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[sheep herd]

I have decided to return to this once great project and get it finished. It was, as you can read below, originally planned as a point-and-click adventure. In it's rebirth the game has become a text adventure. The current plan is to keep the plot identical and just change the gameplay. Hopefully I can get this boy finished.

↓↓↓↓↓The Old Game↓↓↓↓↓

Red Water is a Point-and-Click game, with elements of Hidden Object and Escape the Room, set in the Old West. You play as a travelling preacher who happens across a peculiar frontier town called Red Water. You quickly discover that a young woman who lived there has been found with her throat slit and the townsfolk are accusing one another.

I’m a serial game-starter and one time game-finisher (a game that has been seen by no eyes but my own) who recently decided to try to finish a game, in a somewhat polished state, and try and get people to play it. After starting at least a bajillion games I came to one I really liked, an adventure game about a crime solving priest, and then realized the scope was wayyy too big and shelved it. I really liked the idea though, and would still like to make it one day, so have decided to make something significantly scaled down but still true to the games original objectives.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Point-and-Click Adventure games but those I have enjoyed, I really, really enjoyed. I love the sense of interactivity and freedom you get when it’s going right but quickly tire of them when they get arbitrary or obtuse. One of the greatest aspects of them though, and to some extent games in general, is the meta-games that go on in your head when trying to solve a puzzle by linking what you’ve seen up until now together. With Red Water I’m trying to make a Point-and-Click game which focuses primarily on the meta-game and gives you the freedom to act as you want to, whilst trying to be fairly straight forward.
I don’t want the player to ever feel like they’ve been told what to do, but instead for them to decide for themselves and try and do it. As the first paragraph probably suggests it’s a whodunit of sorts, but I’ve avoided certain things that are ubiquitous with the genre.

The games scope is fairly small, there are 6 buildings to explore (each with no more than 3 rooms), 6 characters to talk to and around 10-20 items to collect and use. As such I doubt this devlog will be especially long but I’m hoping it will encourage me to finish and release the game to the world, and hopefully drum up some interest.

I’m using GameMaker Studio for Red Water. So far I have created the foundations for the items you will find and use, and what you can use them to interact with. At current you can pick up an anonymous object, place it in your inventory, retrieve it from you inventory and use it to destroy an anonymous square. Pretty riveting stuff.
I’ll be able to make most of the puzzle type stuff with what I have. What remains is creating the foundation for NPC conversations, writing all the NPC conversation (I have a general idea of what these will be), creating NPC interactions (mainly with the player but some with one another) and behaviours and then doing the graphics and sound.

The graphics are going to be low-poly, pixel art textured pre-rendered 3D (I’m using Blender) for the environments and then pixel art for the characters. At the moment I think all sound is just going to be diegetic but I might try some music when it’s finished and see if it improves the feels.

Thanks for reading. I didn't use any smileys so here is this guy pointing at an eye

[rj]

Well Based On Your Logo I'm Wanting To See The Rest, Maybe Let Me See More

[sheep herd]

Well Based On Your Logo I'm Wanting To See The Rest, Maybe Let Me See More

It's good to hear some interest, I'll definetly update as soon as I've got something worth showing.

[rj]

good

[lobstersteve]

I'll definetly update as soon as I've got something worth showing.

 

[sheep herd]

Here is the first batch of characters:



I'd love to know what you guys think 

[flipswitchx]

Lookin' good, na ha bat sum settin' and/or gameplay screenies there partner?

[sheep herd]

As stated in my first post I had originally planned to use low poly 3d models for the environments. I had only previously done 3d modelling casually and never tried to actually create something cohesive using it. I underestimated the challenge and whilst I have managed to get some stuff done I'm not really happy with the finish I've been able to achieve.

I have always wanted this project to be quick and whilst I'm sure I could ultimately get the results I wanted I don't want to invest time into that for this game. Instead I'm going mock up some alternative ideas which will hopefully generate better results.

[sheep herd]

I've decided to make the enviroments pixel art. Here is the view of the town as of now:

[sheep herd]

For some bizarre reason I decided to focus entirely on getting all of the art finished before I started putting the game together. I think this was mostly because, due to the nature of the game, I assumed pre-planned puzzles and dialogue didn't need to be tested and really just needed to be implemented. Whether or not this is the case or whether I will have to iterate remains to be seen but I've sort of burnt out on the art side of things and my results were getting worse and worse. Realizing my madness I've hastily roughed out all the remaining enviroments and started to patch them together in the game (although that isn't taking very long at all).

Some what ironically I'm now thinking of completey chaining the art style because the last few days have made me sick of of pixels. So once the game is together I may end up throwing all of the current art out and doing it all again. We'll have to wait and see. Here are a few of the good enviroments I made before I reached critical mass:




this one's a bit square


this is about where my soul crumbled to pixelated ashes




This final one looks totally out of place. To risk a spoiler you can cut this open in the game and I want to drive that home and make it look like a piece of taut fabric that would be really satisfying to slice through. My mediocre art skill wouldn't cut it so I ended up taking a photo of some nice taut fabric and then using index mode on it. I really like the result but like I say it is totally jarring and I don't live near enough general stores or log cabins to take photograph of all of the buildings.

[sheep herd]

The game is coming along pretty good, I've basically got all of the items and their interactions in. I want to show some gameplay but I don't really know what to show

Now I need to move onto NPC dialogues and notes, and I'll probably put something in that tells you what you're holding so player know exactly what they've picked up. I also have some minor cutscene stuff I want to put in just for the very beginning and end.

As previously mentioned I had been thinking about deviating from the original pixel art aesthetic. I wanted to try vector graphics for something completely unrelated and as I've never used vector graphics before and thought maybe using them here would help me get some experience. I've also, for a long time, wanted to use angular/geometric/maybe-there-is a-better-term graphics so decided to tack that on.

Here is what I've come up with so far:





I dig the logo, not sure about the colour though, but I'm not to sure about this piggy fellow. I'm curious whether I should use less or more detail 

I'd love some feedback   

[rj]

unfortunately i gotta say i liked the pixel logo a bit more

[lobstersteve]

I honestly liked the pixel art more, probably because it had more detail, and had this "dirty" look to it, that has this old point and click adventure charme.

[sheep herd]

I honestly liked the pixel art more, probably because it had more detail, and had this "dirty" look to it, that has this old point and click adventure charme.

unfortunately i gotta say i liked the pixel logo a bit more

Fair enough. I might continue experimenting with both and reassess once I have the gameplay finished.

[surt]

Red Twater

[sheep herd]

Red Twater

Arguably the most compelling argument to go back to the old style 

[sheep herd]

I have re-started the project, as you can see from the edits to the original post. This time as a text adventure game. I had originally planned to use Adrift to make it. However the plot, which is already 90% complete from the original work I did on it doesn't really fit into the traditional 'go north' or 'enter barn' style of exploration. There is a single location, a town, which is fairly dense. You can go into every building, most of which have multiple rooms, and you can look behind them as well. As well as this Adrift seems to only support one method of opening each door, which isn't what I wanted.

For simplicity of exploration I have decided to instead work on the game in Twine.

This creates an unfortunate dilemma. The game has a focus on collecting items and using them to better explore the town. Luckily I have recently been thinking about those old 'choose your own adventure' books and I wanted to try something digital that recapture the essence of them. As such I am going to try to make the game combining Twine and a simple character sheet that I'll just make in HTML with forms. When the game is complete I now plan to make it a webpage, divided in half with the game on one side and the character sheet on the other.

EDIT: After starting the game in twine it is clear that it is an even worse tool for making this game. The amount of back tracking means you will be constantly greeted with the same messages. You'll break into somewhere, steal something then if you return you'll need to break back in and the thing you stole will still be there. What to do?

[sheep herd]

This is a terrible idea for a text adventure, back on the shit heap you go!
 

[Christian]

Have you checked out any of the recent IFComp games or text adventures like Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey. Quite a few do what you were trying to do with, with inventories and items and RPG elements/stats and such. I'd recommend checking out Inkle's Inklewriter tool and their Sorcery games, and games like Zombie Exodus, Counterfeit Monkey, Hadean Lands

Your concept is absolutely viable as a text adventure, just not as a Twine game.

A few other more complex ones:
Kerkerkruip - A text adventure roguelike, so expect spells, tactical combat, and lots of death
Color the Truth - Think Contradiction-style detecting and interrogations, where you also get to play as the stories that characters tell you...and cross-examine them to catch lies
Gun Mute - Atmospheric combat puzzles in a futuristic Weird West
Hill Ridge Lost & Found - Mechanical and organic puzzles on an alternate reality farm where weird flora and fauna, and odd machinery must be experimented with and understood
Insignificant Little Vermin - A gamebook-style fantasy text adventure