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It's Called Divine Dreams Now

7 years ago705 words

I've been working some more on the project I mentioned in my previous post. I've written the first two scenes, and composed music for them too! I'd be interested to hear what you make of it.



I've replaced the previous, temporary title ("After Life") with "Divine Dreams", which is similar to "Taming Dreams" because I suppose I'm exploring similar territory, since that's what interests me. It's a title with many meanings, all of which are appropriate, which I like.

It was nice to have a reason to compose some new music for the first time in like two years, maybe more (the last thing I composed was the soundtrack for Taming Dreams). Making music was always one of the most important and satisfying (if not 'enjoyable') aspects of games development for me, though I expect other people to care much less than me about it. We usually like things we've made because we made them, whereas to other people they lack that emotional resonance and will never be as appealing, probably. You can mute this music using a button in the upper right corner.

(Some people apparently mute games and listen to their own music while playing them. This seems bizarre and irritating to me, almost offensive, since the soundtrack - in my opinion - plays as important a role in scene-setting as the graphics. But each to their own. Some people care more about mechanics than immersion, I suppose.)

In many ways, I could say that this project is essentially me distilling my creative efforts, focusing on the bits that made me want to make things in the first place and discarding the rest. I'm aware that what I like about the things I make is probably very different to what other people liked, though; the mechanics and actual gameplay probably appealed to people more than the world or music. But that's so much harder to make.

Anyway, I won't say much about this Divine Dreams thing; I already said a lot in the previous post. What I'd like to hear though is what you think of these first two scenes ('Worried' and 'Sam Sara', in that order). They're meant to serve as an introduction to the story and characters, so I'd like to hear if they're effective for you. I don't mean that I want to hear some objective analysis about what 'people' might think or what I've done wrong. I'd rather hear what you think, personally... and not just criticisms either, as that's completely discouraging and doesn't help. (Past experiences are why I'm saying this.)

Oh, I will say though that it's not as finished as I'd like, so far. I intend the characters to have varying poses and expressions (as I said in the previous post), but I've yet to add those because of frustration with my art skills. They'll probably drastically change the feel of the conversations when I do add them, and I really wanted to add them first for that reason, but it might take a while for me to draw the poses so I'd rather ask for feedback while I work on that. The website is also very bare-bones; things like that will grow over time.

(And the whole thing still looks ugly and works badly on mobile browsers.)

Thank you in advance for your feedback. I'll refrain from going into my own critiques and concerns, otherwise I'd influence your opinions and be writing all day.

You can find it at ∞ divinedreams.net ∞ (because both 'divinedreams.com' and 'divine-dreams.com' are taken in annoying ways).

If you see some HostGator page talking about setting up name servers, just check back later; it takes a while for new domains to properly propagate, apparently (though it's currently working for me).



Also, there seems to be some issue with Disqus that a few people have mentioned on previous posts where comments don't post properly if you copy and paste them as a big chunk of text all at once. I'm not sure how to get around this other than typing a comment in rather than pasting it, but perhaps it's something I need to look into.