The main thing I want to show this week is a video of Atonal Dreams' intro bit in preparation for a maybe-soon demo, which I'd very much like to hear your thoughts about! I also added a minimap, and uploaded the OSTs of two Raider games as the Album of the Week.
Atonal Dreams Progress
Apparently I showed off an early version of the intro scene with Pierce in ∞ this post ∞, 3 months ago. I've mostly left it alone since then to focus on other things; I wanted to finish a draft of the script in its entirety first, for one, so then I'd have a very clear idea of every step of the story for foreshadowing/lore consistency reasons.
I've currently written half of the script, but I thought it'd be wise to use that to build the demo I've been talking about for ages rather than waiting until I've finished the whole draft. I might be able to get to that point in a week or two (we'll see), but the first steps were to apply the new script to this intro scene, plus I needed to do some technical tweaks and additions to get it all working as it should.
Here's a video of what I have so far:
I showed an earlier version of this (I've since made a few tweaks) to my Patreon patrons a few days ago, and... well, to be entirely honest, I suppose it set off various unpleasantly familiar mental issues stuff. While working on this in my little bubble, I was so happy with it; I'd read through the written script and be brought to tears with happiness! But when the response - which wasn't bad at all! - wasn't the same kind of enthusiastic excitement (and why would it be?), I suppose it was just deflating and got me worrying that maybe people won't like it, maybe I've written something that'd count as wrongthink and get me cancelled and all that... I've talked about it a lot before. I suppose if you've been through any mental trauma, it doesn't take much to set it all off again, plus showing off any kind of creation to potentially-judging eyes is always a tough thing for sensitive little sausages such as myself.
So watching this back now, I just feel... nothing, mostly. The dark thoughts didn't last long at least, but now they've combined with the light ones to leave something more dull and grey. So I don't know how good this is at all (though watching it for the dozenth time is always going to be different to a first viewing anyway).
EDIT: I just wanted to add a little something to this bit since it probably seemed like I had particular issues with something someone had said in response on Patreon, which wasn't the case and I feel bad for the implication! It's less about what anyone said or didn't, and more like... just the thought that other people have even seen what I've been working on triggers a whole bunch of insecurities that have built up over time, especially with the idea of being 'cancelled' in some way. Seems I'm not the only creator who's concerned about this, and I wonder if it's just unavoidable. (End edit)
One thing it got me wondering is how long an intro should be, or how long is too long. The original plan was to immediately plunge the player into a battle, because I always got impatient through RPG intros and couldn't pay attention until I got to experience free gameplay, but the written script translated to more time than I expected it to... Though for this video, I read out all the lines under my breath to determine how long I should leave the text boxes up for, and it might be a lot quicker for someone in charge of their rate of progression.
I just did some timing tests to see how long it takes between clicking on the save slot and being able to run around in the field:
In the video, it's almost exactly 8 minutes.
While playing the game myself, it took 4:54, but notably it felt a lot quicker than watching a video passively.
In Skyrim (hardly a comparable example, but it was the first thing that came to mind), according to a random longplay I just found, it takes around 8 minutes before you can move of your own accord, though the character creation would take variable time, and the cinematography is obviously much more varied.
I also checked a longplay of FFVI - the second game that jumped to mind - and that takes something like 4-6 minutes before you take control? Though much of that is just watching credits, and the dialogue that there is is quite scant.
If you can think of other games with decent intros and you're inclined to do so, it'd be valuable if you could check the length of their intros either with a longplay, or with a stopwatch while playing them yourself!
What the intro's aiming to achieve makes a big difference though, of course. Atonal Dreams focuses on characters and lore; it's designed for the sort of players who - like myself - play games primarily for feelings of immersion. As such, most of the themes and lore details that the game would go onto explore are presented - or at least hinted at - here in some form; even the banter was carefully written to be reflections of deep psychology that'd play a story role later on.
There are a few tweaks I want to make which would cut down the length a bit; some lines are just unnecessary, or I feel they don't really work.
I'd like to know what you think, anyway. Does this interest or intrigue you? Do you like or care about the characters from what you've seen of them here? Do you feel it's too long? If you do, what sort of games do you prefer? What games do you feel had particularly good, gripping intros?
Getting that ready took much of the week (there were a lot of stupid technical things or bugs I had to sort out), though I also had time to add minimaps:
I figured the process out myself, and it only took a couple of hours; faster than I thought. The minimap is a bitmap procedurally-generated from the geometry, so it's pixelated and only shows basic elevation, but that seems good enough to me. It's cut up into 'rooms' which reveal themselves as you first enter them, and all monsters and treasure are marked.
I didn't give much thought to where it should go; I just put it in the bottom right because that's what felt natural to me. But when I showed it on Twitter, someone said it felt wrong to them, and that minimaps were usually in the upper right. This surprised me; I don't think I've ever seen a minimap at the top before! But then again I can't really remember where other games have had them. So I started a poll about it, and these are the results at the moment:
Very surprising to me! I wondered whether there was a super popular game like Minecraft that had the minimap there, but I was told that that game doesn't even have one without a mod. Someone else mentioned MMOs that have them there, so maybe it's that?
I don't play as many games as I should, but the most recent ones I did play, Animal Crossing New Horizons:
And Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity (which I'm currently in the middle of):
Both have their minimaps in the lower right, which is probably why it felt natural to me to put it there.
What would feel natural to you? And do you know why that might be, which games have it there?
Music Album of the Week
Like I said... at some point, I'm trying to arrange all my old music compositions into these albums on Bandcamp. This one's the first old game soundtrack, for Raider!
For whatever reason, I made two completely separate games, both called Raider. There was this one, which was one of my first Flash games, which I worked on between 2006 and 2008 but never finished or officially released (though I think I put it on Fig Hunter?):
And this pixel one, which I did release 2 out of the intended 5 chapters of, though they got a fairly meh response so I never bothered making the rest (I had the third mostly finished except for a boss):
I've never compiled their music into OSTs before or released them anywhere like this, as far as I know, and there are tracks here for unfinished parts of the games that I don't think I've released anywhere.
Apparently my approach to composition changed quite a bit between 2006 and 2009, and I'd say the music for the pixel Raider is still something I feel somewhat proud about, despite its imperfections. I remember some comments when I released the game on Kongregate about how good the music was (like someone saying it was too good to mute) that still stick pleasantly with me!
Both of these soundtracks were from around the time I made MARDEK and composed for that, so I'd say they're about the same in terms of quality.
'Converting' them from midis to wavs (by recording the midis as they played) took like 4 hours, especially since a few of the pieces use an excessive amount of instruments (I prefer minimal numbers of instruments these days), which didn't play back properly all at once, so I had to record the midi twice with half the instruments muted and layer the two recordings on top of each other... Quite a chore, though I'm glad to have the music in a more enduring and consistent form now, finally!
While I was intending to use art from the same years as the compositions for the album art as I did with the first two albums, this one's a painting I did of that character in 2013 for some reason.
Other Indie Games
Playing a new indie game each week is a habit I still need to get into! While playing Timelie last week, I was also slowly working my way through the aforementioned Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, but doing both at the same time was taking too long, so I've devoted this week to getting through that before starting another indie. I'm still not done though, despite spending 2-3 hours a day on it! I'm almost there, I think. I'll talk about it in a post when I am - and maybe it'll be as phenomenally popular as ∞ the Timelie one was ∞ (162 views currently) - but I will say that it's grown on me despite initial doubts and I'm quite enjoying it at the moment!
My indie game research this week involved watching a long video that I want to write a separate post about, since I've got a lot to say about it, so I'll do that!
I keep wanting to redesign this website a bit, so maybe I'll do that when I have the time. If you're here, how did you get here? Does anyone use the main page, or do you just get to the blog directly, or to specific posts when I announce them on Twitter or you get emails about them? Does it still look terrible on mobiles?
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