Eve DevBlog 27: What a Twist!

This was a pretty good week. I managed to eventually struggle my way through the first part of chapter 3, The Descent, a task which proved to be far more difficult and greater in scope than I had imagined it to be. I really like the ideas I came up with for it, though, at least conceptually. I must admit that I am a bit worried about actually doing the programming and art to implement the imagery I’ve concocted for it, but that’s a problem for another day.

I’ll figure it out.

I also got some more animation done. I got some turning frames implemented that transition fairly naturally, though not perfectly smoothly, both from a run and from a stop. It’s a bit tricky because I’m having to balance making it look good against making it work from different places in the animation cycle. This is one of those problems that’s unique to interactive projects, since other animation knows its timing ahead of time.

Yes, the title was a dumb pun. Anyway, if anyone knows of a good article or text on how to approach this subject in the realm of 2d animation, please let me know.

As I progress, I still have the second half or so of chapter 3 to plan out, which is going to be my main task for this weekend. Writing the stories for the game is done, which is awesome but also sad because they were really fun to write. That said, I’m probably going to have to do a fair bit of reworking for them, and I will be writing a bunch of other incidental lines a bit further down the line when the levels are a bit more fleshed out. I’m also going to be continuing this animation work, and developing crouching and standing animations. In the realm of less fun work, both to do and to talk about, I need to get all of these notes transcribed and then add everything done since the middle of chapter 2 to the big task list.

Thanks for reading!

The night was lonely, for her children had died long ago, drowned in the endless poisonous haze of war, and had left her all alone. What few of her friends still survived had become so familiar to her that there was no companionship, they were just lonely together. Whenever the sun would leave, she enveloped the world in her wings and watched as the people beneath her waged their endless wars, had their love affairs and their hate affairs, and wrote their stories into the sand.

So many of them were lonely, too.

She had been following the sun for an eternity, and the things she saw made her sick with anger and sorrow. Why would one create children just to be orphans? Why would you comfort them with warmth just to take it away again?

The night began to adopt these orphans, bringing one after another with her to become her faerie children. They played with each other all throughout the night, every night, and lit up the sky– but they could never stay in one place for long before the sun came and chased them away.

She wished she had the strength to fight off the sun, the power to make this world her home, or the power to create a new and better world–

New worlds do not come easily, and even with all those she rescued she was not nearly strong enough to fight the sun. She sent her new children out to find more, to find siblings, but there were simply not enough orphans. Even in this lonely place, people still connected themselves to each other, somehow, a chain of buoys in a heaving ocean.

What was she to do?

She did not tell them to do it. Her faerie-children, they began to kidnap newborns and raise them as brothers and sisters. She did not tell them to do it, but she didn’t stop them either. The new parents were distraught with grief, orphaned by their own children, and soon were taken in as well to play in the night.

The night orphanage began to consume the world. She hoped to create of herself a sunless paradise of night without end, without sleep, where all creatures cast their own light and their own warmth and all were as family to one another.

Was it her fault that those who remained, who saw their fellow inmates disappear without a trace, came to fear the hungry night? Was it her fault that they lit the great bonfire and created, of themselves, a sun? She did not foresee such foolishness, but was caught up in it, along with everyone else, and with them banished to the afterlands.

Her children– many did not make the trip. These were trapped in the interstice between the heartlands and the afterlands, where they grew feral and vicious. Thus it was that Pandemonium, the night orphanage, established herself at the outer borders of the afterlands, to protect her children and to protect from them, to rehabilitate them, that they might once more someday join her in the quest for a second paradise.