Well, I’m back to working on EverEnding. That side-project ended up being exactly what I didn’t want it to be, an excuse to work on a whole bunch of tools without ever making an actual game to go with them. We’ll call it a learning experience. What did I learn? I learned that I have a habit of avoiding the scary unquantifiable parts of a project in favor of working on parts that feel like safe investments – that I feel, somewhere inside myself, that if I pour my efforts into making tools and systems that that’s a safer gamble to me than pouring them into the actual core of a game. Art is scary! The more time you have to put into making it, the scarier it gets – in the first place, making art is like putting a message in a bottle and letting it out to float on the sea, and it only gets more stressful when you spend more than a year creating that message. The solution is not, I think, to spend another year developing new bottle and paper and ink production facilities to make creating each message that tiny bit less terrifying, but it’s an appealing option to take whenever it presents itself.
Oh, also in addition to those big existential questions I guess I learned a lot about making a scripting system and working with OpenFL. So that’s good too.
Once I decided I’d basically dead-ended, it was clearly time to head back to EverEnding. However, I’d left the project in uh… not a great place. I’d completed about half of the OpenFL port, and lots of systems weren’t running and I’d left lots of bugs in the systems that were running. Eventually, after lots of debugging and deliberation, I ended up rolling back a number of the changes I’d made and reverting back to Adobe AIR… for now. The reason for this is that switching to OpenFL would not only require me completely rewriting all my rendering systems, it would also make a couple of the special effects I’m planning extremely difficult. I really want to be actually working on a game now, so I figure rather than resolving all these issues right away I can defer them for a while. A big thing that enabled that is that OpenFL now supports Adobe AIR as a target platform, so with a few checks in my code to handle cases that are unique to OpenFL (most of which I’d already implemented) I can have something that can run on that version of OpenFL with no changes and, perhaps soon after, build to other OpenFL target platforms. Even if I’m not prepared to implement OpenFL just yet, with my experimentation here and with the side-project I think I have a pretty good idea how I’ll handle it when that time comes.
So, back to working on EverEnding: There were a few big design decisions I’d been deferring, one of which was specifically how to handle the narrative of the game and the other was creating some sort of special moves the player could unlock over the course of the game. I think I figured out a good system for creating a narrative in the style of sort of a story-book, with narration synced to music and text fading in – this is probably something I’ll want to prototype, though, to make sure it actually feels right. The special moves are like 75% figured out, but only the smallest slice of that stuff will be in the first chapter of the game, which is the one I’m focusing on right now, so I can figure out the last of that later. After I got that stuff basically sorted, I created a big task-list for creating chapter 1 of the game. I already had a task-list, but I made one that was bigger and more thorough, and had accompanying time estimates for each task. I tried to overshoot every estimate, but if they’re accurate than I have something in the region of 1300 hours to put into the project before the first chapter is complete. That’s a lot. Then again, I’ve put that much time into TF2, and I didn’t even make that game.
I have my work cut out for me. I’m going to start scheduling myself a bit more strictly again, though I may only get a few days to work to that schedule before I have to leave for a family thing, but with all this down and planned out I feel – well, not exactly optimistic, but determined I guess. I just turned 35, I’m starting to get the tiniest bit of grey in my beard, I got a blood pressure monitor for my birthday. I really do need to actually finish a project.