Bound City DevBlog, July 2022 – Deadlining

The end of June and beginning of July were dominated by travel, several trips in quick succession over about 3 weeks, over which I made very little progress on the project: Perhaps a few ideas popped up, a plan or two was hatched, a facet thought over and refined, but nothing concrete. I finally got back home and to work again on the 11^th, but it was pretty slow going for some time afterwards. Eventually I was able to focus enough to settle down and tackle the title screen.

For a while I had conceived of the initial title screen as being a full-screen illustration that could double as a promotional image, which I shared as a work-in-progress last week. However shortly after that I realized that such an image was too detailed to be suitable – something a little starker and more minimalistic would surely fit the tone of the game better. I started working on a simple logo to be the centerpiece of this screen. I was inspired by the Final Fantasy logos, which are mostly just text over a simplified thematic background image, but I struggled a bit with the text – and continue to do so. I like embedding some of the game’s symbolism into the text characters, but it’s very difficult to know when doing so how much is too much – and frankly I don’t have too steady a hand when it comes to design, so doing structured shapes like letters doesn’t come very easily to me. I’m reasonably satisfied with where it’s at now, but will certainly be revising it more as I go.

Now that I had the basic look of the title screen done, I began work on the menu design and programming. This is an aspect of the project that I probably went a little overboard on considering how far the game is from completion. However, my goal at the moment is to make a small slice of the game at a more-or-less finished level of quality, and that includes handling things like saving, changing audio levels, rebinding controls, and so forth. Over a couple of weeks I got all of that set up, along with the logic for playing the intro cutscene and starting a new game or resuming an old one. There were a lot of little challenges and nuisances along the way, particularly when it came to working with Unity’s input system and text input interfaces, but no huge derailing obstacles.

There’s a number of visible issues here that still need to be fixed, but they’re mostly relatively minor. I’m particularly pleased with the name input screen: Though it was primarily a compromise with Unity’s uncooperative built-in text input systems, this screen will probably be helpful when it comes time to port the game to other platforms – well, it may be the exact opposite if and when it has to be translated to other languages, but that’s a pretty abstract problem to have to worry about now. Along the way I also had to rework how the save profiles worked – which is more a side-effect of how sloppily I had programmed them initially than anything I can really blame Unity for. The details of what had to be fixed are too specific to be of interest, but the upshot is that I built a new system for quickly throwing together reusable save files for repeatedly testing particular sections, which I think will pay dividends as the project expands.

Additionally, I wrapped up the music for the title screen and intro cutscene. This was mostly done as of last update, but I polished up a few bits I wasn’t happy with and completely reworked the title segment to be quieter and more minimalistic to accompany the title illustration.

The first minute or so is the title music, the couple of minutes after is for the intro cutscene. The illustrations and scripting for this sequence have yet to be completed – and, frankly, are still incomplete enough to be actively embarrassing to share, so I won’t be revealing all that just yet. I can, though, share the current script for the intro:

The night never ends.
Everything has become stagnant. 
The apocalypse happens in slow motion.

No one can remember 
when The Tower first appeared, 
but it keeps growing taller. 

The faces of those who 
have disappeared are found 
etched into the bricks at its base.

From it exudes a madness 
that pulls people in. 
An unrelenting tide.

We can all feel it now, 
the urge to lie down at its base 
and to become one with it. 

Some succumb, walk to the tower, 
are never seen again,
except in its bricks

Some change, 
becoming violent, 
aimless, monstrous,

The rest of us wait 
for this cursed night to end
Will this night ever end?

I cannot stand it any more.
I am done with waiting. 
This cannot go on.

I woke up and I knew.
I am the hero;
I am the one who will end this.

There is an evil behind this pain.
There is a heart to that evil.
And I am the one who will stab it.

The emphasis will probably shift a bit, there may be more ideas I want to try to incorporate, but the rhythm and tone are probably similar to the finished product.

As a final minor tweak, I also added zone marquees. These are a little detail I always really liked in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – and I think a lot of other people must have liked them too, because they’ve shown up in a lot of games since. Whenever an area is entered, the name of that area appears for a few seconds on-screen. I think this helps add a little extra tone and identity to each section of the game, makes it easier to remember where a player has and hasn’t been – particularly players who, for one reason or another, can’t hear the zone music, probably the most immediately recognizable aspect of each area.

With the title screen completed, this suddenly feels much realer and more solid as a game, something dramatically closer to a finished professional project, even as it has a long way to go. I feel closer to having this initial vertical slice done than ever before – close enough at this point that I’m going to try to set myself a deadline! Deadlines, as a productivity tactic, can be very useful but also can easily backfire: If they’re too soon they can lead to desperation, burnout, and cut corners; if they’re too late (I assume this happens sometimes, probably) they can lead to confusion and project bloat. I think declaring that this vertical slice will be done at the end of this month is likely to be just soon enough that I will be forced to really get my ass in gear and focus on high-priority tasks, rather than meander here and there getting secondary tasks and nice-to-haves done, as is frequently my habit.

Here’s approximately what remains to be done, and how long I think it will take:

Requirements:

• Title Menus fixes and sounds
  • 1 day
• Intro cutscene (illustrations semi-polished, timeline scripting)
  • 5 days
• Carnifex boss battle polish, pre/post-battle scripting, death sequence
  • 3 days
• Background layer interface improvements and finish
  • 3 days (I’ve done two of these days already and seem to be on-track)
• Finished NPC dialogue and implementation
  • 3-5 days
• Beginning of game sequence concept/dialogue/scripting* *I’m still not sure exactly what this scene is going to look like so it will require some experimentation and brainstorming
  • 2-5 days
• Placeholders/blockers for unimplemented content
  • 0-1 days

Thus in total I’m estimating about 17-21 days of work to get all this stuff done. Right now I’m working on the project 4-5 days a week, and there’s 4 weeks and 3 days in this month, so I have 18-23 days available – so this all ought to be feasible. Of course this is assuming that I stick to normal work patterns and that nothing goes drastically over or under schedule, neither of which are necessarily safe bets! On the off-chance that things go remarkably well and I’m ahead of schedule, there are plenty of things on the nice-to-have side of things that I can add as time allows:

• Mini-boss (Requires a placeholder if unimplemented)
  • 2-3 days
• Death Illustration(s)
  • 1-3 days each
• Giant Flea enemy development and placement in existing areas
  • 2 days
• Overlook sequence concept/dialogue/scripting (Requires a placeholder if unimplemented)
  • 2-4 days
• Various in-game documents providing a little extra context and history for characters and areas
  • 1-4 days
• Additional music (Beginning sequence, special sequence, mini-boss, Carnifex conversation)
  • ???
• Polish/improvement passes on enemy behavior and special effects
  • 2-5 days

I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting, but you get the basic idea here. I think I’m in the sweet spot where a deadline is neither redundant nor unrealistic, so I think it’s time to take a stab at it. I won’t beat myself up over it if it doesn’t work out, but I’ll give it a solid try. If I hit this mark, that will be 17 months from the start of this project to this demo version: Obviously way longer than I ever thought it would take, but nevertheless an exciting milestone. From here, I’ll be looking into finding some way of leveraging this work into an advance to take care of living expenses while I finish the project – from what I can tell, running some rudimentary numbers on what’s left to do and how long it will take, I’m probably at least another 17 months out from finishing, and it would make my life and the lives of others around me a lot easier if I could actually pull in money during that time. Of course, I have no idea how realistic such a deal is: That’s a problem for tomorrow me to figure out.

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