This weekend, I demoed Tinselfly at IndieCade East. It was only a two hour slot, but wow did I get a lot of feedback — I got way more traffic there than I got at other, all-day type events I’ve done before.

It’s… a lot to process.

And it needs to be processed; I should neither follow every suggestion everyone made, nor forget what was said and done in those two hours. And, in fact, if I’m thinking in terms of following-or-not-following suggestions, I’m probably thinking about it wrong.

the audience

I’ve demoed Tinselfly maybe four or five times now, but this event was new to me in that it seemed entirely populated by, well, people who were really into video games. Most of the events I’ve been at before were not specifically game related: they were more family-oriented fair type things where each exhibitor table was showing very different things that might broadly appeal to random people walking around a fair.

So at first the crowd at IndieCade threw me off; they were giving helpful comments, but they were different sorts of comments than I was used to. In the future, I should try to get to know the individuals playing my game just a little. If a person who’s, for example  into highly competitive games gives me a comment, that context is important. In  many ways, the comments people give are less important that the unfulfilled expectations the player had, that prompted the comment — like, the expectation that there might be different weapons in my game, or leveling up. Which there won’t be.

I can’t (and shouldn’t try to) meet everyone’s expectations, but at the very least, continuing this example, I should make it clear from the beginning of the game that there are no weapon or skill upgrades; that character advancement, such as it is, happens in a fundamentally different way than most games. That’s something I need to communicate very clearly.

bugs

Thankfully, there weren’t any outright bugs anybody discovered that I didn’t know about already. However, it was still interesting and useful to see how the bugs manifested themselves — if at all — during the demo.

For example, in the very first scene there’s this staircase where you can walk through railings in the middle of the staircase, and you could walk off the edge of the staircase, which had no railings on the edge at all. And nobody walked through those railings or off the stairs, not even this one guy who was specifically trying to break things. I was kind of surprised.

So seeing which bugs came up and how often gave me some clues as to how to prioritize fixes for everything.

attention grabbing

There’s a part in the beginning of the demo where the player loses control of the camera briefly. One player really didn’t like that, and to be honest, I don’t like it any more than he did. It’s a brute-force solution to the problem of figuring out how to draw attention to things you want the player to notice.

In general, it looked like I really, really need to work on directing the player’s attention. The most egregious failure was that when starting a sword fighting duel, players frequently looked away from the area where their opponent would appear, before their opponent showed up. And then it wasn’t clear what to do because the opponent wasn’t visible on screen.

I… don’t have any specific thoughts on that right now. Just something to think about.

style changes

As you’re walking down those railing-less stairs, the point of view changes from third person to first. Many players stopped immediately when that happened, thinking that they’d accidentally pushed some pov-switching key.

I want the presentation to change based on the needs of the current scene; I think that’s an important storytelling tool. And I want the player reminded as often as possible that they’re playing a character with her own personality and goals and body. Among other things, that means being third person in open spaces and first person in confined ones.

But if players are getting confused by the switching, that’s a problem. I need to make it clear what’s happening, and more importantly, why.

I’ve started implementing a dialogue system for Tinselfly, based in large part on the keyword-based dialogue in Ultima V.

The basic idea is, when you engage an NPC in conversation, you’ll type in single words and, if the NPC you’re talking to recognizes your word, they’ll respond with a single sentence, or maybe two, of dialogue. It’s not really a tree; nor is it a text parser; it’s more just a list of stimuli and responses… though certain words could lead to short trees a couple levels deep. You’ll learn new keywords to try by paying attention to the exact words your conversation partner is using.

(You can see every scrap of dialogue for Ultima V at the Ultima Codex. Most characters… don’t have very much dialogue at all.)

Yeah, it may seem a bit weird and archaic, using mechanics from a game made in 1988, but I think it has potential.

* * *

Dialogue makes me nervous. I’m not, you know, a very talkative person. I only get like three quarters of the dialogue in movies. My understanding of dialogue and dialogue writing is kinda limited. But, I’ve ordered a book on dialogue writing for written stories, and my wife, awesome published author that she is, will be helping. So I’m feeling a bit more comfortable now.

I’ve had to take a break many times during this project to learn new technical skills that I have to have, to complete this project. Dialogue is no different. I don’t have the skills I need here, and I either need to learn them or find people who can help.

* * *

It may seem backwards, but now that I’m building this, I’m getting a clearer picture of what I want. So here are my goals, and how I think this system might work.

• Conversations should be short. In addition to the shortness of the rapid-fire stimulus -> response structure, I’d like a mechanic where your character tires of conversation quickly; she’s not a very social person. So the more you talk, the more energy you lose.
• The player must not be encouraged to exhaust all possible options during conversation; I want them to think about what is worth saying and what isn’t. This could also be solved by the conversation fatigue mechanic — and the emotional weighting thing below.
• The player should be encouraged to internalize the idea that specific words and concepts are pretty important to the story. By making the player remember the keywords and manually type them in, I think I can do that here.
• The player should develop a sense that some words carry emotional weight for their character. Certain words you hear should cause your character to gain a positive or negative status effect. Certain words you type — whether or not you press enter — will cause you to gain a status effect. And the same should go for the NPCs. You should learn that there are certain words you just shouldn’t say around certain people.
• The player should feel that her character’s close friends are just easier to talk to than other people. I could have less of a conversation fatigue penalty with certain people. I could also have a mechanic where close friends can essentially read your mind — they can react to your typing words before you press Enter on them. Could get annoying if done wrong, but I think it’s worth exploring.
• NPCs should be able to strike up conversations with your character, of their own volition. I’m not quite sure how this would work, unless they’re asking simple questions where it’s obvious what exact words to use for answers you might want to give.
• If you hear two NPCs talking to each other, it should feel like the NPCs are using the same dialogue system you are. Which I think I can do by, well, using the same code, with NPCs picking sorta-random keywords to use on each other.

Well, I probably should have realized this earlier, but for a variety of reasons, the weekly project update thing just isn’t going to work. In fact, packaging them in my head as weekly updates makes me less likely to post here. So I’m switching to updates-as-they make sense.

So, have a Tinselfly update!

I have started working on one of the first scenes in the story,  which involves recruiters. Your character lives in a town whose main industry is shipbuilding, and they hold a signing festival upon the completion of large ships, on the deck and hull of the completed ship. It’s supposed to be an air-show-like thing where, in addition to vendor booths and aircraft demonstrations, people who worked on the completed ship sign their name on the hull in this sort of signing ceremony.

So your character during this scene will be a teenager, and there will be Navy and other non-military recruiters trying to grab your attention.

There are a number of technical and design problems I need to overcome here, but as my first real scene, most are not unique to this:

• I need a dialogue system, if only a temporary one while I decide how I want dialogue to work.
• I need to figure out how to get NPC facial animation, both expressions and lip synching. This LipSync Unity plug in looks promising.
• I need some puzzles to require you to visit each booth and pick up swag or talk to people; puzzles that give the player some introductory information about about her character, the world she lives in, and her relationship to various entities in it.
• There will be a Navy recruiting booth kinda like the real-life Air Force Performance Lab. It will feature a handful of interactive activities testing people’s fitness for the Navy. In addition to making those activities interactive for the player, I need to show a constant stream of NPCs interacting with the activities and moving through the booth.

Your character won’t ever join the Navy, but I’m the most worried about the Navy booth — and not because of the visitor NPC scripting or animation. I’m worried about getting the tone right. I don’t want to look like I’m commenting on historical or modern recruiting or military organizations; but I don’t want it to look like the game itself is all hey! look how cool this is! either. It has to be earnest and honest and feel real, and over-the-top on selling heroics only to the extent that a real booth like this might go nuts with creating this brand around individual heroism, to get visitors interested in their program.

I guess ‘week’ is kind of flexible here, seeing as it’s been 9 days since my last post. 😉

What I did last week

Goals for this week

I didn’t have to do to all the filler pieces I wanted, and didn’t make bathroom fixtures besides the light. I’m calling those a loss for now, as I want to move on to making my first real puzzle.

At the moment, I have no idea what form said puzzle will take, but it will probably have to involve areas that are already reasonably detailed:

• Ship areas:
  • Mess
  • Bar
  • Cabin
  • Lounge
• City areas:
  • Ice rink
  • Soda fountain

Well, for a variety of reasons (which I won’t go into here), this summer has been nuts. But it’s getting back to normal, and in the interests of getting back into a routine with my pet projects, I’m gonna try posting regular, weekly updates here.

So here’s my first Tinselfly update!

What I did last week

I made some custom editors for wiring.

Since I haven’t mentioned this on the blog before: everything you see on your spaceship should be powered. And when you put your engineering glasses on, you should see wiring everywhere. If you’re going to be running around solving wiring puzzles, I want all the wiring to be functional and logical. So I’ve already got it so the game knows that, say, when you flick a light switch, the power line coming out of the switch loses power, and since it’s connected to some lights, each of those lights turns off.

To save myself time, many devices will be powered wirelessly; there won’t be power outlets. But every light, every automatic door, every large device, should be powered, with visible lines running to them, and lines running through things like lightswitches and motion sensors.

Adding all that wiring will be a lot of work, so to save myself time I’ve made a custom editor. I can drop these sort of wiring canvases into the scene and plot lines on the canvases reasonably quickly now.

Goals for this week

I could fuss over my editor more, but it’s functional now and I’d like to move on.

I’d like to get my mess completely wired, including the bathrooms, entrance and bar area. That, by itself, shouldn’t take very long. I’m most of the way there already.

The more time consuming part will be designing and modeling new light fixtures for the bathroom and bar. And I’m careful to use the word design here: lately, I’ve been feeling more like a curator, faithfully reproducing antiques I’m finding images of online . But while my ship has a 1920s sort of aesthetic, this isn’t the 1920s. This  isn’t our world at all, not even an alternate history. I need to get back to designing things with styles that recall the 1920s, while still being having their own identity.

I also need to design and model a toilet and other bathroom fixtures.

Lastly, I’d like to finish updating my mess with Substance Designer/Painter textures.

A few days ago, I got a subscription to Substance Live. It’s a ‘rent-to-own’ kind of deal where, for around $20 a month, you get access to tools that let you make realistic looking textures for video games.

Before this, I was using texture nodes in Blender. To give you an idea of the level of quality I was able to achieve with those, here are some cafeteria tables with Blender textures that involved hours and hours of tweaking, over the course of several months:

And this is what I’ve replaced them with, just playing around with Substance Painter over a couple of free evenings:

I find the new wood table textures just… better. More realistic, more detailed… and they took very little effort to make and customize.

I probably should have gotten this a lot sooner. The cost is minimal, and the results are wonderful.

* * *

Procedural pine wood surfaces are a solved problem. I’m not the first person to want an unfinished wood cafeteria table in a video game.

And yet, when confronted with any problem — how do I make convincing procedural wood, how do I make this music sound more nautical, how do I make a wormhole you can walk through — my first question is, how do I solve this problem?

My first question should be, has someone else already solved this? And most of the time, the answer will be yes. Sometimes I’ll have to pay for someone else’s solution, but most of the time, it’s totally worth it.

These problems are solved.

* * *

Sometimes, I think of myself as a sort of lone pioneer, exploring new ground: the sort of game I want to make has never been made, to my knowledge, and certainly not by a single developer. However, the whole ‘lone wolf’ thing is entirely inaccurate. First of all, I get a huge amount of input from my wife and my brother, who are at times more opinionated about the nature of my wacky 1920s-but-not-really, sci-fi-but-not-really universe than I am.

And secondly, I’m not here to fashion bespoke solutions to every problem that comes my way. I am, increasingly, using other people’s tools and libraries to finish this project — which I see as giving me more independence, not less. I’m here to try to solve some very specific problems: how do I craft puzzles that teach you about characters rather than impersonal systems; how do I set up situations where I’ve loaded up simple player actions with piles of emotional context.

Realism in texturing is not one of these problems. I have nothing to add to the field of realistic texturing.

* * *

So I want to focus more on picking my battles, which in many ways means finding more tools that will help me. I’ve already got a third-party character modeling and animation system I like. I’ve now got a texturing system I like. I may, in the future, start looking for a way to auto-generate 1920s style, hand drawn and lettered posters and signs, rather than hand-drawing everything myself. I am capable of doing hand lettered signs. That doesn’t mean I should do it here.

And hopefully, this will all let me give my characters and story the attention they deserve. Those are the most important problems I need to solve here.