hey it's the rare opportunity for me to share something that isn't a huge spoiler (i'm saving a lot of context-specific stuff until i can finally 'reveal/announce' the game)

so, i've been working a lot on upgrading the dialog rendering, and that means lots of little number tweaks that make the most important part of a story-driven game shine: displaying text in fun and intuitive ways!

what this means for the gif above is my super important design goal for speech bubbles to always feel contextually appropriate!

when i first designed the dialog system (heavily adapted from peyton burnham's fantastic tutorial series) i wanted to make a system that felt like dynamic speech bubbles drawing out alongside the text. this was already shown off in the teaser video i released back in october 2021, but i made some tweaks to the visual presentation since then to make them a bit more round (i just like the shape ok).

the text boxes also adapt to display a tail if coming from a character portrait (or, and this isn't shown in the gif, but i can place them in the world & originating from characters, too!)

the latest addition is little nametags for important characters, like our protagonist astra. but because of how dynamic the speech bubbles are, i wanted to make sure that they only displayed when it made visual sense to do so. and you can see that in action, especially as astra's distressed ellipses draw in... as soon as the bubble grows to a size that displaying a nametag makes sense, it fades in. otherwise, for little exclamations & other short text, it remains off.

literally the tiniest detail, but every detail needs development time to figure out, so i felt i'd share~

//Start is called before the first frame update

//Update is called once per frame

when i was in college i took an unelective game development class that taught unity to students. the final assignment was to create "duck hunt" from scratch (the irony is not lost on me). i wrote some code that would make the duck change directions every 500ms or so and i wrote the script to kill the duck when it was clicked. i didn't understand OOP very well yet, but one of the requirements was to instantiate an object, so i put some conditional logic on the update method that would instantiate a new Duck() if the current one was dead.

the result of this was that, upon killing the first duck, 60 ducks would infinitely spawn per second, flooding the screen and filling the heap like a cosmic horror emerging to exact it's revenge.

the post in question:

the quotes:

there is this desperation of so many who work in the (video game) industry to be a part of a consequentially serious form of art, like film, that has this romantic social purchase and the weight of history tied to it. as (game designer) Chris Crawford said, game developers are very defensive about the sordid reputation of the field they work in. 'Content Creators' fondly reminiscing about a part of Zelda game they played in their youth on their youtube channel for 800k subscribers doesn't have quite the same ring to it as Martin Scorsese writing about how attending Fellini premieres in his youth profoundly changed him as a person. the environment that produced filmmakers like Fellini was shaped by huge upheavals of the social and political order that profoundly changed how film was viewed in broader society. and the fact is: so many of these game industry people who want video games to be a serious, consequential art form are unwilling to commit to what that actually means.

the way the indie space was prepping itself for primetime meant shaving off its own edges in an increasingly merciless manner in order to achieve correct respectability and palatability to the mainstream. if this sounds really at odds with the often highly personal source of inspiration Blow described games from the indie space as coming from, that's because it was. but it felt that whenever this crowd was hit with anything too weird and freaky for them that took this personal game mantra too seriously, they instantly would launch into "finish your game please" mode and hit people with treatises on the importance of polish.

your apparent lack of respectability as an outsider game developer was treated as a threat which endangered their long-term investment in this space - like a father lashing out at his children. you were looked down upon as an unserious joke for not following more conventional industry approaches and modes of presentation. but hey, if you play by the rules maybe one day you'll be called the great new auteur of the space by some journalist from The Atlantic who is hopelessly clueless to the world of games.

games developed by one or two people, especially from more recent years, often challenge the hegemony of industry norms and practices in much greater and more profound ways than commercial games made by larger numbers do. i have long argued that many game design 'rules' now read like the old "180 degree rule" in Hollywood used to read: perhaps there's some practical utility to those rules when putting together a work that a large number of people will experience. but they are also rules imposing a specific mode of artistic creation by companies underestimating the capacity of audiences, and unwilling to take larger risks. that means that many people who work in the industry and internalize these rules, if only out of sheer self-preservation for the sake of their jobs if nothing else, are often unable to see outside of them.

to me, if you are not interrogating more deeply how norms created by the markets that produce these rules, you are just giving the game industry a complete license to define what kind of experience is valid and what isn't. this has much more serious implications when it comes to the ability for experiences to exist that would never be able to be made by large studios.

Hi cohost friends 💖 Just posted my new 6k-word manifesto blog post epic about having radical pride in your art. Give it a read!