To the fellow amateur adventure game designers in the audience…
November 7th, 2005Have you ever had those moments when you’ve looked over your puzzle designs from an eternity ago, and spontaneously decided that they made no sense, therefore provoking you to do a complete rewrite?
That just happened to me this weekend. I decided to cut out an entire section of TGTTPOACS involving diving under the sea to meet mermaids[1] as well as completely changing the puzzles of one of the four story paths to make it feel more like a detective game[2] .
The good news is, reinventing the wheel does a lot for me when it comes to being inspired. Now, if I can only find a way to effectively juggle game development between more midterms and other school-related work (eek!), all shall live happily ever after.
Footnotes:
- Although mermaids are amusing and quite giggle-worthy, this section of the game, I realised, was unnecessary to the overall story and would have involved way too much extra drawing and coding, which would mean more time until the game gets finished, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we? ↩
- Yes, there’s a part in which you essentially get to play detective. Really. Cubert Badbone even makes a cameo appearance. ↩
November 7th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
Have I done a complete rewrite? Well, I’m still working on my first adventure so I’m far from experienced, but no. I’ve kept the basic stucture for better or worse (I like it) but the parts have evolved quite a bit during the implementation. The ending has changed quite a bit, but that’s more a matter of adding things than replacing. The later parts of the game were initially very sketchy, and I’ve not known how it was going to end until now.
November 7th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
Ah. I suppose my tendencies, then, may have to do with the fact that I started out as a SCRAMM developer, meaning I’m used to planning a whole game before coding it.
For my next project, I’m thinking of doing something episodal, a la Telltale games, meaning that there’ll be more making things up as I go along while still keeping a structure of sorts. That should help things.
November 8th, 2005 at 6:15 am
I know what you’re talking about! Except that it’s not just puzzles for me; pretty much anything can become suddenly-not-so-good! Some of the exceptionally painful needs-a-do-over’s are backgrounds and animations. It’s strange how something that looked good when you made it, looks horrible when you look back at it a month later.
Two footnotes always compensate for a lot though. But you shouldn’t have given that cameo away! It should have been one of those ooooh-i-noticed-a-cameo-that-probably-no-one-else-has-noticed!-moments that make you feel special. Or elite or something.
November 8th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
My game has sort of been developed in episodes, too. I just won’t release the first two parts until the third and final part is done.
November 18th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
Yup, same here.