“It’s forever nighttime in this place. So, don’t expect that moon to go away or for the sun to rise.
Sorry. Some people here want the daytime to come back. I don’t really want that. I think nighttime is beautiful...Just feel it all.”
is something I need to create.
I've been caught in this loop of various projects and almost finishing them since I was 12, I'm now 21. I'm tired of not finishing.
This endeavor is meant to be an instrument of happinessA day ago I was listening to
Mort Garson's "Mother Earth's Plantasia" and taking a little break doodling a 320x200 scene for fun. I fell in love with it and chased it. It was like fish came up from the ocean and winked at me as it mouthed the word "Vacuum" and in mistaken fury, I dove down after it. I kept going further and further down.
This game is meant to be a calming experience of discovery and understanding, of others and yourself. However, the central conceit of this project is an attempt to provide an environment of varying morals. The user is presented with an end goal that is ambiguous and separate from their preexisting morals, the means of which is obtained by interacting with various little buddies.
The Game Itself: 6/23/18I present you with a
very small proof of concept! Whoa!
You can
download it from indieDB:
https://www.indiedb.com/games/forever-nighttime/downloads/a-slice-for-windowsOr here:
http://xm10x.x10.mx/msusa/fent.html10/1/18 HAPPY OCTOBER EVERYONE!
I have a place to live now!
I'm in the process of moving things and such, but I have been working all this time when possible on the game. I have updated some assets and solidified systems.I am currently working on the propagation of information between individual characters. Every character in the game has their own set of knowledge in their theoretical heads. Information is disseminated by any character that moves around the world. You as the user can do this as well. You also have a set of knowledge. The first "Idea" in a characters list, including yours, affects the outcome of an interaction. Each of these characters also have emotions. These are actual values assigned to characters that can't be known precisely, but they are there regardless. If you upset a character their well being decreases. It is up to you whether or not you actually care.
1/22/2019First of all, check this out, wow.
I've been playing a lot of Crawl with my friends lately. It's quite inspiring. Despite being so far from the design space this game is in, it still is giving me the inspirational push I need to keep going. If there is one thing I can take from Crawl, it is that the look, feel, and player control being unified and intuitive goes a LONG way. Also dope music really gets it there too.
I just updated the banner animation a little. Right now I'm continuing to get a lot of scripting done. I'm running into a few problems. The engine has this issue where the mouse is sluggish when the game is full-screen. Besides that, things are going smooth.
2/7/2019I'm officially migrating Forever Nighttime to GameMaker from Adventure Game Studios. I'm not making a classic adventure game, nor do I have the control over many aspects of the game I want with AGS.
I've worked in AGS since I was a young kid. Some day I'll finish an AGS project, but it will assuredly be an adventure game.
GameMaker has allowed for a much more satisfying and efficient workflow without running against engine limitations that become actual limitations, as opposed to interesting design constraints. I can make everything so much prettier and satisfying to play now without having to worry about Steam integration or hardware specific issues that have bizarre fixes.
User experience is so important to me and being able to improve it is something I need to be able to do.
I'm happy to say that this experience had been making me a better programmer and this journey will set me up for future success. I will be able to make games that were previously not possible under the limitations of the engine I felt trapped in.
I'm currently coding the inventory system, dialogue system, and save system. I'm trying to get the stuff that actually comprises the most crucial elements of the game before I start getting burnt out.
I had my hand held quite tightly by how easy it was to code a save system in AGS. I'm finding it quite difficult right now in GameMaker. I'm using JSON to do it with map and list data structure functions. It's not that the method is difficult, because there are tons of great resources for it, it's figuring out what needs to be saved and what doesn't.
-dave
Thank you for your time 
Community
