One of the interesting challenges that I have to face with this project is the question of combat.

Now I have taken a pretty clear stance on the matter; there will be no combat in the chain broke, but as the game is set in a world directly following a major global conflict, I find myself having to but weapons in my game regardless.

This proves an interesting challenge for me as a designer, how to put a gun in tha game and then tell the player that he/she cannot use it.

I don’t know the answer quite yet, but I will figure it out… I at least hope so.

Creating videogames is amazing and if I could I would be doing it all day everyday, that said, it can also be exhausting work.

When you find yourself on month 4 of an 8 month development, it becomes easy to crave a creative reprieve. at this point, you have been staring at the same art style and the same models for what feels like an eternity. You have been staring at these things to the point that you have lost any idea of whether the thing you are creating has any value at all.

This is where you need this creative respite. You need to let your freak flag fly and just try something new. Something that may or may not work out, but that is fun in the moment and feels good while you are doing it.

This is why I decided to work on my Blender game today and create a bust in the style of tellstale’s the walking dead. It is not for anything, other than the fun of making it.

When I started The chain broke, I did so, knowing that I wanted to make something simple and easy to work with. Little did I know that simplicity is one of the most difficult thing to attain.

This is the problem with projects that are done well, they make everything seem effortless. I looked at projects like “Lara croft: go” or “Grow home” and thought, how hard can it be to get that style…

very hard as it turns out.

This mini rant on the complexities of simplicity comes on the back of a week where I have been doing nothing but trying to build a cantina for the game and failing miserably.

All of this griping should however not reflect on my want to finish the game. I am in this until the bitter end, sometimes it is just nice to vent.

When working on videogames, project fatigue is a real problem that does need to be combatted at every turn.

You start out a project all excited and ambitious. There is nothing that your game cannot do and nothing that it cannot be. This is probably the best part of making videogames, the open and delightful place where every opportunity is available to you.

and then it starts; the long arduous task of actually making the game. All of a sudden your game has to move from great idea to awesome game. You have to think about things like visual design, audio design and story beats. You lose yourself in questions of color choices and fps count and you can no longer tell if what you are making is any good at all.

This is when project fatigue starts up. You can no longer tell if you game is good or not, you can no longer tell if anything is any good and you start question everything about the game down to it’s core principles.

At this stage you can do nothing but take your successes where they come and today I found such a success.

I am now officially half way. I have reached the threshold that means that I have finished 50% of the levels that are in the game and that is awesome.

Now, bear with me, as I attempt top finish the rest.

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I have been revamping the designs of the antagonists of my game. I needed to give them some kind of common denominator, something that let the player know that they were part of the same organism.

Well, I think I might have found that thing: creepy Japanese inspired masks.

I got the idea from watching the movie “spirited away” in which there is a character called “No face”. No Face is this odd character who is neither wholly good nor totally bad, he does some terrible things but finds redemption in the end.

The reason that I chose this character as my main inspiration for the antagonist of my game, is that he wars this eery mask throughout the movie that is ultimately expressionless.

I loved the fact that this mask is terrible and I wanted to pay homage to just how creeped out I was by that character, so I created these masks.

In my experience game development is a game of place holders. As you develop you game, in the rush of creativity, you simply cannot be bothered with making something look nice. So you create a placeholder object. Something that isn’t necessarily good, but definitely good enough.

This, however, is a double edged sword. On one hand, you have something that works, but on the other hand you have a mess of work that you have to do in the future to make the project look somewhat decent.

I currently find myself in this placeholder hell with the enemies that make up the bulk of the challenge in “The chain broke”.

They are definitely good enough, but there is nothing distinctive about them, they are just “good enough”.

moving forward, I will have to find a way to make these monsters something to be feared. They need to be made scary.

I have reached an interesting part in the development of “The chain broke” where I am going from answering how something is happening to why it’s happening. This might sound very arty farty (pun intended), but it really isn’t.

Up until this point I have been focussed on how the characters of my game survive given the circumstances under which they live and now I am going into explaining how those circumstances came about. I am, of cause, being purposefully vague here, because I want you to play the game and find out all of the gory details for your selves, but suffice it to say some stuff went down and now I am exploring just what happened.

Surprisingly, I am finding it a bit harder to define the why of everything, than I did the how. Creating the world after everything had gone down was, for whatever reason, quite a bit easier for me than I thought it would be, which is probably why I am struggling now.

However, I will not let that get me down, I have a game to make and damnit if I am not going to finish it.

I want to state, at the start of this blog post, that I have no delusions of grandeur when it comes to "the chain broke". I know that in all likelihood, this game will fall by the waysaide, as there are allot of indie titles that are released every day and allot of those are better than the game that I am working on. 

In fact, I am pretty well prepared for this game to fizzle. I am prepared for the game to come out and be ignored by everyone but my friends and my family. I have made piece with the fact that simply finishing the game means that I have a succesfull title.

This, however, means that I have no idea how to handle myself if this turns out to be even moderately succesfull. In fact, I won't be able to know what to do, if people actually start paying attention to me and my work. I am, as the title states, completely unprepared for success. 

The only thing that sates me currently is that fact that I probably won't be succesfull. As it stands, I will sell a couple fo copies and then the game will wort of disappear into the either. 

I think most indie developers (assuming that they are full time) can attest to the money problem that come with devoting your life to something you love as much as video games.

it is fair to say that I love video games to an almost unhealthy degree. Even though I am completely broke, I spend most of my money on games and I make sure that the job that I hold allows me time to devote to development.

In fact, I let the whimsey of videogame development control most of my life, despite that fact that I have never made any money off of my own games.

That said, I can’t imagine allot of indie dev make games for the cash of the thing, since I know more broke developers than I know ones with work. I think, we as a species, have devoted ourselves to this interactive business and the love of the things carries us through, even when we have to eat ramen for every meal.

The chain broke is, despite appearances, a narrative game. I have a very set story that I would like to tell using this game, but I am having a hard time figuring out how i might go about telling that story. 

This is why I am plying around with this idea of creating posters that I might hang around the gameworld to tell the story better. The drawing seen above, for instance, is one of the first looks the player gets at our antagonist, Tau. 

The idea of creating posters that might tell the story is a good one, the problem comes up, when I realise that I have created a  gameworld without walls. No walls, no places to hang these posters, which means I am out of luck. 

This kind of problem is merely one in a range of similar issues that I encounter every day with this project and is both the reason that I love development and why I absolutely hate it.