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[CodyJones]

About the Game
The inspiration is Machinarium: a reboot of the genre that tried to eliminate adventure games' boring or frustrating parts. There won't be much pixel hunting, and you can only walk to points that are relevant.

Story
I'm not inclined to speak about the plot, because I've been refining it over the last month, and because it has twists. All I can say is it is both pre- and post-apocalyptic, but you have a large role in how one turns to the other.

Visual Style
I am not an artist, so the scenes will be non-photorealistic (NPR) renderings of places around Vancouver and Victoria. I will be using Google Street View to pick locations, and when I get to the production stage I'll drive to those places and shoot them myself. Characters and their animations will probably be done using Adobe Mixamo, though for some custom actions I'll need to resort to manual animation. (I considered both rotoscoping and motion capture but both would be a time sink.) Those will be passed through an NPR filter too, so it looks like the entire scene is rendered with pencil crayons. Crucially, though, I’m trying to do all NPR filtering as a pre-processing step, so it doesn’t need to be real time.

To balance the dark storyline and music, the artwork will be higher contrast than in real life (ie. brighter colours). While experimenting with filtering photos, I found that increasing the colour contrast made it look like a real drawing. Leaving the contrast as-is just looked like a photo that had been filtered. Reducing the contrast made it monochromatic. That would be fine too, except a game with muted colours and a depressing plot is, to me, overdone.

Visual Design
In most adventure games, the current location fills the entire screen, and you might have some dialogue options or inventory items overlaid on that. I want to let the user see where they’ve been, and emphasize the fact that two adjacent screens might in fact be a long distance apart. So, each location will be rendered onto a virtual piece of paper. When you visit a new location, the player sees the paper being stuck to a massive cork board. How it is placed reflects which way you’ve moved. Walked to the right? Then the paper is stuck to the right. Went up some stairs? Then the paper is stuck over top the old. When you return, the paper is pulled off the board as though by an invisible hand. There will be some other effects like wind blowing the papers, sometimes right off the cork board, which is partly good trailer material but also ties with the plot.

In other words, it will look like you are playing a storyboard.

Music
The music will be a mix of pretty and dark ambient, as well as drone. I’ve spent quite a few hours listening to iLicenseMusic.com, building a shortlist of tracks, and listening to them over and over to decide if they suit the mood I’m going for and aren’t annoying. I think I have an hour’s worth of music selected.

Current Status

• No code has been written yet. That's probably for the best, since the plot and gameplay design have evolved since I started, and anything I had created would have needed to be thrown out. I have chosen C given my past experience with it, and SDL2 as the A/V layer.
• Plot is sketched out at a high level. Some aspects are rough.
• Art design is chosen and prototyped.
• All music has been chosen from iLicenseMusic.com.
• Some puzzles have been designed. For many other puzzles I am planning to use public domain art from the British Museum - eg. animating cut-away drawings of machines.

Why a Dev-Log so Early?
I’m the sole wage-earner for a family of five. By the time they kids are in bed I don’t have a lot left in the tank. It’s very tempting to just watch whatever TV my wife is watching. I started keeping a dev-log blog (http://theiterator.blogspot.ca) but nobody reads it. People read dev-logs on Tigsource. Even if one person occasionally says “that sounds cool”, it will be motivation to continue. I’m frustrated with not completing projects, even if lately I only dropped them because I sadly concluded they wouldn’t have been useful to people (applications) or fun (games).

I know this project will be a long haul, but I want to set the conditions so I'm likelier to see it through.

About Me
My name is Cody Jones, and I have some experience in the game industry. I was a tools programmer for the adventure game Orion Burger; wrote the audio system for the Mac ports of Unreal, Deus Ex, etc; and built an animation codec for two of the World Series Baseball console releases. The last experience was illuminating in several ways. It was great working with incredibly talented people, but the life-work balance sucked. I turned away from it and started working on business applications, which I've been doing ever since.

I'm not quite middle aged, but it's approaching quickly. With that has come a feeling of dread that my proudest software accomplishments are always going to be in the distant past. That scares me, and I don't want that to be true.

I don't play adventure games much. Actually, to be frank I don't play games much, period. I think Limbo or Journey are the most recent games I've played. Despite being a massive fan of the series, Fallout 4 sits on my shelf, still in its wrapper. If I have free time and I'm not tired, but I spend it watching TV or playing a game, I feel guilty. "I should be creating something!"