This week passed very quickly.
On monday, I made another version of the Arrow Engine, my gridbased narrative framework. I keep remaking it from scratch, but this time I tried out something new: Tweening.
I had just never looked at tweens, in all my 10 years of making games. Once I understood how to use them, I found them to be perfect for making text move upwards smoothly and without jittering.
Seeing the clean movement of the text made me play around with layouts and then, for the rest of the week, I’d wake up and just have this one tiny idea I’d want to try out, only to find myself a couple of hours later, still sitting at the computer, experimenting.
Finally. It was this tiny bit of new technology that compelled me to keep coming back, trying just one more thing.
Some of the experiments are really cool, others are terrible. What I have arrived at is very simple, very reduced. It looks a lot like this website, just black letters, scrolling over a white background. This is what I want to make the next narrative game with. No sounds, no music, no images. Just text.
Text can render anything. It’s all just words and so it doesn’t matter if I describe a room, a feeling, a millennium or someone’s smile. It’s all the same amount of mechanical work, it’s all just typing.
So there is nothing to anchor me, unlike with PRODUCER, which was always built around a tangible place, a city and it’s surroundings, rendered in expensive (meaning that they took a long time to create) images.
Now that I have constructed the way to display my interactive blank page, I realise that it is, of course, a blank page. I could put anything there and I find myself, once more, without desire to express something specific.
The general thematic direction I am thinking in is socialising. Talking. Conversing. Relationships. Interfacing with people. This is not a very clear direction.
Should I write about a year of socialising? A single night out? Online dating? A fantastical post-apocalypse with alien social relations? Zooanthropy? The blank page is not just blank in regards to theme, but also in regards to structure, and to interactive granularity.
I am pretty lost in this vast possibility space and I find nothing withing myself to anchor myself to. Well, that will come with time, as long as I don’t try to force it too hard. Obsessing over these abstract problems will not lead anywhere, I think.
I’ve also been playing around with an old arcade-y prototype again, something that feels like a relic from a forgotten time to me. Despite lack of practice, I am still very fast at coding immediate movement mechanics. I like the idea of always switching between narrative & platformer in my commercial releases, but this project is so clean and concise that it might take over my workflow. I have to let go of these pre-conceptions about what I’ll do next and just see what presents itself.
This week passed very quickly. It was spent switching between building text-rendering prototypes, thinking about what I want to say and tweaking jump heights for a good old platformer. Even if it all feels a bit unfocused, it is nice. I am really working again. Yehaw.
After hurting myself by putting too much weight on my dumbbells (are they called that because they ring out when you don’t fasten the weights correctly?), I have added pilates to my work-outs, to prevent another episode of horrible backpain.
All of the stress- & over-eating of the last few months has settled itself down comfortably on my hips & stomach. I want to loose weight again, which will be difficult in the coming weeks of endless christmas celebrations.
I’ve been waking up around noon, missing a large chunk of the very limited amount of sunlight we get in winter, so I’ve moved my working desk into a the kitchen, which has a lot more windows, hoping to not run out of vitamin D completely. There have been no more depressive episodes. I am still sober. Yay.
P.S.: Ord., out minimalistic narrative game from 5 years ago, is now free to play on steam!. Hope you enjoy!