The Story

Some games can get by with only the basics of a story.

Unfortunately, adventure games can't. The past few months, I've been writing and re-writing the story for the events of this game... The formats have changed and even my original design document has been thrown out the window and burned.

Well, not literally.

Starting over from scratch on the story side of things is hard. Especially when all of the rooms have already been drawn. My graphics are still safe, though I may need to tweak them a little depending on how the story flows, a new exit here and more grime over there... but that's later.

So far, I've just started to write the game out as if it is a first person short story. An except is as follows:

"Callihan and Moxley are dead.


I've never understood why an astrophysicist and a psychiatrist would ever work together, but the two of them have been close since before I joined up with the Technical Division. Sam Callihan is built like a box, all right angles and hunched over his desk most of the time. He's the kind of shrink that makes you feel exposed under his beady-eyed stare. John Moxley is quiet. He hardly talks to anyone other than Callihan. He has the build of an awkward high-school wrestler; all limbs stuffed into the standard white lab coat.


The two of them have been out in Sector 35 studying the psychological effects of spatial anomalies on humans out in deep space. Seems like a waste of funding to me, but the big wigs like to act like they are concerned with the welfare of the space workers. All I know is that I have a flat line from the AI of their research craft. Flat line on occupants automatically triggers the recall protocol to fetch the bodies of our fallen comrades. So here I am, in a slow spiraling search pattern to find the Switchblade-class ship, aptly dubbed "Conspiracy".


I can't help but wonder if this is just a malfunction. It has been known to report perfectly healthy people as among the dead due to interference or a software glitch. They could also be using the monitoring equipment as another of their creepy experiments.


The scanners on Norm's computer beep, so I pull up the data from the sensor sweep. The old Switchblade is visible on the scan. The ID query returns back the Conspiracy's ident string.


Callihan and Moxley are dead.


Another beep from the computer means that Protocol 001 is initialized."

Interlude

I know what you're thinking.

"That floating sandwich would eat the poor technician sprite. It's too big for your game!"

Why yes, yes it is.

That's why the sandwich isn't going in this game.

I found that writing the script (as in the exact plot and dialog) for Protocol 001 is tedious and tiring, but I refuse to put anything in code until I finish it. I'm not going to go down the road of getting to the point in the game I hadn't thought about and improvising a puzzle that doesn't make sense or is badly designed.

So to take the tension out of being Twilight Zone serious, I've found something to keep the stress down.

I'm making a platformer game with an engine called Construct. I know, please stop thinking that I'm going to ignore this game like I did with Bitey the Littlest Vampire... but, Bitey understands. That story wasn't ready and not built for an adventure game... it was for an RPG.

One of these days, one of my game projects will be finished.

Puzzling

This isn't as bad as it sounds. Not really. I was just in the middle of drawing all the little detail objects in the rooms when I realized that I hadn't finished writing the puzzles. I didn't know what objects that I really needed.

Okay, so... let's open up the Game Design document that I'd started months ago...

What do you mean that I never finished that outline?!

Well it looks like I'm back at the drawing board, using a flowchart software and finally finishing that outline of the plot. Now that I have all three parts outlined, all the puzzles mapped out and all four endings summarized, I can go ahead and write the script.

The script script, not the code script. I wish I was far enough in everything to start coding.

Here is a pic of part of my puzzle chart:

Thinking about everything else, I'm considering dropping the text parser section of the game and just going Point & Click for the whole thing. The story will remain the same, just the user interface won't be so convoluted. Plus I added a couple of minigames and I don't want the player to have to switch from keyboard to mouse too many times.

We'll see what happens I suppose. Until next time gang!

Backgrounds

I took a brief break from getting the sprite walking to put some more detail into the backgrounds of the rooms. In an adventure game, the environment is the most important. Backgrounds and objects giving the player most of the interactions. Objects will be added later, as well as animated items. Things are coming along now, it actually looks like the character is in a spaceship.