Cenc

Developer Log #8

Added 2022-10-08 09:00:39 +0000 UTC

Any of you reading these updates on the regular will know that I recently produced a stand-alone mission for Spacecorps. This Developer Log is going to detail some of the highs and lows of that development, as well as the lessons learnt. Consider the following to contain major spoilers for the Spacecorps mission as well as mild spoilers for Dreams of Reality.

Being an Indie developer is hard!

No, really. The amount of work that goes into every aspect of game creation (writing, coding, art, advertising, to name just a few elements) requires a considerable amount of time, and time is the enemy of development. I feel like I’m constantly chasing myself, trying to catch up to some imaginary deadline.

The development of Spacecorps took around 4 weeks to complete, this was alongside the development of Dreams of Reality and, honestly, was a much-needed break and fun to do ‘something different’.

Spacecorps 1.0

The final mission involves Cindy and Chantelle teaching the MC how to become a stripper. It’s simple enough, of course any developer given the chance to use someone else’s main character is going to have some fun – so the outfit was completely deliberate!

The idea didn’t start out this way though. I was approached by Ranilabs, the developer of Spacecorps, over a year ago and invited to create a mission for his game. I agreed and set to work on a script. This was just before I released the update to Dreams of Reality that involved you rescuing either Kimiko or Louise.

I had the idea that the MC from Spacecorps would be working as a cop with Jacob, he would have a short introduction before being put to guard the safehouse for Kimiko. Several events would occur, eventually featuring a helpless Cindy:

girl “Hey!... Hey, you gotta help me!”
mc “Huh? I wasn’t asleep!”
girl “Oh… okay. I need your help.”

## mc looks at the clothes the girl is wearing, of which there are very little.

mc “Aren’t you… cold?”
girl “What? No. Why would I be…?”
girl “My car’s broken down. Flat tyre. You gonna help me or not?”

mc “Interesting… I must stay and guard this place, but then perhaps I should help her.”
girl “You know you’re talking out loud, right?”
mc “Maybe there’s a reward.”
girl “There’s no reward.”
mc “Huh. It’s like she can read my thoughts!”
girl “… You’re still talking out loud.”

As you can see, this sets the tone that I was aiming for.

mc “I know what. I’ll save you!”
girl “It’s just a flat tyre… I could probably change it myself…”
mc “No! I would never leave a damsel in distress. Lead on young vixen, take me to your transport device.”
girl “That way.”
girl “Bloody weirdo.”

## The girl leads mc to the car and away from the house.

girl “Here’s my transport devi… car”
mc “I see one of your tyres is flat.”
girl “Your powers of observation astound me.”
mc “Hmm… feisty one here.”
girl “Do you always do that?”
mc “What?”
girl “Talk out loud.”
mc “…”
girl “…”
mc “…”
girl “… The spare’s in the boot.”

## The girl pops the boot and points at the spare.

mc “That should do the trick.”
girl “… Sigh, this is so degrading.”

## The girl reaches in to remove the spare tyre. She bends over, her skirt rides up, exposing the fact she is not wearing panties.

mc “Oh, hello.”
girl “*sigh* Oh-no-I-think-I’m-stuck.”
girl “Help-me-step-b…”

## The girl stands up.

girl “What even is your name anyway?”
mc “My… name?”
girl “You know what, forget I asked.”

## The girl leans back into the car.

girl “Help me… err {w} you. I’m stuck.”
girl “I think you will need to come behind me and pull me out.”
mc “Of course. Let me get into position.”

A comedic masterpiece, I’m sure. The girl is, of course, Cindy, in case that needed pointing out. The above is only a small part of the first treatment. I completed a rough script and it sat on my hard drive for a few months. Gradually I would create and render some scenes when time allowed.

And then it stopped.

The long dark (or how I avoid my responsibilities):

So, the mission languished for several months, occasionally I’d look at the script, poke at it a bit but nothing was being done. Nothing substantial anyway. After several months I looked back at what I had written, and the original idea just didn’t sit right. Yes, the events I’d written were okay, they may even evoke a slight chuckle, or at the very least an exhale of breath from the nose. But the story of Dreams of Reality had moved on – quite significantly. The mission would no longer be a companion to the main game – In fact, it ran the risk of confusing matters.

So, rather than fix the problem. I ignored it, until eventually I could ignore it no more.

Spacecorps 2.0:

After the release of (Dreams of Reality) Chapter 0.4.1, I was contacted again by Ranlilabs , who being patient wondered about the progress I had made. I decided then to get my head down and get this mission done. I had a new concept. After the latest release that included the water volleyball event, I wanted to expand this further and make a repeatable mission where your skills would increase each time you played it.

Anyone familiar with the Monkey Island games will know insult sword fighting and the mechanics behind it. Put simply, you fight other pirates using insults, to begin with you don’t know any, only once they have been used on you do you learn them.

Once learnt you can then use them on others, of course some will know the counter insult which allows you to beat pirates that use the insults against you. This eventually escalates until you fight a ‘boss’ pirate who uses a bunch of new insults that you have to guess the correct response to (there’s a few right answers, so it’s not a complete crapshoot) There’s a fun easter egg if you go back to one of the first pirates and use the new insults you learn from the boss pirate, they will complain about using the boss’s insults against them.

Anyone playing the DoR mission will understand where the base idea comes from. As you practice your dancing skills with Cindy and Chantelle, you then get put in front of a crowd who randomly call out ‘moves’ that you need to perform. Do these enough times and you eventually go up against the Don who has his own version of the ‘moves’. It’s simple but adds an element of replay and makes a game out of… the game.

In between all this are a few words of… encouragement from Cindy and ultimately if you are successful, you get a reward.

I set to writing and wrote the complete first treatment in two days. What followed then, was several days' worth of edits.

So, those lessons then?

Yeah, okay. So, what did I learn? Don’t bite off more than you can chew, don’t over promise... And more clichés, I’m sure. Essentially, I found one of the biggest issues was coding and scripting each variation of skill. I went with four skills, and four levels. But of course, any mathematician will tell you, for every skill and every level of that skill you need an outcome.

That’s a lot of outcomes. Couple with the fact the player needs to be rewarded for each successful event, you begin to realise just how much work there was to be done. I had wanted this to be quick, more fool me.

Repetition is not the enemy:

I subscribe to the school of “Every line of text should contain a representative image”. Essentially, I show changes in mouth movements rather than a single fixed image. This means I perhaps produce more images for a scene than others would. Nothing wrong with more or less – it’s a stylistic choice and to change it for Dreams of Reality now would be jarring to you, the viewer.

I did, however, work on using the same images on multiple occasions for the Spacecorps mission. This has the benefit of reducing the number of images I needed to create and the amount of rendering my computer had to do.

So much so, I did a small animation. Because I’m a sucker for punishment.

I will be making a standalone version of the mission available to you all in the next week once it has been fully released in Spacecorps. I am interested in the feedback, as some of these ‘game’ elements contained in the mission I will be using in a future update to Dreams of Reality.