In this post: more about the game concept, how I spent the first day of this development cycle, and my next steps.
USE will be a point-and-click information game. (What's that?) "Translation-based information game" is an idea I've had floating around for some time, so this isn't technically the first day I've ever worked on it, but I'm going to be honest, there wasn't much to report. Most of my ideation was nebulous.
I was inspired to push ahead and really make something of it by two things I saw in the last week:
- Watching GMTK's video about limiting scope
- Finding out about the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant, for which submissions are due by early October
(To be clear, I don't assume that I will receive the grant merely by dint of making a demo. I'm going to put feasible effort into making a good demo with the resources available to me, and if they choose it then Hell Yes. If not, then I still have two months of consistent dev progress under my belt that I wouldn't have had otherwise.)
These served as motivation to sit down and think, what format will allow me to present what I want to present, without introducing additional challenges? I'm one person with limited time and a low-end computer. 3D requires skills I could relearn or obtain, but not immediately. So let's simplify. 2D. A 2D sidescroller still means having to program hitboxes, cameras, and traversal animations. Even simpler. Point-and-click, original Myst style. Just put all the things in front of the player and have them click a button to move to another area. I can prototype that in PowerPoint, love it.
I spent most of my work time figuring out how I intend to work and the order of operations. Kinda dull, sure, but it makes a lot more sense to take the time now to plan ahead than to get way down the line and realize I needed to have details ironed out weeks ago. With that in mind, the rough phases I have planned are:
- Planning (we are here)
- Language design
- Graphical mockup
- Text-based technical demo (in Twine)
- Technical demo with placeholder graphics (in Godot)
- Updating graphics
- Improvements and polish
These are not equal in size. I plan for the two tech demos to take up the majority of the time. (I'm demoing first in Twine then in Godot to make sure my logic works before I start messing around with visuals; the resulting Twine file will also serve as a guideline.)
I also took time to set up some mechanisms to keep myself accountable. This includes the devlogs themselves (plan: Cohost and Tumblr daily, Itch weekly), but I also made this chart:
I've broken up the time I have before the grant submission deadline into 7 weeks, as well as a collection of 10 "flex days" that I can either use as days off or to continue counting work days if I've filled up the 7 weeks. If I work for at least an hour, I put a small sticker in the next available work day's box. If I work more than an hour 30, I get a big sticker. This is because I have ADHD and require immediate positive feedback.
For Day 1, I got a dinosaur (big).
Next steps: blocking out the Itch page, writing out explicit goals for me to hit, and setting up a kanban to finish up the planning phase.
