I need to get down to work on Monday. Although lots of things need sorted out! Why can't you buy extra time from ebay?
I need to get content done, must sit down and write up some stuff for the the first part of the game. The game is split in to five main quests, each quest will have a number of missions or adventures in it. Each one of these needs a lot of detail put down in black and white.
- Plot
- Artwork detail
- Social phase detail
- Scouting phase detail
- Attack phase detail
- Maps for the realms of life
- Maps for the realms of death
- Creature statistics
- xp awards
- Loot tables
and the list goes on and on. Each element needs sufficient detail in it so that we can construct the artwork from it as well as code up all the different elements required to run through the adventure. It seems to take a lot of time to detail each adventure. The first one took me about a week. Although I hope this will get easier as time goes on. At least I have a structure to work to now.
One of most complicated bits to get right is probably having branching dialogue options in the social phase that actual mean something tangible in the later phases of the game. This is made doubly difficult by the fact that the game can enter the realm of death at any point. This transition brings about an entirely new set of characters that can be interacted with, all of which require branching dialogue options that make sense.
On top of that I don't even have a good way of recording the dialogue options. For the first level I ended up using excel and bookmarks so I could track along the screen and make sure they made sense. I am sure iworks (pages) would have helped in this regard, as it seems to be determined to piss me off and not let me read anything I have written I have decided to give up on it for now! Maybe I will have the chance to puzzle this mystery out some other time.
Now to go and thump a grumpy cat who is trying to destroy the ironing pile.....
Cheers,
Al
I'm not sure if it'll help much, but maybe some screenplay style script tools could help with the dialogue. I think they generally let you have character bios, and possibly links to what dialogue is associated with them.
ReplyDeleteOf course, you'd have to munge around the fact that screenplays are rather linear, so it may not be better than a spreadsheet ;)
There are a few open source and free ones though, so you could have a quick prod without wasting money on them (just time :):
http://www.celtx.com/
http://www.fivesprockets.com/fs-portal/
And a few listed at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screenwriting_software
Hello there, thanks for reading the blog and for the advice! I would never have thought of trying my hand at something like that. I will have a look at those links and try something with the tomorrow!
ReplyDeleteJust wondering who you are? My mysterious saviour! I hope that works, it would be a great relief to find a useful tool for this part of the writing.
I will post about how I got on with tools you have pointed me too later tomorrow!
Cheers,
Al
I believe we may have been at the same Wedding yesterday ;) I work with Sinc. I think he passed along a link on iPhone dev from me at somepoint, which may have been the interview with the Little Gods peeps.
ReplyDeleteI had a quick look around for better tools, but there basically seems to be nowt. I imagine they're mostly in-house tools, or cobbled together tools.
The only one I did find was this:
http://www.chat-mapper.com/
It looks fairly nice, but it's still in development, so I can say anything about stability and so on. Could be worth a shot first though - just make sure you save regularly ;)
Alas, it's Windows only, but if you don't have access to a windows machine, you can run it in a VM on your mac. You can either use a free VM app:
http://www.virtualbox.org/
Or one of the pay for ones:
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/desktop/
If you decide to buy the VMWare one, keep an eye on their blog. They often offer 30%-50% discounts: http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/
I've used all of them, and they're all pretty similar. To be honest, I'd be surprised if VirtualBox didn't do all you need - it ran XP fine on my mac.