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MSS - Testing, Week 3 - Animations and Extra Dialogue, and Renaming!

5 years ago1,361 words

It's been a week since I last posted anything! Gasp. I've been very busy finishing off the last bits of Sindrel Song, and I'm almost done now!!

Though it's getting sort of irritating talking about being 'almost done' every time! I've literally been saying that since the first week of development. It's June now, so that was, what, just over five months ago? That's longer than I'd like to devote my entire life to one game that might be a complete flop, but OH WELL.

Since testing began, I've mostly been fixing reported bugs and frantically trying to address the difficulty concerns, but this past week I've been focused on some of the more creative aspects, which I'd left unfinished before testing and had been meaning to get around to. It's really satisfying now that I have!

I've finished most of the animations, though they're not exactly amazing or anything. Mediocre at best, though hopefully not ludicrously bad. I'd like to do better, but there are clear limitations to my self-taught and way-too-divided skills, so it'll have to do. They're better than something someone completely oblivious could do?? Playing with Hammer or Dolour and having them actually strike at their instruments feels so much better than it did before!

I've also been working on adding quite a lot of new dialogue! Before, you could talk to Hearth every morning and evening and he'd have something new to say each time. I've built on this to give every one of the wintrels extra morning and evening dialogue! It's all completely optional, and some - many? Most? - players would just ignore it, but I feel it's the sort of thing I'd appreciate in a game, so it seems worthwhile to add. Some of these bits are short and forgettable, but I'm quite pleased with how some others turned out! I feel I've learned some new things about the characters, so I might do another pass through the script to incorporate these things in other scenes. I've also essentially rewritten Course's dialogue, which I meant to do anyway, in way that's inspired by some of the feedback. I think it's better now. It's ridiculous how long writing even a little bit of a conversation takes though because I'm so much of a perfectionist.

I still need to do some more of this dialogue, but not much, then I'll need to add an ending too. When that's done - hopefully less than a week from now - I'll upload another update. At that point, it'll be pretty much done, apart from some little bits of polishing and probably bug fixing.

A few people have contacted me to express interest in testing, and I've not replied yet because I'm apparently terrible at replying to anything. If you're one of those people, it might be best to start testing once I've included these new additions; it'll be valuable to see how new eyes interpret what's closer to the finished version.

I am terrible at replying, and I feel bad that I haven't replied to comments yet, and that I keep saying this! I've read everything, but my time management and mental health have been so poor lately. Did you know that ∞ the ideal amount of focused work hours per day for a person doing creative mental work is just four hours, according to a guy who wrote a book about such a thing based on evidence like the work habits of famous knowledge workers? ∞ I didn't until the other day, when I started researching such things due to frustration at how little time I seemed to have focus and energy for each day. Perhaps having fewer hours of higher-quality focus each day would be less stressful than trying to cram in as much as I can and constantly feeling stressed because of it? It's something I might experiment with.

I've been stressed in general anyway, lots of depression and anxiety, because of constantly worrying that this game won't do well. I suppose all I can do is finish it as well as I can and see how the whimsical masses receive it. Whatever happens, I can use it as a learning experience, to know what people like and don't for next time.

But it's frustrating, because I'm so concerned about making a game that's truly enjoyable to play, and I'm so worried that it won't be, but other developers don't even seem to care. I'm currently addicted (in the bad way) to a mobile game called Marvel Strike Force (I've talked about this before), which is blatantly hostile to its players in the pursuit of greed to the extent that the players compile lists of the many horrendous ways they've been treated in the more-than-a-year they've been playing for. Games journalists have even got in on it, publishing articles about the developer's shady practices. There's a huge uproar in the community at the moment about them changing their mind about how a character was to be acquired, after people had started devoting time and resources to the previously announced method, entirely to milk as much money as they could out of the event. It's just spitting in the faces of all the players, and their response to the unanimous outrage (usually they don't reply to reactions at all) was basically "deal with it". Yet people keep playing, through their frustration - myself included - because it's trapped them.

That's not massively relevant to my game or anything since they're worlds apart in how they work, but I suppose it just saddens me how much I care about this, and my game might flop regardless, yet developers with such predatory attitudes towards their players make millions. Obviously that game is successful because it's Marvel, and there's no way it'd be able to get away with that if it used an original setting, but that's annoying in itself...

I keep having ideas for other things I'd like to write posts about, unrelated to this game that only a few people have had a chance to play and even fewer might be particularly interested in, but I'm eager to just get it out of the way, so I'm trying to get through all that's left with as much laser focus as I can muster. The finish line is closer than ever, and I've wondering a lot how much things will change for me once I get there...



Oh, edit, I completely forgot:

As I've been working through the script, I've been considering a couple of significant name changes.

One is the character Dolour, who I've been wondering for a while whether to rename to Duhrge. Dolour is the first name that came to mind and it relates to sadness, which he doesn't really represent. Duhrge is 'dirge', which relates to both music and death, plus it has 'uh' in it, and an 'urge' that's been interrupted by 'H' (for Hearth). It sounds quite ugly too. All those things fit the character in a really pleasing way, though obviously I've had the name Dolour for months so it'd be difficult to adjust to a new name. I already renamed 'Melody' to 'Vivace' though, a that change was uncomfortable at first, but which now feels natural to the character, and more fitting than the original name.

The second is the ungainly word 'symboliote', which I came up with on a whim like a year ago and have also been meaning to change for ages. The fact that it's apparently hard to remember or spell strengthens that desire for change. I'm considering two options:

Daemons (a term I also used in an abandoned project concept a while back), for the 'inner demons' connotations, plus ∞ guiding spirit ∞.

Nous, which has ∞ a rich and complex history ∞, but which roughly seems to mean 'common sense' or an 'innate intelligence', or an 'inner eye', or just 'the mind'. Plus it sounds like 'noose'.

I might go with one of those, but I've yet to decide.