Time for another pseudo-quick update.

I know it’s been a long road so far with this game, a lot longer than I planned. It’s amazing how much the computer gaming world has changed since I started this thing — back then, there were no iPhones or iPads, and most gaming was either on desktops or consoles. Now, the game industry has shifted dramatically toward mobile devices, just like a lot of other industries. I sometimes wonder how many people still use their desktops for gaming. Nevertheless, this game needs to be done and put out there, and it’s about time I did something about that.

So as I mentioned in my last post, I managed to get over a pretty large hump at the end of last year, and since then progress has been rapid. At this point, I’ve finally managed to do what I’ve been trying to do for some years now: get all of Act 1 content and the first cutscene put together so you can play the game through all the way from the very beginning to the end of the first cutscene. There are assorted little pieces that still need to be slipped in here and there, but nothing too important. A few extra sound files, a few environmental objects, maybe some more non-essential verbs, and of course the occasional bug fix, but that’s really about it. The one important thing I haven’t implemented yet is the PRAY command, but that’s less important for Act 1 than it is later in the game, so I’ll work on that soon enough.

That content, in a nutshell, is what I’ve been talking about for so long as the “demo.” And I mean that more in the manner of “tech demo” than “demo of a complete game,” since this is really just one big experiment, and my goal is to see if this is at least worthwhile to continue all the way through to the end. But that means, with a bit of cleaning up and some testing, I might actually, seriously, no-kidding-this-time be able to get this submitted to the IndieCade meeting this year, since they accept works in progress. They may hate it (or, worse, ignore it), but at least it can get submitted and I can stop saying over and over (and over) that this is the year I’m going to do it.

So after I clean up a few loose ends, that means I need to start focusing a lot of effort on testing and feedback, and that is about to start in earnest.

I’ve already enlisted a handful of testers, but if there’s anyone out there still paying attention and who is really up for it, let me know and I’ll set things up so you can download the latest version and start hacking away at it. But please only do so if you can dedicate a bit of time to it and can give useful feedback. I’m also starting a closed, invite-only Google group to have a discussion forum for testers of the game.

I think the deadline for submission to IndieCade is toward the end of May, so there’s a good amount of time left to smack this thing around and fix some of the big problems. So it’s time to get started and move to the next phase. Who’s with me?

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Oh right, the game thing. Almost forgot about that.

Well now that you mention it, yes, as a matter of fact it is definitely on. For a while there it didn’t seem like it, but if you ask me why that was, I’m not sure I could give you a great answer.

2012 started strong, but March never seems to be a good month, and apparently I have problems getting past it. Last year, it was a combination of things, but I think the biggest reason is that I just had too many things to do in life and not enough hours in the day to do them. On top of that, I had run into a real road block in development, the kind that brought things to a standstill, and there just didn’t seem to be enough inertia to get past it. So faced with a brick wall, development stopped.

The road block was basically a lot of architecture redesign to accommodate more than one Act, and more than one Day, in both the game code and the file structure. When I started, I never really gave that much consideration, thinking that it wouldn’t be a big deal to handle when the time came. Well, apparently I was wrong about that. I thought about it for a while, couldn’t come up with a satisfying solution, and got frustrated. The rest of life came at me, and once I stepped away from the problem it was hard as hell to get back into it.

But all that appears to be behind us now.

It was really nothing more than brute force and time that solved it. It’s possible that the injury to my shoulder may have helped, as it removed some of the competing priorities in life, but who knows how true that is. All I know is that I finally sat my ass down in that chair for a few days, forced myself to come up with a solution for the architecture, and hammered it out. And once that was done, the doors opened and the rest started to flow again.

That was a couple months ago, and since then I’ve been making progress in leaps and bounds, tackling some of the things I thought I might never get to.

I had to implement the sequence for making the girl appear at the front door after an appropriate delay from the start of the game. I had to implement a system of random environmental sounds, for things like wolf howls and wind gusts. Thunder and lightning had to be implemented, to herald the approach of the girl. Other mechanisms had to be implemented to prevent the player from doing unwanted or unexpected things with the girl. And all of this had to be coordinated so that none of these interfered with each other, or interrupted a conversation the player was having with one of the other characters. All that is now done.

More verbs have been defined and implemented, and more work was done with the text parser (yes, even that) to clean things up and give more appropriate responses. We now seem to be handling the word “her” with more grace, given that it can be both a possessive (“examine her eyes”) and a pronoun (“give her the blanket”). And there are many more responses to player commands that show a need for assistance, such as “What am I supposed to do now?”

All of these are done, and all of it in just the last few weeks. Removing that road block did wonders for things. I’ve checked off so many items from the task list that I have to create new ones to keep myself busy.

I’ve now reached the point that I’m only a few steps away from finishing Act 1 and connecting it to the first cutscene. Once I do that, it’s just a few more steps to package that as a real demo, and then I’ll move into a period of serious user testing. Who knows? Maybe it will be done enough to submit to IndieCade this year, like I always say. We’ll see…

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The Vespers submission for Screenshot Saturday for February 11, 2012. Check out all of the indie screenshot submissions over at screenshotsaturday.com.

Vespers, Act I, showing the monastery entrance doors and the highlighted alms box.

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