Alora Fane

I'm still working away at stitching together the intro sections of Atonal Dreams, and also this week I started on a side project based on Alora Fane: Creation!

I might make a habit of writing these on Fridays instead of either Saturday or Sunday since that seems to work better for me!

This week, I intended to clean up the existing dialogue scenes I had for the Sprouting Isle area (the 'tutorial island' where the game originally started). "I should be done in a day or two!", I naively thought. Instead, I spent the whole week just fixing up the single battle conversation thing with Pierce. Isn't this how it always goes? Things take too long!!

I had to rewrite a lot of it since what I had from before didn't make sense with what I'd added in the nightmare intro, which took time, but most of my time was spent just adding and fixing various annoying little technical things, like ensuring a particular dialogue command spawns a creature and resets the turn order properly... Lots of annoying little things that really add up. Game dev in a nutshell, that.

I've been wondering about this scene, though. First, the degree to which it's necessary; now I've essentially got two back-to-back intros, which might be too annoying or repetitive. Originally this scene introduced concepts like basic battles and taming, but those are now both in the nightmare bit as well. I've made use of this scene's events to further the narrative in some way, but I wonder if anyone would actually care about that at this early point where they're unlikely to retain much anyway.

I've also been wondering about how much dialogue is too much. Pierce in particular prattles on quite a bit! And I hope it'd be amusing at least, but I'm concerned it'd just drag on. Makes me wonder what people would be hoping to get out of the experience though; if you're playing for a narrative experience, then isn't more dialogue better? If you're only playing for a gauntlet of battles, you could skip it anyway. But I'm assuming most people are somewhere in the middle, and they'd want some dialogue, but not too much. Hmm.

I have mixed feelings about these battle cutscenes in general. In MARDEK, conversations and battles were distinct; I don't think characters COULD talk during battle? So maybe that felt a bit hollow, but keeping them separate definitely decreased the time it took to make the game. I feel that what I'm doing here with these dialogue-packed encounters is more immersive and narratively pleasing, but it's also taking much longer to make.

But then again, I'm also being more precious and I suppose perfectionistic about the dialogue writing here, trying to make every line count or mean something or be amusing, trying to make everything flow as well as I can, whereas in MARDEK I think I just wrote out the first thing that came to mind and didn't edit it at all? I can't remember though! This incessant tweaking is probably the norm though; why else would screenplays take several people years to write? And yet despite the constant fiddling around, I still worry that what I've got doesn't flow well!

Oh well... The full extent of a dialogue scene is the sort of thing that's not really possible to communicate unless you actually play through it, so hopefully the next alpha test won't be TOO far off and we can find out what people think then (though with Christmas looming just over the horizon, I wonder whether that'll end up getting in the way).

The dialogue I've already written for this Sprouting Isle area has stuff like this aspect of Collie's character, which I've been wondering whether to phase out for a while; I'd forgotten about it while caught up writing the nightmare bit, where that side of her isn't really shown. I'm not sure! I know some people here don't like it, but what might the average player think?

Other than that, I also started working on a project I talked about in more than one blog post recently: a remake of sorts of Alora Fane: Creation.

It's early days yet so there's not much to show - and I've already posted what I do have in public posts on ∞ my Patreon ∞ - but I might make a habit of including progress about this side project in these weekly updates if I stick with it.

I've built a simple map builder/editor which creates procedural meshes with simple pixel textures. I like it so far! Though obviously there's still a lot left to do.

The pixel tile textures - ripped from AFC - were meant as placeholders, but I liked them enough to consider using pixel textures as a deliberate style. I wondered how I could use them for the characters, and experimented a bit:

I imagined that these facial features could be easily switched out by the quest/tale/whatever creator when customising their NPCs. Also still needs much work!

I hoped to do more on that this week, but I'm still figuring out how best to manage my time between several different things.

I've been trying to limit my work on Atonal Dreams to 3 focused hours a day, which seems to be going well for my mental health and focus, though I'm concerned about how long it'll take to finish (though 3 consistent hours a day would be faster than 6 or 8 hours full of procrastination and mind-draining reluctance).

I also intended a few weeks ago to assign a 'social' slot to my days where I'd try and actually respond to things or engage with the world... which lasted a whopping two days or so before a depression spike got in the way, and I've been struggling to respond to anything since then! Ugh. There are a couple of friends whose messages I've been meaning to reply to for weeks, and think about every day... but then continue to put off because the effort feels beyond me, or something. Damned diseased mind.

And I still need to decide on what computer to get!! I'll likely end up using one of the sites that a couple of people linked to, where you can select parts that they assemble - seems a nice medium point between building my own and getting one completely pre-made? - but I keep procrastinating about it because it's a big decision and something that I 'have' to do, so it's engaging the same part of my mind as homework assignments, and all the reluctance that comes with that. I keep telling myself I'll devote an afternoon to it "today"... only to instead spend every one doing something else.

Though I remember something I read about procrastination many years ago, which roughly said that if you have several things you need to do and have been putting off, then you might be inclined to work on one because it means you'd be avoiding working on the others. I've been productively procrastinating in that way - yesterday I composed a piece of music, for example - so that's not nothing, right? Right?!?

(I still need to upload more of those music albums...)

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