Eve DevBlog 39: TIGJam

Had a couple of off days this week, but made up for it with a run of programming days that ranged from okay to great and some solid writing progress. I’ve been working on figuring out animation issues, which also ended up pulling me into rewriting my character behavior code. Before, I had everything hard coded into the player character, but I’ve pulled all of that stuff out into a set of customizable behaviors for each different trait of movement. These can be modified separately to the character, and also triggered through code as well as being directly hooked up to player input.

Now: That was pretty good as a start. But today is, in fact, the first day of TIGJam, a gathering of independent game developers, and for the first time in a loooooong while was the only opportunity I’ve had to really focus on working on this game, free of any and all distractions. And work I did! I got all of the animation implementation code added into the movement behavior, which has the most complicated set of animation interactions, and even added a class to support transitions between different animations such that, once all of the starting and stopping animations are developed, it should be extremely easy to add them into the game. Since I’d been working for 8 or 9 solid hours I took a break after I got all of that working, but this is huge progress to make in a single day. I would have, under other circumstances, expected to spend a week or two getting all of this together. There’s still 2 and a half days of TIGJam left, and I hope to get as much or more achieved on these subsequent days!

Aside from programming, I have written out the story for the final area, a story which, aside from the beginning and the end, can be told in any order. I’ve also begun work on the compiled design document, a job which involves collating all of my notes for each area and then editing them together into a consistent style and tone– since I’ve discarded many of the ideas I had when I begun and have gotten a much clearer idea of what I want this game to be as I go this is particularly difficult for the earlier levels. I’m also in the process of taking the stories I wrote before, editing them to make them more succinct and consistent in tone, re-ordering them to an order I think is most interesting and, finally, chopping them up into segments and adding directions on where each segment is going to play. I haven’t gotten too far into that whole task, yet, but I’ve gotten far enough in now to know what the task is and that it’s going to be a fair bit more difficult than I’d anticipated. Still, with each step I get closer to something concrete, and my vision of Eve becomes that much clearer.

I’m excited to see what tomorrow will bring, as I continue to refocus on my work and really bring this game to life. Hopefully next week’s devblog will be even more packed with exciting progress and news!

Seven young sisters lived alone in the woods. Their father left long ago on business and never returned.

One day the youngest grew ill. Her sisters tried all they knew to cure her to no avail. They prayed for their father to return and cure her with his power but he never came. They buried her in the yard.

From her grave grew a strange tree, flat along the ground, white as bone. It grew in the shape of a door, and though they knew from death it grew and to death it lead it called to them each night.

One by one, they left their beds to enter the door down into the dirt. They were not ever seen again above the ground.

 

One sister ventured beneath and saw the Birdcage Row, the bars she spun about herself to keep herself safe and to hide her beasts from the world. She walked down it, seeing the bars that tore when the beast had grown too great to contain, or when some greed too great had torn them through to devour what was inside.

She fell asleep in a cage, there, and when she awoke it was all she knew. The silver lattice was so beautiful to her that she was blinded to the prison it comprised, and lived the rest of her days there, deep in the land of oblivion, believing herself to be free.

 

One sister ventured beneath and found the Sleeping Chamber. She awoke, then, in her own bed, certain that it had been a dream. And awoke again, and again. She went mad, trapped between a dream of the future, pressed underground, and a vast past that always ended in fuzzy failed memory.

She never awakes, now, for fear of the weight of responsibility that thought brings. Easier to commit oneself to the dream, to be secure in one’s own irrelevance, than to always be trying to be in two places at once.

 

One sister ventured beneath and fell into the sink of the Red Kitchen: A sea of churning blood, the massacred swaths of those she had killed or caused to never be born by existing and by surviving in this cruel world.

She struggled in the bloody mess and made a ship of bones, with a sail of skin. She became queen of that rancid sea, for it was either to embrace it or to drown in it. She sails it, hunting those who do not have the will to kill, or to accept that they must, and wears their teeth, and laughs, and dances.

 

One sister ventured beneath, into The Deep End and sank deep into wet dirt. The fingers of mud crawled through her hair and into her mouth and crushed her into the black depths of the earth. She sought nothing, and nothing is what she found, a nothing too great to be regarded without being consumed.

She is still there, her pure white bones looking up through the dirt, listening to the many footsteps of those waiting to join her. She is happy there, in the deep cold mud, and the dimly remembered light of a candle keeps her warmer and safer than our sun could ever keep us.

 

One sister ventured beneath with her friends, and found herself alone together with them in a tiny red room. They spent so long there that they began to breath in sync with one another, to have the same thoughts at the same time, until eventually each forgot that they were not the other and became one person.

And yet, every night, she dreams that her shadow speaks to her in different voices, the voices of people long ago consumed by a hungering mind. She wakes to find the pictures, drawn against the faded white walls of the red room, left there by an unknown but familiar-seeming hand.

One sister ventured beneath and found a Forgotten Study. She found a book, there, which told her of another book, which she also found. Each book led to the next, until the stacks piled up into the night sky.

She climbed the stack until the air grew thin and weightless, until one day she slipped and fell upwards. Now, she has only the last book she found, and reads it over and over, and somehow, for her, that’s enough.

The first and youngest sister ventured beneath before any of the others and planted the tree that would lead them on their way. She found for herself a paradise that only existed in her heart and, because it could never be, she came to know that she could never be.

The disease that took her was a poison she drank. The light of the sun could not have cured her: Her sisters prayed in vain. Her poison was her paradise, and she left a door in the earth to lead her sisters on the way. They never found her, but she will never know, for all is the same, one way or the other, where she is now.