I’m starting this thread because we were talking in the QQ thread about how maybe we should talk more about our game development projects here.
I found out about Kate Barrett’s Open World Jam a few weeks after it started back in March 2022. Her pitch at the time was, hey, let’s try to make open world games fast, like in two months (I don’t remember the actual original timeframe, but it was under three months). I was like, yeah, cool. Let’s try it.
The jam has since been extended multiple times, as Kate hasn’t finished her own game yet (I did a little testing on it some months back and it’s very cool). I am still working on mine. The current deadline is April 29, though on the Discord, Kate’s suggested she’ll extend it again.
Anyway, back in 2018, I started this one project. It was supposed to be an improvised open world-ish adventure platformer thing, where the player could go one of four key ways. My thought was I’d spend a week on each branch and then another week tying it all together to make an exploration platformer in ~a month. That fizzled, but I thought I could maybe take a similar approach and create something quickly. I wanted to improvise the world as I went. So I borrowed some assets, including the player character, from that and set to work.
Here’s the first video I posted on March 31, 2022, to Twitter, showing off my day/night cycle, sped up. (It does look a little better/smoother now.)
At first I thought I was going to make a game without combat at all. that it would be an extension of the ideas in my game Temple of the Wumpus, all about seeking out knowledge to solve mysteries. But then I thought, well, maybe I’ll make it combat-optional. Then I made a spear animation I really liked. Then I made a bow and arrow animation I liked even more. Then I was like, well, I guess combat will be required.
My idea to make this up as I went along quickly ran into problems as I started filling in the first town, put together the first mini-dungeon, and sketching out the surrounding areas. I could either make it a fully open, almost goal-less wander-and-see-what-you-find game (which is appealing to me on one level), or, as my ideas kept taking shape, I could structure it around a central quest. The latter won out, and then I found myself approaching the Zelda 2-like game I’ve always thought about making.
Holy shit, I realized, after the deadline had been extended into the fall. I’ve made a lot of stuff for this, but this is gonna take more than the two more months or so I have to finish if I want it to be what I think it can be and not have squandered what I started—a big part of this was sorting out story structure/premise—so I guess I’ll put this on the backburner for a minute while I whip up something smaller scale. So I spent a week putting together the basics of a cavern-exploration game featuring Disney duck-like duck characters. It was basically Super Pitfall + Capcom’s DuckTales.
Damn, and then that started getting too complicated. I want to go back to that one day, too. But as Kate extended the deadline further, I went back to my original project. All of this coincided with the development of my Ungrateful Birds games (which I finally released in January 2023) and also significant work on the Explobers sequel I’m also working on.
I eventually sketched out more or less the entire overworld. It’s massive and sprawling. It took a long time, but I’ve settled on a basic structure I like.
One major issue is still the story. I’ve rewritten the premise a bunch of times, and I have something I kind of like, but it is perhaps too linear for the openness I am aiming for and also perhaps lacking in momentum/propulsion. As such, while I’ve started to make significant progress, and I’ve now got a world where the player can do a lot, the backbone is a bit amorphous and volatile.
And now I’m looking at my task sheet. I’ve fully designed 1 of 6 main dungeons. There are supposed to be 3 more. I have a bunch of items and systems that I have basically implemented that I still need to figure out how the player is supposed to get access to, in a way that isn’t too gated or linear but also not too obscure or frustrating. I’ve got a structure that relies on the player reading texts and talking to people to put together how to discover the way forward, but none of that is in the game or even actually written yet.
It’s supposed to be a game of research and discovery. All the dungeons are hidden and require, uh, lots of reading to figure out how to access. Same with items, including weapons. There’s a whole magic system that I’m hoping will not be obvious and will hopefully be a surprise when the player figures out how it’s integrated into the world. I’m really hoping to avoid the search-action/Metoridvania-exhaustion feeling of “oh, I see this obstacle and i know how this works. better come back here when i get the doublejump/dash/hookshot/whatever codified ‘upgrade’.” maybe this will be more annoying and less successful? I don’t know! I hope it’s neat and different.
So I’m hoping that as I continue doing the level design aspect of it, the narrative design will snap into better focus and I can start filling the world with characters and text that make for a cohesive, coherent, and (hopefully) engaging whole. I’m hoping it isn’t completely unhinged of me to think I can tie this all together.
Oh, and then there’s all the side stuff I want to make sure is in there.
I had other things I was going to write about in this initial post, but this’ll do for now. There’s a lot to talk about.
I am excited for where this is going. Each dungeon is going to be mechanically/structurally pretty different, if things go like I expect. This was supposed to be kind of a lark, but it’s turning into my most complicated project by an order or two of magnitude. Kate’s assured us that she’ll probably be extending the jam yet again from its April 29 end date, at least until she can finish her own project (which I’m sure is more than 2 months away). (By the way, some people have made and finished their games, such as my friend WiL’s ZZT open world deckbuilder ZOZ, which is kind of amazing and he finished in November 2022.)
And then I’m like, holy shit, I’ll have spent 2,000 hours working on this and no one is ever even going to play it. Who the fuck is this for? lol lol lol