Process Journey: Sehya’s New Face

After over a week of a terrible cough that was bad enough to prevent me from working, I’ve finally been able to get back to it!

Yesterday I spent time working on updating the original character portraits to the style I will use for the new game.  Unlike in the original game, each character will have several different portrait and expression sets.

Clickies for large.

In the original game I found that the characters did not pop against the background as much as I would have liked, so I decided to add a line around them so that the portrait images will be more distinctive.

Next up I’ll be working on Dorval and making changes to the original background scene.

Process Journey: Expanded Edition Part II

At the moment I am supposed to be on vacation.  Since I hadn’t taken a break for months, I thought perhaps I should take time off to relax.

But when has vacations ever stopped me from working?  The only thing that can make me take a break is illness or injury.  So!  Of course I’ve been working more on the expanded edition of Process Journey.

I decided that, for once, I would actually create a design document before really beginning production on the new game content.  I’m not sure if this makes sense to anyone but me, but I’ve never liked actually “planning”.  I tend to work organically, working on a bit here and there until it all comes to a cohesive whole.  Trying a bit of this and a bit of that, essentially building the design document in my head as I create.  The most I have done is write down things that need to be done that day, so I don’t get behind.

But of course, this method of planning only works if you are by yourself.  I do not always want to work alone, eventually I would like to work with others.  I need to practice making plans ahead of time and writing them down.  Not everything can stay locked in my head.

Planning is especially important for the kind of game I want Process Journey to be.  I want the puzzles to be creative and challenging, but not feel out of place in the context of the world and story.  I want them to feel logical, and for the player to feel good once they’ve figure out the solution.  I don’t want the player to feel confused about what they are doing, but at the same time I want the puzzles to come about naturally through exploration.

These things are difficult to balance.  I want to avoid “use the ham on the cheese grater” puzzles (as entertaining as they can be in the right point and click) as those don’t require much thought and only serve to irritate the player.  Because it the balance is so tricky to get right, I’m going to need a lot of planning and people to test my ideas on.  I hope I can get plenty of volunteers for testers when the time comes!

I’ve written a few pages of story and puzzle design so far, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I’d like to do.  As, obviously, these are things that can’t be revealed before I actually release the game, I’ll leave you with a small sketch of Sehya:

A note about the games listed here:

I have many MANY more games I am working on or have worked on than I care to admit.  The ones I post in the in-progress and abandoned sections are ones that have had significant amounts of gameplay already programmed in-engine.

If I posted all concept art and snippets of plot or ideas that I had, then each section would soon become rather difficult to navigate.

That doesn’t mean I won’t post any of the ideas and concept art I’m working on!  For those that aren’t tied to any games with major progress, I will post about them on my blog.  I hope you will enjoy them!