I haven't written here in a long time (haven't had anything to write about!). Long story short, I'm picking up the game development hobby again and will be cross-posting progress from our devlog. The original is here: https://www.essembi.com/devlog/2-6-update-social-media-world-map-story-tool-animations-icons/​

Feedback always welcome!

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You know, making a game can be a lot of fun. So much fun that, when you hit a groove, it can really push aside playing games as your primary preferred pass-time. What the experience also does, in its own funny way, is make you blindingly self conscious when you play other peoples’ games. It’s really hard to avoid that feeling that everyone else is making gold and you’re just building your own little turd sandwich in the corner. When that feeling shows up, which happens pretty much every day (or night in our case), you end up in the constant struggle between abandoning all hope or pouring everything you can into the project. After-all, when you’ve got a day job that pays the bills, why do this thing anyways? And then you remember that it’s a life long dream and you just have to push through it even if what you’re building never amounts to much. If you’re in it for the right reasons, it shouldn’t be about making something go viral.. it should be about making something that you love.

Social Media

We’re not big social media fans. If you haven’t seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix, for me it reinforced all the reservations I had about social media. I think, generally speaking, the platforms are dominated by divisive keyboard warriors who are trying their hardest to convince us that we’re more different than we are alike (when in reality the opposite is true). My opinion is that life’s too short for the amount of hate that is spewed around openly on social platforms. The reasonable voices of the vast majority of people are drowned out by the loud few. Luckily, I think society is also starting to come around to this problem and hopefully it’ll get better in the future.

That has nothing to do with video games, though. What matters when it comes to video games is you’ve got to get the word out. You need to reach people. You need to get critical feedback and use that to fuel the creative process. You can’t expect to build something that people actually like in your own little vacuum. Because of that, we set up all the standard social media accounts this week and will be updating them regularly. Please follow along!

Facebook | Twitter | Discord | YouTube

Progress This Week

We got a ton done this week. One of the things I like about this indy side gig is that you get to wear a lot of hats. When you work at a mid-sized or larger company, people turn into specialists. That’s just the nature of the beast. On small teams, you have to juggle a lot of different things. You don’t have the resources to specialize. While we do intend to bring some other folks into the team to plug some of our gaps as time goes on, I will say I enjoy being able to bounce around. Don’t feel like coding today? Work on a model or the story. Don’t want to look at a screen? Sketch some designs for monsters or the environment. Variety is the spice of life after-all!

New Animations

We recently ditched our original temporary player model (affectionately termed “Generic Man”) for the Amber player model that’s in all of our screenshots. While this is a good thing in general, it’s created some challenges in that all of the previously completed animations need to be re-done. There’s a lot of them, too, and it can be difficult to work on the motivation to do something again that you’ve previously gotten done.

The goal at this point is to chip away at a couple of them a week until we’re done. This week we hit the Axe and Pickaxe animations. Still a little rough around the edges but I like where they’re headed. Check out this video on our YouTube below. Full disclosure: sound quality is a little rough (that’s an area where we’ll need some help).

https://youtu.be/99P6KRmKoAM

Icons / Painting Video

Sarah got three more icons done this week: Lettuce, Pipe, and Valve. I love the style of our icons. She paints them all by hand on a drawing tablet. On average an icon takes her about 45 minutes. When it’s all said and done there will be somewhere around 1,000 icons.. One at a time!

Check out this 16x time lapse of her painting the valve icon. She makes it look easy.

https://youtu.be/CSzXyzBlbEo

Story / World Map

One of my other dreams has always been to write a novel, but I always lose steam. I don’t think that one will ever happen, but I really enjoy writing. Two evenings this week I wrote two pages of story. I had gotten that from a podcast I was listening to recently that basically said to write two pages, even if they’re bad. It’s important to keep the momentum.

We’re currently trying to figure out how Amber ends up on the island to begin with and what the over-arching story arc is going to be. It’s a tricky challenge but it’s a lot of fun. With that, we’re also working on the world map and trying to figure out different events and how access to different areas will be controlled by progressing through the story. In a game like ours, there’s a ton of progression and balancing that has to be achieved with creates some interesting, fun challenges.

When I wasn’t looking, Sarah snapped a pic of me in my usual dress code (since March at least) working on the map. I started by cutting the paper up into 12×12 squares and sketching it out at a high level. Each square is then going to get a full sheet defining it in greater detail. Each sheet is 32m x 32m meaning the whole world will be about 384m x 384m or close to 150k square meters.

–and that’s all for now! Thanks for following along!

-Sheridan