Posts Tagged ‘ Deadly Premonition

The Last Street

It’s been another really productive week.  In fact, content has gone in so fast I’m playing Lone Survivor and it’s different every time!  I must say, despite the stress and exhaustion, I’m really happy with this part of the game.  It’s a chance to use all the skills and mechanics the player has learnt up to this point, it’s a lot less linear than the other areas, there are multiple solutions to how to get from A to B…

There are two rooms which actually have a mini-challenge in them You can repeat, because the idea of the city is to stock up on resources before entering the final level.  One of these gives random loot which is a lot of fun, the other is a place where you can stock up on a different commodity, or trade things, much like an earlier room (cryptic at all?)

The city itself is really important to the plot in a visual sense. I’m leaving a lot of clues around.  There is actually about 30% more background art than there was two weeks ago, to give you an idea of how much my drawing claw aches.

All that’s left to paint and script are three locations, which leaves just under two weeks this month to add:

– A new enemy.

– A couple of cutscenes and a ‘boss sequence.’

– Extend the parallel story arcs which begin in the first 2/3 of the game (for characters you can revisit, the radio, the diary etc.)

– … before starting on the final level (whose location I can’t reveal!)

Anyway, I don’t often write down the specifics of what I do on this blog, I tend to leave those on devlogs, such as on TIGsource… but I thought I’d share every stage of the process from now until completion, once a week if possible, as a kinda motivating factor.

It’s sooo hard to keep up the urge to push onward, when evey day you’re making a tiny dent on this terrifyingly huge list…  But breaking it down helps, and I think my setting milestone deadlines is also the right thing to do for the project, as it’s a game that’s in danger of attempting to include simulations of pretty much everything (I have a toothbrush item drawn, for example.  I’d definitely add shaving if I could – although it would be hard to show visible without You’s mask.  Deadly Premonition flies perhaps?)

I’ve decided I can easily release the game in a tighter form, and add additional ways to look after You, sidequests and so on, without throwing the balance of the game off, at a later stage.  I’m still going to put in everything I realistically can, though.

Next week I’ll try and share some behind-the-scenes stuff, to show you how it’s all put together.  I’ve been meaning to do this a long time, and if I write it down here, I may feel guilty enough that I have to do it!

Daunting Door

For the last six months, I’ve been ‘just about to start the city’ environment in Lone Survivor.  Instead I’ve been honing the first three worlds to a finished standard, gradually adding, changing and even dropping mechanics.  The game has got a lot wider, but very little longer.

The IGF version I put together, as with all the others since before my Indiecade entry, ended with You stepping out of the Wing Court Apartments onto the street for the first time.  That door has always led nowhere, and that fact has become increasingly daunting.

Well I’ve finally broken that barrier, and I’m working hard on the new area.  It took a long time to work out the scope, and eventually the map I was going to use.  It’s still likely to change as I have a time-budget now I can’t really afford to run over, so cuts will be made if need be to simply get this game out the door!  There’s plenty of stuff to do in LS already, so I’m not going to pad the content out if it doesn’t need it either.

So in the city I plan on having a couple more sidequests like the coffee ones.  Even though these are not crucial to beating the game, and add time to development, the flavour they add I think is essential to the game’s subtext.  My inspiration is definitely Deadly Premonition in this respect, a game I loved very dearly.  In fact the more this project rolls on, the more I realise I’ve subconsciously been influenced by its mechanics – not just the coffee!

Outside Superflat World