running in the game with the old game jam dialogue, I can't help but view it with an intensely critical eye. My intention given my current resources was to make little to no modifications to the game jam dialogue. The problem is, I wrote it all two whole years ago over the course of 7 days and cleaving very closely to Lovecraft's writing in the original story. People have given me plenty of positive feedback on it, but it really doesn't reach the standards of today's me. So I'm making a slight adjustment in my expectations for the game's dialogue. I can't afford to overhaul it completely (especially because Marc has already translated the entirety of the current version) but I'm allowing myself to revise little things and redo sections that strike me as rushed work or utter shit.

SMART Goals

In my Business class, a couple important lessons have struck me hard. The first one is an acronym for setting good goals: they should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Specific. I was reading Gamasutra's 2014 Game Developer Salary Survey—not linked because after discussing it with local community members I've decided the survey is highly flawed and shouldn't be taken seriously—and it said that, of the indie gamedevs surveyed, 57% made less than $500 in individual earnings from game development. This became the guiding statistic for a SMART goal I've set for The Whisperer in Darkness, my commercial debut. Yes, I just denounced the survey's results as unreliable, but bogus or not, the goal I've derived from that statistic is a valid one: I want to sell enough copies to personally earn more than $500 by the end of 2016. (If the survey were statistically credible, this would roughly translate to Earn more money than the majority of indie game developers.)

I've done the math and know the rough number of sales this will take at a $6 price point given 3 paid team members (though I can't share it without implicitly violating my Steam Partner NDA). I think it's a realistic number, but it's going to require me to take marketing seriously and make a real effort to reach the game's audience. I know this sounds like it should be obvious, but at the start of the project I had a much more lax attitude towards release. I saw it as more of a "throw it out there and move on" project because until now, all of my games have been that sort of project. Over the course of working on The Whisperer in Darkness I've become invested enough in the game to see it as a "sell this game as my best work"-type project. It's exciting but terrifying. I'm finally coming face to face with the realities of indie game development as a career and a lifestyle. To sum up the emotional impact of everything I'm learning, here's good ole' Howard Phillips:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Edit: I forgot to write down the time constraint for my goal.

[Lares Yamoir]

Yeah the talk was quite interesting.
Wish I could give you a few hints on marketing, but as a hobby game dev I have no experience with that.
Best of luck on reaching that goal .

[nathy after dark]

Progress Update #19 (February 13-25)

I've been really swamped by schoolwork so there's not much to tell. I'm gonna go with shorter form bullet points for this log.

• Started making revisions to Chapter 1. There's only one passage left to revise before I say Chapter 1 is ready.
• Implemented the remapping of mouse buttons, and a screen to let the player do so.
• Fixed several bugs in the flow between chapters of the game
• Chapter headings are now written in the center of the journal page, which I think looks more sophisticated
• Wrote the code which should trigger the proper recap scenes before starting a chapter in the middle of the game. I haven't written any recap scripts so it remains untested.

EDIT: I haven't actually finished scripting Chapter 2. My mistake.

[Greipur]

Cathartic task tracking (sticky notes are fun)

Not only rewarding and fun but also almost impossible to ignore. I've gone through several Agile programs such as Pivotal Tracker and Trello on earlier projects and came to the conclusion that not everything gets better when digitalised, at least not for me. Our studio now has a wall dedicated to sticky notes. I would recommend everyone to do so if one feels like they are forgetting the overall picture.