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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsAnn Achronist - a time-travelling narrative adventure game
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MaybeLaterGames
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« on: July 04, 2018, 06:14:24 AM »


Adventure Start!

Hey! Thanks for checking out the dev log! Every week I will be posting updates on the development of Ann Achronist so little by little you can see the game come to life for yourselves! First things first:

Who is Ann Achronist?

Ann Achronist finds herself in a fix: down and out, left with nothing, life has not been kind to her. But that all changes when she comes across a mystical ring, imbued with the power to travel to the past. Enter 17th century Alderdale, seek out your ancestors, and cause a ripple through time big enough to shake up your present. Pave the way to fortune, fame, and fortitude in this charming narrative adventure.

- Encounter a host of delightful and dreadful Alderdalians whom you may entertain or infuriate at your will. There’s no need to fear the consequences: time (travel) is a great healer.

- Your actions directly impact your future. Learn new skills and forge alliances to aid future trips to the past.

- Not everything is as it seems: uncover the townspeople’s secrets to discover ulterior motives and hidden locations.

Jump from timeline to timeline in order to carve out a better future for your ancestors, and — by extension — for yourself.


When will the game be released?

Release is slated for the final quarter of 2018. This all depends on how smoothly development goes and how much time any commissioned pieces take to finish, but that’s the rough estimate right now.
Update 18/12/2018: Art will likely take a few more months to create. The game should be ready in Jan, and then released some time in late Feb when the art is finished. Smiley

Who are you?

I’m Dan, a 25-year-old game designer cum programmer from England. I originally studied French and German at university before shifting my focus to game development. I’ve been developing games for 4 years now in various capacities, and this will be my second big project made in Unity. Looking forward to sharing my progress with you!

« Last Edit: January 23, 2019, 09:01:23 AM by MaybeLaterGames » Logged

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« Reply #1 on: July 05, 2018, 03:08:35 AM »

The Butterfly Effect

Homeless and penniless, Ann’s luck changes for the better when she comes across a magical ring with the power to send her back in time. The only way for her to make a better future for herself is by making a better past for herself, starting by helping out her ancestor — once she finds him, that is.

Over multiple visits to the past, players learn about the residents of Alderdale and what errands they need running. Ann has a variety of futures that can be unlocked and revisited at any time once they have been discovered. Many of the townsfolk can help your ancestor out and provide you with a different future, but some fates prove more fruitful than others. Each future grants Ann a different ability. Stepping back in time once more, now with her newfound ability, she is able to perform tasks that were previously impossible. For example, by giving her ancestor a more studious, academic past, Ann gains the ability to read when she returns to her home-time. Not only does this unlock a new ending for the player, but it also unlocks a new skill that Ann can bring with her on her next dive into the past — in this case, literacy. Being able to read signs and books proves useful for uncovering more details about the Alderdale of yore and its inhabitants. This is just one of many endings and abilities that influence your journey to a better future.



Careful, though! When Ann leaves the past again any future that she made for herself will be overwritten by her latest foray into the past. This means you can end up back on the streets, homeless and penniless — oh, and illiterate too —if you’re not careful! (Of course, there’s nothing stopping you selecting previously unlocked futures for a quick retry — I’m not so cruel as to make you start back at the beginning!)
« Last Edit: July 06, 2018, 06:08:59 PM by MaybeLaterGames » Logged

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« Reply #2 on: July 06, 2018, 06:00:37 PM »

In the Little Town of Alderdale



They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but thankfully Alderdale was! The town plan, at least. The idea was to make the town as compact as possible to prevent players spending too much time roaming around. The game isn’t a walking simulator, after all! Similarly, I wanted each place to have a purpose to the player — no empty houses just for decoration. The little town is supposed to feel alive after all, and a person’s house can say more about them than anything that comes out of their mouth.

The witch’s hut is intentionally quite apart from the rest of the village — she’s an antisocial creature, and she’d like nothing more than just to be left to herself. Unfortunately, the wooded hollow, colloquially known as “Lover’s Lane” to the locals, is a common spot for… well, need I elaborate? This is much to the chagrin of the witch, whose windows look out onto the wood. The rogue’s hideout had to be quite isolated from the rest of the village too, as it’s supposed to be hidden away from the other villagers.

I’ll be using natural borders to form the edge of the town. There’s not much need for the player to be able to leave the town, so there’s no clear exit available. It’s perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of the town, but it’s not something I think many players will give much thought to, and it’s a nice convenient way to cordon players off — through cliffs, trees and water.

Next stop — turning plans into reality! (Or should that be virtuality?)
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« Reply #3 on: July 07, 2018, 03:22:50 AM »

I love games that deal with time, particularly rewinding events. How dialogue-heavy will the story be? I'm assuming there'll be conversation choices?
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« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2018, 03:52:29 AM »

I love games that deal with time, particularly rewinding events. How dialogue-heavy will the story be? I'm assuming there'll be conversation choices?

Hey Jesse! The game is completely focused on narrative choices - navigating the people as much as the world, figuring out what makes them tick as much as what ticks them off. The entire script is around 30,000 words [I'm kind of writing these blog posts retrospectively, the game is actually quite close to completion right now, but I wanted to document it bit by bit so readers aren't completely inundated] with plenty of branching paths depending on what responses you chose. Of course, nothing is permanent except the knowledge you gain and the endings you unlock, so if you end up getting thrown in prison you simply take the ring off and start the day anew! Smiley
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« Reply #5 on: July 07, 2018, 07:04:56 AM »

Brick by Brick
With the town plan of Alderdale in mind, it’s time to start piecing together its buildings, one tile at a time! First up, the bakery!



Functionally, the purpose of the bakery is (obviously) to house the baker and backstress. On top of that, the writer and I thought the small supply closet would be a great place to stick some Easter eggs for any plans who are shrewd enough to figure out how to break in. There’s no real need for the player to get into the living quarters of the bakery, so to save extra dev time building it I decided to lock it off behind the baker’s front station. (I’ll confess — it’s technically a bench, but hopefully you didn’t notice until I just said so!) The bakery is also a part of the Duchess’s tour as an opportunity for a little extra character exposition, so I wanted to have enough space for the three characters that bustle through the door in addition to the player so things don’t get a little too crowded. I’ve decided that any adjacent rooms should have their outlines shown but none of the contents to maintain a bit of mystery and a little realism. It also helps players get their bearings after entering a building and allows them to see rooms that they might be able to explore. I also added the slight break in the wall at the bottom to indicate where the doorway is. At first I considered using a doormat, but it’s not always a suitable solution — whereas every room will always have walls as a border, so it’s a more consistent aid to the player.



As for the exterior, I had to make sure the door was in a visible spot — having the door on one of the side walls would make for difficult entry. I gave the building an interesting shape to add some variety and identity to the buildings — as much as I’d love to scrawl BAKERY in nice big letters above the door, Ann is supposed to be illiterate at some points in the game, so that would sadly undermine the game’s mechanics. Hopefully the unique shape will be enough to separate it from the game’s other buildings.
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« Reply #6 on: July 08, 2018, 07:11:05 AM »

Clockwork Town
Ann has the ability to go back in time, but only to one particular day in the past. In Groundhog Day fashion, the events of the day play out again and again with each visit to the past — unless, of course, you have personally done something to change the events over the course of the day.

Part of the game’s focus is learning the inhabitants daily routine to make sure your current task is completed on time. The bakery won’t be open all day, and the librarian may not always be available to talk — but their behaviours will play out the same way day in, day out, to allow the player to plan ahead.


Full image

Learning about the predictability of the townspeople’s actions is just another way that players progress in Ann Achronist. It’s quite a strange game from a progression perspective, since there are no levels — you’re always on level 1, so to speak. The most obvious sense of progression is unlocking an ending, since the way you can interact with the world changes when you unlock new abilities — albeit only being able to use one at a time. Rather, most of the progression of this game is learning what conclusions certain conversation paths lead to, and whether or not the results can prove useful to you. Sometimes you might need to sweet-talk a villager, but in other timelines you might need them to storm out in a fit of rage to make progress. Job number one is finding out who your ancestor even is! Only by asking villagers about other villagers do you learn this information, and having that knowledge opens up new paths for conversations. By the end of the game, the player should be an Alderdale expert, knowing more or less what every interaction leads to, what abilities they need to access certain places (there are sometimes even multiple solutions), and where and when key events occur. In that way, it should actually serve the visual narrative crown quite well: one playthrough is rarely enough to uncover every facet of a character, and that exact replay mechanic is built into the game design of Ann Achronist.
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« Reply #7 on: July 09, 2018, 08:25:26 AM »

Bewitched

Today I spent some time putting the witch’s house together. Here’s how it looks in its current state.



As I said previously, a person’s house can say a lot about them. In addition to dialogue options with the witch herself (the current placeholder is the skeleton behind the counter),there are plenty of examine events that we’ve woven into the narrative, should people choose to explore the room in more detail. I think this one is my favourite of the bunch:

You look right and see a huge wooden cabinet looming over you. It’s groaning with clay jars and pots, and some still have dirty pestles sticking out. They have labels carved into the sides which say things like “eye of trout” and “lung paste”. One is just labelled “Brian”.
Excuse the red crosses around the back; that’s my way of coding collision tiles. I had some difficulty getting the engine to return whether or not a tile was occupied or not before Ann stepped into it, and my initial concern was that the hitbox of the ‘X’ wasn’t sufficient, but it turns out that wasn’t the problem. The code involves taking Ann’s local coordinates as a Vector3 ([4.5, 123.5, 0] for example) and converting them to a Vector3Int so the engine knows which tile I’m currently trying to access. The exact positions of the tiles and the Unity coordinates don’t align, but fortunately Unity has a function that returns the position in terms of the tiles. I then take the sprite (or image) that has been assigned to that specific space on my collision tilemap and essentially check if the sprite exists or not (in other words, whether the tile is occupied or not). If it is — no moving! If it’s not, go right ahead, Ann! This makes it extremely easy to just ‘paint in’ collision tiles without a lot of work. While I was at it, I also coded some general functions that create new collision tiles and remove collision tiles in real time, just in case of any environmental changes that happen during gameplay.
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« Reply #8 on: July 10, 2018, 11:40:21 AM »

Cathedral

Pressing on with the construction, I’ve put together an exterior for the cathedral and also crafted some interior rooms. Only when I was building the front of the cathedral did it occur to me that we should have some gravestones nearby, using the inscriptions as an extra piece of lore for the player to uncover if they so choose. But — you guessed it — if you can’t read, it’s not going to get you very far!



For the most part, I’m happy with the interior. I’ll have to make some special layering exceptions so that Ann’s sprite doesn’t appear over the top of the pillars if she’s moving behind them, but apart from that this room is quite straight forward. I think the stools don’t seem too out of place behind the pews. The only thing I take issue with here really is the back left of the room. Any guesses what it is? If you can’t tell it’s a confession booth, I’ve made a boo-boo. I’ll see if I can find any other, more appropriate sprites to convey the confession booth — I tried a curtain, but it just looked like a bay window for some reason. The gap in the wall on the left leads to the library, and the door at the top leads to the backroom.



To the left, we have the library. The librarian will be waiting with bated breath at the door for the chance to pounce on anyone who arrives. He doesn’t get much company in the quiet sanctuary, so he’ll talk the ear off anyone who comes close.



Finally, we have the backroom, site of a particularly serious interrogation later in the game.



I’m mostly happy with all the rooms, give or take a few details. The library’s wallpaper is perhaps not appropriate or accurate for a cathedral setting. Same goes for the floor. I think the stone walls inside the cathedral look a little garish, so I might recolour them to a duller grey — though, these cathedrals will look a lot fresher in those days than they do in their current state. Mostly small miscellaneous details that might be striking at first but the player can easily forget about.
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« Reply #9 on: July 11, 2018, 05:51:26 AM »

Pleased to meet UI

Behold! The conversational UI for Ann Achronist! Up top we have any dialogue being delivered, along with an emotionally-charged portrait of the character speaking (placeholder art courtesy of game-icons.net) and their name tag. Down bottom, we have any dialogue options available to the player.



The astute among you will have noticed that the responses don't match the dialogue. Just checking you're still paying attention!

It all looks very simple at first glance, but coding this was a huge challenge. The nine-slice, expandable UI boxes weren't too challenging, but I decided to have a type-in effect for the text, one letter being added to the string at a time, and that caused no end of problems for me. At first, I had the text aligned top-left, but as you can see it doesn't fill the box out very well this way. To offset this blank space, I aligned the text to the centre of the box - but this meant that by adding one letter at a time to the string that was being displayed would constantly pushing the current line to the left more and more, leading to a pretty hard to read letter-by-letter animation. I instead wanted to have all the letters in their final location at the point that they appear and not to move again. To do this, I had to keep the string the same as the original, instead of being added letter by letter, instead changing which letters were actually visible or not. This meant throwing in a few <color=#000000> tags into the string itself to create invisible text. 

The next problem? I wanted other formatting codes within my strings, as seen in the example above. However, the animation wanted to move a <b> tag, used to make some text bold, one character at a time. This meant "<" being visible right up until the closing tag. Any broken formatting also messed up the formatting for the rest of the string. To remedy this, any opening tags that were detected had to be moved from the invisible side to the visible side altogether, in addition to the next letter in the string (otherwise there would be an unnecessary pause every time a tag was moved). I also had to temporarily close this tag at the end of the visible string with any tags that hadn't been closed yet - if I opened a tag and never closed it, Unity would not be able to parse it and none of the formatting would work.

Now all is well and good, right? Wrong. I also wanted to use colour-coded syntax to help focus the player's attention on keywords where appropriate. But if I were to declare that some text on the invisible side of the string should be a specific colour, that would override the 'invisible' colour I had already given it! This was a major headache. I ended up resolving it by stripping the invisible string of any colour tags and storing each of the colours in order in an array, replacing them inside the string with a specific marker. Whenever it was time to move one of these markers from the invisible to the visible side, it removed the marker and inserted whichever colour tag was next.

All of this just to get some simple formatting to display nicely! It just goes to show how much coding goes into some things that we take for granted.
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« Reply #10 on: July 12, 2018, 03:28:21 PM »

Emotional Intelligence

Agh! Visual Basic! How you torture me!

For the uninitiated, Visual Basic (VBA) is the programming language associated with Excel. The entire script runs off an enormous Json file that is constructed by a VBA macro. I decided to use excel for ease of editing — I could have directly written the json myself, but that’s extremely unwieldy and slow, not to mention fairly uncomfortable to navigate. Excel cells are much nicer.

I had no prior experience with VBA before starting this project, and it has been a bit of a rocky road. The debugging has been a hellish experience — more modern coding interfaces have much smarter intellisense (think of red squiggles under typos in word processors, but the programming languages equivalent instead), but this thing just spits out error code numbers when it doesn’t want to play nice. Fortunately, every error I came across was indexed well on Google (a benefit of using an older language, I suppose) but after writing swaths of codes to make a complete function, VBA doesn’t do a great job at pinpointing exactly where or what your issue is. Nonetheless, it’s the best option I have for the time being, and I’m now at a point where I can copy and paste any tedious parts and most core problems have been figured out (like parsing strings as integers).

Today I worked on coding a small macro that provides data on character portraits. Remember the black and white portrait placeholder from the previous post on the game’s UI? They’re exactly that — placeholder. I’m looking to commission some art for these portraits with a range of emotions, but at the same time I don’t want to commission any more portraits than I need.



As can be seen in the table, Alexander only has a ‘shocked’ expression the once — is it really worth commissioning a portrait for the sake of 5 seconds of screen time throughout the entire game? My aim with the program is to reduce the number of portraits required by shuffling around any ‘1’s. For example — a worried, curious, sad or neutral Alexander might work just as well.

For the time being, I will put down whichever expression feels most appropriate. Only once every single line of dialogue has been added to the script will I start to go through and cull down a character’s emotional breadth to the most common reactions.

On a related note, I’ve been trying to keep the pipeline in my head so the game can stay on track for its release date — the earlier I finish collating this excel document, the sooner I can figure out which reactions I need and the sooner I can get these pieces commissioned. I understand that these images aren’t gonna be finished overnight, so the sooner the artist can start the better! I have made a start on searching out artists to do the portraits, but it’s quite tough to pin down exactly how many portraits I will need right now. Once I have the specifics, I’ll be in a better position to come to an arrangement.
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« Reply #11 on: July 27, 2018, 01:18:33 PM »

Emotional Breadth of a Teaspoon

With all my lines transferred to a compact JSON the game can read, it’s time for me to whip these emotions into shape! And by emotions, I mean the characters dialogue portraits; and by whip into shape I mean get as much mileage out of as possible!

Since I’ll be commissioning all this artwork from a third party I want to make sure every single portrait will get a good amount of use. I’ve written a macro script that quickly whips up a grid of frequencies for me. I stuck on some colour coding that shows me how commonly a reaction is used for that character. Red indicates that this is the reaction used the least by that character, and green is the opposite. Note that these are coloured independent of other characters; every character needs at least one picture, after all.


Ignore the anomalous inanimate objects; they populate the store.

This is how it looked upon finishing the first draft of the script. My hope is to trim this down to 3/4 of the size. Preferably, every picture will be used at least twice, and no character will have more than one reaction to that is used twice only.

The first thing that struck me was the typos. “Smiiling “, anyone?

Next thing to go was inconsistencies. As I started adding emotions to lines, I worked quite liberally, not sticking to a particular palette — just sticking any emotion down that seem to fit best. However, does Ann really need a different image for "depressed" and “sad" ? Answer: no. Same goes for “happy” and “smiling” (and “smiiling”, lest we forget). This helped cut the grid down considerably.

With that out of the way, it was time to pull out the electroconvulsive therapy and start zapping niche reactions into more heavily populated emotions. Matt had only one laughing reaction, so I either had to find a reason to change another line to that reaction, or more simply (and frugally) change the offending line to something else. In context, smiling works just as well as laughing, so it was easy to cut the need for a new sprite altogether.

And here is the final result!


This brings it down to a total of 132 reactions. Much more manageable! If anyone is interested in commissioning some character head portraits for me feel free to drop a portfolio off to [email protected]. My plan is to take some beautiful photos of myself until the art is ready — it’s about the only thing I don’t need to have fully ready for when the testers (read: poor unsuspecting friends) get their hands on the beta builds.
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« Reply #12 on: August 01, 2018, 05:45:41 AM »

The Many Faces of Ann Achronist

Behold, the many futures of Ann! As already mentioned, your actions in the past follow you into the future — with wildly varying consequences. I won’t give too many spoilers here about what each ending entails but see if you can guess from her appearances what each of Ann’s futures look like.


The list goes Ann and Ann and Ann…

The trick with making multiple variations of the same character was making them all distinct enough from each other whilst still keeping her recognisable as Ann. You’re not playing as a completely different person, after all! The new aesthetic also makes unlocking a new ending all the more rewarding. I tried to communicate the special ability associated with each ending through Ann’s look — any guesses what sort of abilities she might get?

It’s not old-fashioned, it’s vintage!

One of the greatest challenges here was making modern-day Ann’s looks not stand out too much in the past setting. The townspeople aren’t supposed to be overly suspicious of her, nor want to burn her at the stake immediately just for looking like an outsider — a low-cut dress wouldn’t serve her too well in the olden days, that’s for sure. Fortunately, the low resolution of the sprites helps to provide a functional amount of ambiguity — though, the details will be a little clearer once it comes to the more detailed concept art pieces.

The hardest rendition of Ann was most likely the private school ending. Putting together an outfit that read as uniform without feeling too androgynous and boxy with trousers and a shirt was quite the feat. I originally relied on pigtails — that screams uniform, right? But it didn’t really fit with the sophisticated character she develops, nor was the long-sleeve jumper convincing enough, so I eventually settled on a neat high ponytail with a pinafore style frock.


I’ll leave the pigtails to Britney.

Next up — the rest of the townspeople!
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« Reply #13 on: August 04, 2018, 05:10:40 AM »

Title Theme v2.1.5 final FINAL ACTUALLY FINAL THIS TIME.mp3

As you might have guessed, I’ve been working on some music today! I’m trying to keep to a deadline so that progress on the game can keep moving at a steady pace, and after some heavy coding I was ready for a slight break from it!


A snippet of the Title Theme, put together in the Crescendo software

The Title Theme was today’s task, which admittedly I had already worked a fair amount on but I was having a little difficulty pulling all the pieces I had composed together into a coherent tune. There are a lot of rhythms playing at the same time in the title theme once the song builds, with occasional chimes sprinkled in the higher registers and a pseudo-walking (let’s call it bumbling) bass line occupying space lower down. That, mixed with a tune that sort of lost its identity half way through, let to a bit of a confusing listening experience. To smooth everything out, I had to iron out a little dissonance between the chimes and the bass line, and I decided to keep the same pattern for the tune consistent throughout instead of deviating slightly towards the end. I was worried at first that it would be a little repetitive, but I think the variation comes through the chord changes and the slightly building melody of the chimes and bass rather than through changing the rhythm of the leading line. I’m pretty happy with it, even though it’s not what I had originally intended to create — I was hoping for a somber, peaceful, slightly melancholic series of chords on the piano, but the computer’s inability to create meaningful spaces (or fermatas) between the chords makes it feel a little phony in practice, and I’m not completely confident in my ability to play anything too complex myself. I think I’ll give it another shot when I work on the Level Select theme where you choose which of Ann’s futures you want to use when visiting the past.

Although I’ve written the songs myself, I’m enlisting the help of an excellent music producer (Protocat — go check him out!) to make the songs come to life. The voicing and other extra magic he does make a HUGE difference to the standard midi fare that gets pumped out of Crescendo (not that Crescendo is especially guilty — any simple software has a similar sound). I will say, working with another music producer has taught me to keep the file names as simple as possible. I’d originally given all of my pieces a super spiffy name (like “Witchy Woo”) because I am a CREATIVE now, but when it came to actually discussing the pieces I myself couldn’t even remember which (witch) was which! I found it much more effective to simply name the songs methodically (“Witchy Woo” is now called “Witch’s Potion Shop”). This is helpful not only to me, but also to the other collaborators, as they know instantly from the name what sort of scenario the music is for.

I’ll try and find a way of hosting the music for you folks to have a listen to, but until then you’ll just have to take my word for it when I tell you it’s shaping up brilliantly. Wink
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« Reply #14 on: August 06, 2018, 07:16:27 AM »

Song Select

After you’ve written a certain number of songs, you start to worry you’re running out of ideas. I’m sincerely hoping that any repetitive themes that come up are considered a stylistic choice for the entire soundtrack as opposed to the same techniques put through the grinder organ time and time again. At least, I’ll use that as my defense; they can criticize me on my next soundtrack!

Now that I’m on a whopping total of 12 songs (around 22 permutations, I’m milking every reprise for everything it’s worth), I keep trying to watch a couple of music theory videos each day to give me some new ideas. I recently learned about ‘7 chords’, and about playing with bass notes a little more freely — things like that which help inform my compositions. I’m no Mozart, but my understanding of music theory is slowly improving and I think my songs are benefiting as a result.

For the level select theme (where you choose which version of the future you want to use for travelling to the past), I first of all considered using a bluegrass style of song, where the currently selected future’s theme plays — always the same tune, but the instruments playing it are different. I think that could have worked fine, but I eventually settled on a different format: taking inspiration from the trailer song for Prismatic I wrote a few years back, I thought a slowly building song would be more interesting. The song I’ve written is only a 16 bar loop, but each time the player unlocks a new ending, they unlock a new melody or bass line, for example, that plays alongside the simple start melody. Eventually, as the player progresses through the game, it evolves into a complex nine-part piece, growing one part at a time. I’m very happy with how it’s turned out — once the music producer has given it a once over, I’ll see if I can find a way to share it for you to hear!
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« Reply #15 on: August 08, 2018, 04:36:07 AM »

Inventory System in the Bag

Today I found myself at a bit of an impasse. For the first time in a while, I was struggling to figure out exactly what the next step for me should be. Between waiting for the writer to finish specific drafts that are required for the artists and waiting to hear back from artists about commission rates, it’s been difficult to figure out how to keep the project moving forward. I think I’ve finalised which artists I would like to use but I just want to run them by the writer to make sure we are all on the same page regarding style and content. I have to say, trying to even communicate with the artists was an art itself! I never realised just how difficult it is to be specific about the needs for the project and how many different art styles there. For example, I confused the terms ‘portrait’ and ‘bust’. Bust is the word that I was actually looking for, specifying the head and shoulders of the character, so I had to clarify exactly what I meant a couple times when emailing back and forth with the artists. Once I have had the meeting with the writer, I will put together some references for the artists to use — I’m not sure how many is necessary, but to be on the safe side I think I’m just going to find as many as possible in order to reduce confusion.

So although I sound busy, in truth I’m just waiting on several parties. Realistically, I should probably be working on improving the excel document and the way it forms the JSON so that I can build in some extra functions such as updating variables through specific dialogue options. However, I have given that document to the writer now and I promised myself I would not touch it at all until the proofreading that was done by the writer was returned to me, at which point I can continue to work on the document. I put the excel spreadsheet aside but still thought it was a good idea to work on some code — the next obvious thing to me seemed to be the inventory system, as it is something that I had neglected to design or even think much about and the later I left it the more likely I was to be unhappy with the design. Strangely enough, the inventory doesn’t actually have much functionality in Ann Achronist. It is merely there as a reminder of the items that you have collected along the way. I think this is particularly important in this game, since over the course of many playthroughs it becomes quite easy to forget what was picked up this time, and misremembering picking something up from a previous playthrough — I imagine — will be quite common.


As for the mechanics of the inventory: if items are ever usable, they will appear as a dialogue option. This completely negates the need for players to haplessly and clumsily bumble their way through the game by brute forcing every combination of items in any situation. “Of course you combine the toaster with the printer ink!” In my opinion, some of the most frustrating parts of similar narrative games are getting stuck behind gates involving items, and this helpfully removes that downside.

And here she is!


Not looking overly pretty at the moment, and bear in mind a lot of the item artwork is merely placeholder, but it is definitely serviceable for the time being. During the process of coding the inventory system, I ran into a bit of an issue. When the inventory system is not visible, the game object is set to inactive. Unfortunately I was unable to assign items directly to the slots themselves, which is where I originally planned to run the code for picking up and putting down objects. Due to this, I had to move all the code that I had written to the object showing the bag icon that you can see in the right corner of the screen. Since this object never goes inactive during a playthrough, it made much more sense to store the data for whatever items and currently has there instead. Interestingly, once I had moved all of the code to the bag the code actually ended up looking a hell of a lot nicer and neater and much more manageable in the long term. I was able to remove how many global dependencies there were (which has a minor affect on performance and also improves the readability of the code through clearer architecture).

From a design perspective, I have only given the player 15 slots to work with. I’m not sure if this decision is going to come back and bite me in the butt later, but as far as I am aware it is impossible for the player to accrue 15 separate items in one single playthrough of the game. Because the player typically only has limited funds, it is simply a matter of choosing one item or the other as opposed to being able to buy everything the shopkeeper has on sale. I did decide to code the inventory in a way that I could easily expand the number of slots that are required if the need arises, however I am secretly hoping that this will not be the case.
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« Reply #16 on: August 10, 2018, 12:10:38 PM »

The Art of Language // The Language of Art

I was about to tread into very unfamiliar territory. The territory of artists.

I’ve worked with coders. I’ve worked with musicians. I’ve worked with writers. But in all my days doing game dev, I’ve never once had art commissioned for a project. Most of the time I was quite content to use free assets found online or to make some terrible ‘minimalist’ ‘art’ of my own. Ann Achronist is different though. We’ve put a ton of effort into this game, and it would be a shame for it to all fall flat because of mediocre graphics.

So it was decided, I would be commissioning art. But how? To avoid any faux pas, I sought the advice of redditors from /r/gamedev who had some interesting things to say on the topic. (You can read the full thread here.) These are the best nuggets of knowledge I found:

There are countless ways to express art styles, and what one artist understands by ‘comic style’ might not be what another interprets. I was informed that using terminology was ill-advised and I’d be better off using reference pieces, or finding an artist whose portfolio already showed evidence of the art style I had in mind.

I found this one particularly interesting: let the artist know what can and cannot be changed. I didn’t always have a complete idea of the image I was commissioning, and it’s nice to let the artist fill in the blanks. After all, they’re the one with the expertise here so it’s nice to let them show their flair — you usually end up with a better product, and the artist will likely enjoy the greater freedom.

By the same token, I was recommended that you state the purpose of each asset instead of just stating the asset. This is crucial, as the exact asset example that you have given may be much more difficult or costly to create, when a simpler one would serve the same purpose and do just fine. Or perhaps another asset would emphasize this point even better than your original suggestion. If the artist knows this in advance (alongside knowing what can and cannot be changed), you might end up with an image different to what you were expecting, but one that simultaneously surpasses your expectations. Here’s an example from one of Ann’s (less happy) endings:

This is the sprite I have for Ann based on this ending. I am able to change the clothing as required. I want her clothing to be quite plain because she travels back in time whilst wearing these exact same clothes and I don’t want people of the 18th century to look at her as a complete outcast and abomination. This isn’t a HUGELY important detail, as we can always ignore this fact, but if possible I think it will add to the believability of the character. I chose clothes here that I thought didn’t look particularly nice but were probably cheap to buy.
We ended up adding a jacket to Ann’s character in the image, since this particular ending takes place outside in the rain and a simple strappy vest looked out of place in the scene; however, Ann’s outfit as shown in the sprite is still visible below the jacket to help players make the connection between the scene and her sprite.

I was a little torn on whether or not to try my hand at sketching the scene myself. I was worried my terrible drawing would be of no use at best, and an insult at worst. I have to say though, a lot of the broad strokes are very simple to draw — chair here, person here, table here, wall here, etc. Even simple stick men will do the job, as long as they’re properly annotated and explained. Even if this isn’t the precise angle the artist decides to use, they at least have a good grasp of the scene as you see it and can work to your vision.



As a final note, I was warned that artists do not like redoing work. No surprises there! For my first commissioned piece I actually ending up sending an eight page document of references, sketches, explanations and material from the game itself. I figured it much better to spend a fraction more time planning and discussing than subjecting the artist to eight more hours of work by making him re-do a job that was misinterpreted. That’s a big no-no, and it can be an expensive one too!
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« Reply #17 on: August 24, 2018, 05:37:25 PM »

The Menu is on the Menu

Given the state of the current pipeline, where I’m coordinating with the artists and waiting for the full proofreading from the writer, I decided it’s finally time to do the things I’ve been putting off since the beginning. The menus.

I’m not really sure what it is about them, but they’re one of my least favourite things to build. Most games start with prototyping. Seeing your mechanics come to life is amazing, and after every update having something tangible to test and enjoy helps keep the motivation flowing. Menus, however, are a completely different kettle of fish. They are functional, not fun. And they’re a part of every game you make, no matter what you’re making. They are often accompanied by the headache of fiddling with awkward UI elements that have to scale properly for any dimension of screen. Alas! It must be done, and now seems like a good time to do it.

I’ve been deliberating a lot about how exactly the main menu should be portrayed. What illustrations I might need for the menu has constantly been in the back of my head. I’ve been racking my brain for important symbols or motifs that exist within the game, but truth be told the only real thing is the ring. I tried seeing if it were possible to flesh out some smaller themes within the game, such as time travel, repeated actions, fate, though none of them really fit with the game; I would have to do a re-write, shoehorning them in as some contrived afterthought. I have a ton of tree, leaf, and butterfly sketches that all are loosely connected to themes within the game, but that without any specific mention would probably be too tenuous connections for the player to understand.



Next, I thought maybe we could just have an extra scene which is basically another perspective of Ann’s initial ending where she is begging on the street. I wanted to try to incorporate all of the incredible artwork that we would have over the course of the game into the main menu if possible. My brother suggested that the main menu screen could just display the ending of whatever was selected last. I had originally planned for the ending scene to be displayed at the back of the level select screen as a helpful visual reminder to the player of the story, the scene, Ann’s appearance and her abilities. There are a lot to choose from and it could be hard to remember them all. I was stuck on this idea for a while, but my current plan is to mesh the two ideas together — the ending that you selected is shown in a smaller image on the Future Select screen, but the full image of whatever you chose last is the main menu screen. I have a nice transition planned, but I need to make sure it’s actually possible first — it involves a lot of masking and scaling on the UI which is likely to be a logistical nightmare, but hopefully possible. Wish me luck!

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« Reply #18 on: August 30, 2018, 05:37:08 PM »

Lock and Loading

Hey! I’m just getting over a bout of illness so had some downtime on my productivity, but we’re back on track now!


Excuse the maroon CC0 background during level selection. The bush sprites will also be replaced by some more meaningful selection icon.

The menu screen is really coming together now — I’ve had to spend a bit of time fiddling with the easings and how they interact with each other to make sure that you can’t see beyond the edge of the ending images because the mask expands too fast for the actual image — basically, really fiddly annoying crap. The basic functionality is there and I will add other features (like a gallery and the options menu) when the time calls for it.

As the attentive may have noticed, the artist has been had at work getting the ending images done. I’m exceptionally happy with the quality! Three endings down, six to go! Smiley

This is the first time I’ve had to jump from one scene to another, and oh lord is the loading time excruciating! The entire game hangs for about 5–10 seconds while the main game loads. Since the whole of ye olde Alderdale is one comprehensive scene with all areas loaded simultaneously, I had anticipated some slow loading times, but I think it’s the best way of coding it to ensure that the experience — once loaded — is nice and smooth. A loading screen was a no-brainer.


A mockup of the loading screen. The background is CC0 placeholder art — I might use it in the final version.

I thought it would be nice to show the player the sprite that they will be playing with for the first time here — Ann constantly walking to the right while the game loads gives the player something to enjoy whilst firing up the level, serves as a reminder of the ending that has been chosen, and also adds some animation to the loading screen. I think on the big consoles it is actually a publisher requirement for there to be moving parts on the screen during loading screens so the player knows the game hasn’t crashed and frozen. It’s an important thing to include, and I thought this was a cute way to do it.

I’m just relieved that players can now unlock endings, select endings, and start the game comfortably now. I need to keep building towards a minimum viable product (a bit late, I’m aware) so I can get testers playing the game as early as possible, as I hope to have one or two months of testing before releasing the game to iron out any bugs and most importantly to figure out the least obvious (and most frustrating) story progression paths that players encounter.
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« Reply #19 on: September 09, 2018, 05:47:48 AM »

Tweaks and Polish

Although I have solid experience with designing mechanics and creating things that are ‘fun’, my eye for design from an art perspective is sorely lacking. The UI in its current state is informative, but hardly beautiful. I figured it was time to level up my UI/UX skills, and I’d been poking around the Humble Bundle site when something caught my eye: their bundle on that exact topic.

I haven’t read them all yet, but I started with David Kadavy’s Design for Hackers and I have to say it was really insightful. I will admit to skipping over some of the history sections, such as the origins of typefaces and the printing press, but it helped me to see things I didn’t know I wasn’t seeing before. Stuff like subtle alignments and relative proportion and white space to emphasise how important or related certain aspects of the design are.



The original design, with dialogue at the top and an empty inventory open.



The new dialogue design and menu icons layout. (Excuse the placeholder image; I made my sister make some expressions for me on the condition that I not put them online. Tongue)

Although it sounds simple, the most crucial piece of advice was ‘question everything’. Why is the background brown? Why is the text white? Is a yellow highlight effective? Why is the name tag below the image, not above? Why is the clock to the left and the bag to the right? How far apart should the inventory slots be from one another?

Once I’d asked myself all these questions, I started playing with the relationship between components, from a functional and positional perspective. Although subtle, the ‘Matt’ and the top of the panel behind the photograph share the same upper alignment, connecting the two pieces of information. Obviously, the name of whoever is shown in the picture is being displayed, so they’re functionally related. I was hesitant to move the tag and the image so far from one another for this reason, but the colour and positioning helps connect them even when they’re so far apart. From a player’s perspective, the game can now be read top-down. I want to know WHO is talking before I know WHAT is being said. The image leaps off the page which its size, so even if the player isn’t paying attention to it, they can’t help but miss it.



I also tightened up the inventory some. In the final version I moved the menu elements to the left, as I wanted the responses to be displayed on the bottom right of the screen. This makes the whole dialogue structure mimic the text conversation format on most phones, where your responses are on the right and everything else is on the left. I’m yet to design the responses, as their height and length vary wildly and I have to be careful to cover as many scenarios as possible.



In other news, I’ve been experimenting with implementing a ring (which is used to travel through time) into the main menu. It’s a little clunky at the moment and looks more like a stone ring than a metal ring, but I will tweak the material and the lighting to fix that. Sadly, I’m yet to learn how particles work in Unity, but I’d love to have a miragey ‘wobble’ effect over the top of the image, as though the ring itself is a portal to another world (or another time, more accurately). I’m planning on creating a transition where the camera zooms straight into the ring with a flash upon selection. Currently there’s a simple fade to black transition, which does the job for now.

Finally, the game loop has finally been completed. In line with my plan to make the MVP as soon as possible, the game can be loaded up, timeline can be selected, the game starts, and all game over possibilities are coded in (bad interaction/time up/manually quit to menu). The player is also able to quit the application completely from the main menu. Baby steps, but we’re getting there!

I’m not gonna say I’m a UI master all of a sudden, but I definitely feel a lot more empowered when it comes to designing UI elements and questioning every single design decision.
« Last Edit: September 09, 2018, 07:02:52 AM by MaybeLaterGames » Logged

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