Interstellar Tortoise

(7/23/08)

I am feeling really good about this new art style. It is really working out so far. I got a letter from a person I’ve been corresponding with who lives in ???? . This guy found my website and played the first point n click game I made (Mysterium), who dug it and was asking about what else I was working on. I showed him the prototype/first pass of Mysterium and he described the Art style as “off-putting” which I found super useful to hear. He encouraged me to do what I think works, but his words only further confirmed that I need to go to a more accessible direction.

Haven’t gotten too much done in the past few days because my dad had to go to the hospital. He is okay now, but it was a bit of a frightening experience.

One thing that I am starting to notice is that for any feature to become properly implemented, there are usually more steps than I first expect.

Example: Have a ‘save’ function in the game (something that I implemented in a rudimentary form a couple months ago). Well, you can’t just have a button that says ‘save’ in the HUD of the game. You need to make an options screen with a save option, probably with several different slots of memory for other players ( or for having a backup in case the player didn’t like the outcome of an in-game decision).

If there are several slots, then there might need to be an option to erase or move the data into another slot. Then you need to have a load screen giving the user the option of which of the slots to pull data from. Lots of stuff seems to have extra steps involved.

Well, gotta get to work!

(6/15/09)

Ha! (Dance of triumph) – Yesterday I figured out how to create a save feature in Flash’s Actionscript using what’s called a “shared object”. I know that writing a save function is pretty standard, but for me it is a pretty big accomplishment. Woo hoo!

What’s more, I am getting really comfortable writing and calling functions in Flash – and it is making my code way more functional. I am not needing to write the same stuff over and over again. Now I don’t have any doubts about being able to complete any features that I need for this game.

I have just picked up the book “Fundamentals of Game Design” by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings from the library. It is super interesting and has inspired some pretty important design decisions – most of all a reminder not to leave the story so unpolished.

I have started thinking of some characters and their various relationships and motivations. This is going to give the game a lot more depth and probably widen my audience (albeit only slightly). I am going back and forth between whether or not to have multiple endings on completion, but feel that it will become clear once the story is more fleshed out.