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Belief - Progress Surge!

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago1,072 words

I've done a whole lot of work on Belief this past week!

Steam's approved all my info now, and I can now upload Sindrel Song on there to begin the publishing process. I haven't yet though, because apparently it's not exactly straightforward. I tried, but it's way less obvious than uploading to Kartridge or Kongregate or YouTube or anything else; there's lots of technical stuff that's not clear to me, that'll take more than a few minutes to learn. I'll get around to it as soon as I can, but I've been hit by inspiration for Belief, so I've been acting on that while it's here because it's been absent for a while.

I started Belief months ago (the first post about it is from mid-August), but progress has been slow and fragmented. I hadn't really just sat down and focused on it for any prolonged period. Largely it was because I wasn't sure how to approach the environments; whether to use a tile-based system reminiscent of my old games, or to just model each area as its own big individual mesh. Deciding on that took way longer than it should have.

Once I did decide though (to go with a tile-based approach), progress really exploded, and I've spent the past few days focusing as much time as I can on it. It means I haven't found the time to do anything else - like correspondence - but it's wonderful being in this creative flow state when the inspiration is there, and extremely satisfying to produce something enduring at the end of it. I don't know if Belief will even be remotely successful or appealing to people, but who knows?? I'm certainly finding it entertaining!

I've been trying to get to the point where I can show off a preview video. I don't mean it's nearly done - that's a long way off yet - but the basic mechanics are all there, and a visual demo should do a much better job of showing how it works - and why it's interesting! - than rambling text posts can. I imagine only a handful of people would care about the video, but setting myself a goal like that is really motivating me to work rather than procrastinating too much.

I was hoping to have the video finished by the end of the weekend at the latest, but a bunch of unforseen bugs have come up (some which exist in the build version but not the editor version for reasons unknown), so fixing those has eaten up a lot of time. I haven't posted in like a WHOLE WEEK though, gasp, so I thought I should at least say something. I tend to post a lot during periods when motivation is lacking, but when I'm focusing on working, I go into even more of a mental cocoon than usual and block out everything else.



Since I've been using my weird tool thing to record EVERYTHING I DO like a madman, I can see some interesting things about what I achieved once I put my mind to it:

This burst of motivation and inspiration hit last Monday (the 4th), and I made the whole tile-based editor, tileset, and general technical mechanics in just under three hours (though I was making use of a lot of what I'd made previously, both in terms of code and previously solved mental problems).

On Tuesday, I spent the morning making a custom water shader, and the rest of the day adding vertical 'layers' to the map system - since it's 3D, I felt I shouldn't restrict myself to one flat level like I did with my old 2D maps - and a huge amount of time trying to get ladders between the layers working (and they're still buggy!). That - just getting ladders working - took up the entirety of the Wednesday and much of Thursday too. It's noteworthy because it seems like such a trivial thing, but took so much longer than some of the things that seem much more substantial. I wonder if this is often the case with development, where stupid little nothings eat into the development time much more than the things you'd expect.



On Friday, I composed two full pieces of music in the morning, before noon; that's the kind of thing I would have expected to take much longer, if I wasn't the one doing the creating. They really improve the appeal of the game, for me at least. Now it feels more real, more alive, more complete. The rest of the day was spent doing uninteresting technical things like a visual 'battle' transition and bug fixes.

Yesterday, Saturday, I made four different NPC character models and their respective skillsets (though they were derived from base models). It takes under two hours to design and add one; this is important for me to keep in mind for when I add more. I even had enough time left over to make the entirety of the 'story' - and its environment and encounters - that'll be shown in the video. Using a tile-based environment system makes adding environments way easier than if I had to model each one separately! They look more charming, too.

This morning, I fixed bugs and modelled the battle background. I've been trying to record a video in the few hours since then, but the balancing of the encounters is rough, and whether I win or lose seems too random. Balancing takes time! Especially with this, where the encounters aren't just mashing Attack to defeat a bunch of weak Lava Goblins or whatever. The interplay between each of the skills takes things in interesting directions, though it makes it difficult to get them just right.

I'm not sure if anyone other than me finds this interesting at all, but if I'm able to achieve this much in a week, it shouldn't take too much longer to actually finish the whole thing... once I put my mind to it.



Hopefully I'll have another post with the video in a day or two! Then when I've reached that personal milestone, I'll focus wholly on Sindrel Song publishing stuff until I get to the point where all I can do is wait. I can't imagine that'll take very long though, surely just a few hours once I get into the right state of mind.