November 23 Update - Finish Your Game Jam!
Thank goodness for PIGSquad.
After a solid 14 months of work on my game, I had hit a bit of a block. Interest was waning, and I knew the feeling well, although never after putting so much work into a project - I wasn't thinking about the game when I woke up, nor when I was falling asleep. It took concerted effort to open Unity or one of the dozens of docs where I work on design and writing.
So, after a solid month of a slog, I took to the Finish Your Game Jam to try and rediscover what made me so happy about the game in the first place, what inspired me, what challenges I was taking on and overcoming, how much I was learning.
I set about the work with a task list of 14 items. By the time the two weeks were up, I had completed those and 13 more besides, and fixed an additional 22 bugs found during testing. I was back!
The major task was to take the starting town of the RPG and make it feel like an interconnected series of quests, giving the player some choice in how they approach the initial challenge - you are but one adventurer, and you need to find a group of folks to drag along on your adventures. Some require a mere conversation, others require certain quests to be fulfilled or progressed, others require the player to choose one or the other, as seen here:
I had developed many of the dialogues and quest lines in various docs, and needed to sit down and do the work of building them into the games dialogue engine and quest system. Along the way I found quite a few necessary enhancements to the system - making the dialogue objects more generic and supporting tags in the text, allowing me to scale the use of the dialogue system to every thing from locked doors and chests to interacting with Innkeepers and Blacksmiths.
Bit of a rats nest, I'll admit. Some of them are more elegant than others, but I wanted the system to support complexity. Each of those nodes has support for conditional logic, enter and exit functions with parameters, and a suite of predefined and "blank" custom callback routines. Soon, I'll add custom Barks, so we can get some "Heya, I'm Imoen" in here :).
I wanted to spend some quality time with the level layouts, and improve the lighting and overall performance. I was able to get the frame ms draw time down considerably, while improving (I think!) the overall appearance.
I also wanted to learn more about OBS and capture, so I could start to share my work with more confidence. The first effort, linked on this site, is a testament to how far I have to go in that regard. But! I think the video above already shows some improvement.
The jam was a huge success for me, I'm so thankful for PIGSquad and grateful for the community. Y'all are so rad!
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