Between E32018 and the World Cup, June has been a month full of distractions, specially since I make my makes on my free time.
Despite that, I still managed to get a good amount done, and a very important part of Blackout, even though it might not be the most exciting: text revision. It has been a long time since I wrote it, and some of the later chapters have never undergone a true revision.
In order to make this task easier I decided to change the tool I was using to keep the text, which wasn’t really a IF tool, it was just google docs, which is better than what I used when I originally wrote the story: two small notebooks.
So I decided to move the story from google docs to Twine, even though I’m not using twine for the game implementation itself (I’m using my own framework, which I’ll go into more detail on next month’s post) making it easier to have a good overview of the flow of each chapter, easier to find a passage and also easier to test.
This is a chapter from Blackout, you can see how chaotic and non-linear it looks, even though in this specific chapter most paths end time leading to the same exit (wide boxes are the end point, and each of them leads to a different chapter). Even though a direct path through the chapter might be short, there are several different ways of approaching every situation.
This chapter has almost 8k words, if you’re the type that is interested in numbers, this is the average for most chapters, some are bigger and some are smaller. If you played through the preview that is up on itch.io, you saw that the writing style is very simple and direct, I want the player to move fast through the story, and do this several times over, so it can’t be some Tolkienesque thing where I describe every small rock on the way.
On other news, I also took some time on a weekend to participate in the Godot Community Jam. I tried Godot for the first time earlier this year in another game jam and liked it a lot, so I wanted to get more practice, and I thought game jams are probably the best way to achieve that right now, given the small amount of free time I have.
I ended up making a very simple game, in roughly 8 hours. The theme of the jam was Temperature. You can check all entries here.
That’s it for June, I decided to start making this monthly report because one of my goals for 2018 was posting in the blog more often. For the next post I’ll try to go a bit into the framework I’ve built (and am still building) for Blackout.
Cheers,
Mini Chimera Game Studio 