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ADWU 16 - Next Steps?

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,516 words

I've spent the past couple of weeks looking into what the most sensible next steps might be, but it's still annoyingly unclear. Here's what I'm going to do next anyway, though.

I've only done a tiny amount of actual work on the actual game recently, so let's start with that so I actually have some images in this post. Actually.



I started adding these essence spirit things, which I talked about in the previous post. They're not finished yet, and I'm unsure about how exactly they should look, or whether they appear in battle or just on this screen. Their whole purpose is to provide stat boosts, and you 'feed' them glitter to power them up, so their physical presence is entirely cosmetic.

Here you can see the outline shader adding some white lines to the wings (which are rectangles with transparent textures) where they shouldn't be. How interesting.



I also added some little tweaks to this status screen to make it feel more complete. Showing - and naming - the character's element alongside all the others should help increase familiarity and reduce memorisation requirements. Same with the stats in the lower right. The red and purple values shows modifications from equipment and essences respectively. Not really necessary, but maybe interesting to see.



Mostly I've been doing other stuff. I took a week off for the sake of stress relief, since it was getting too hard to focus on anything and my mental health is poor enough at the best of times. Thankfully I have the freedom to take breaks when I need to rather than being overworked by an employer. I spent that week working on another project instead.

Then I spent a week looking into promotional stuff; I wrote three posts about that: ∞ (1) ∞ ∞ (2) ∞ ∞ (3) ∞

I'd very much prefer to spend the entirety of my time just doing the creative work, and I'd surely be a whole lot further along if that's what I was doing. But frustratingly that's not enough; even if I made a really appealing game, there's little chance of it earning enough to keep doing this because nobody would see it or be hyped enough to buy it instead of the many, many other games they could be buying (and there are SO many!). So some marketing is necessary, and it's something I'm in the process of figuring out. It's not something I can spend a couple of days skimming googled articles about and that's that. It took many months to get any good at programming, music composition, etc, and this will surely be the same.

I'm planning to do some marketing research for an hour every day from now on, or at least most days, though we'll see how that goes since I find it extremely unpleasant and can imagine coming up with excuses. I'd rather do it alongside development instead of just halting progress, though.

I've been a bit lost about exactly what to spend my dev time doing. I was aiming for a demo, but I don't even know whether releasing a demo would be a good idea. There are a lot of arguments for and against, and it seems to depend on the game and how well-known the creator is.

I've also been playing Undertale recently, finally, after avoiding it for years out of creative envy. I was under the impression that it was similar to stuff I've wanted to make, but obviously it was a little bit more financially successful. Now that I've finished my first playthrough, my opinion about it as a creative work isn't exactly ecstatically positive, and I'm more irritated than envious, though there are some appealing details I'd like to use as inspiration for how I can structure parts of Atonal Dreams. So now - before writing the in-game dialogue scenes - seems the best time to have played it, really. I'll post an entry with my thoughts about that soon (including impressions I made along the way; it'll probably be monstrously long).



So considering all that, here's what I have in mind:

The game is planned to have this format: you explore the overworld, then the underworld, then the drealm. The overworld consists of six smallish islands that you can navigate across the sea between.

The game begins with a battle against Pierce, and an exploration of the starting island until you get to the entry to the Beyond Ponderer monastery. It's blocked (by Pierce), though, and requires six 'keys' (not actually literal keys) to pass through. You have to go and collect these keys from the other (small) islands.

Originally I planned for there to be two encounters with Pierce: right at the start, then again when you'd got all the keys. After having played Undertale, however, I feel I should add several more brief encounters with him along the way.

Currently I have the first island decorated and populated with monsters, but that's all there is to it, just a series of monster battles. I'd been wondering whether to release this for testing so then we could see together whether people enjoy the battle system...

...But it might be better to instead add a few of those Pierce scenes to it, then release it for testing.

I think what I'll do is run that through ∞ my Patreon ∞, so if you're a $6 or $10 patron (I'll have to decide which is best), and you're interested, you could get access to this non-public alpha test/demo/whatever when I've actually made it.

As a side note, I've been particularly grateful lately about the people who support me on Patreon! I've not posted there in ages because I haven't had anything to post about, but maybe I could start posting other creative stuff? I'll ask on there. I check every creator's Patreon link I see these days, and I seem to be doing better than most. For example, it's not indie-game-related, but I saw ∞ this video (about some art tips) ∞ yesterday, from a channel with 409K subscribers, and ∞ their Patreon ∞ has 50 patrons compared to my 60, for $122 per month (for two people!) compared to my $327. I hope this means that what I'm doing really means something to people, and that really helps me feel motivated to keep doing it. I just hope Atonal Dreams can live up to that! That's why getting feedback along the way will be wise.

So I'll spend the next week or maybe two (hopefully not more than that, but who knows) working towards that.

Also inspired by Undertale, I rethought how interacting with allies on the field could work. Currently Savitr can talk to Collie, but she doesn't say much. The plan was to have it like MARDEK's P Dialogue, where you unlock new bits of dialogue as the story progresses or the character develops statistically, but instead what I'm going to do is have a branched dialogue tree with options to select. Nothing too extravagant, just maybe three or four questions that trigger different scenes that vary depending on the context, but hopefully it should help to add to the feeling of social immersion, of getting to know that person. This required some recoding of the conversation system, which I got about half way through yesterday, so I should hopefully be able to finish that early next week.

What else? Ah, right; I wanted to update the ∞ Atonal Dreams info page ∞ with newer screenshots and info. It's only been viewed 1184 times so far, so it's not like it'll make much difference to anything - and as such it's not been a high priority - but filling it out will involve making some pretty animated videos/gifs which I can also use to promote on Twitter and maybe Reddit eventually. I'd like to post there at least once before the end of the year! Maybe if I keep doing the promotion research every day, I'll figure out how best to do that.

Oh, and I should set up a Steam store page for the game, which having content for that should help with. This'll be how I'll run the alpha test, probably, plus it means that I can start accumulating wishlists ASAP which seems to be crucial. That'll take days in itself. I hate Steam's submission process!

For now, honestly I'm frustrated about being essentially stuck in this one spot for longer than I'd like. Making games never used to feel like this! Or maybe it did and I just can't remember. I remember very little about the MARDEK creative process! I look forward to breaking through this barrier and actually getting started on adding story stuff to the game rather than just battle mechanics and marketing research. Hopefully it'll start coming along smoothly once I get the ball rolling.