The Devil's Broker

[Perihelion]

Unity is running a contest from now until the end of January, so I'm using it as a motivator to get serious about the short game I'm working on right now. I'll post updates in this thread over the next two months.

Overview:
It's a visual novel/point-n-click hybrid. The story should be around 10,000-15,000 words, and the game should be about an hour long. The premise of the story is that you're an agent of a wizard-lawyer-mercenary organization that makes unbreakable contracts with people, and the game will cover a couple jobs as an introduction to the premise. It's designed to be a series, so if it makes back the money I plan to spend on it (hopefully not exceeding $2000), I might make more. I'll probably release it on most of the platforms Unity deploys to unless I run into major roadblocks.

Outstanding Questions:
I'll be doing the writing, design, background art, and portrait animation. Unfortunately, since I'll have my hands full with the art, I'll need to outsource all of the engineering to Sailerius. I'll be commissioning our artist to draw the portraits.

The big things that leaves are UI design and music. I want to hire an experienced UI designer, but I'm not sure where to find one. The girl who did the UI for the new version of Ars Harmonia did an excellent job, but I don't think she's taking commissions anymore, so I dunno what I'm gonna do. Anyone know someone who's good at game UI? As for music, I'll probably end up using royalty-free or creative commons music, but I don't know shit about music and may or may not pick appropriate tracks. Oh well!

Production Schedule:
Previous experience with contest games says I should leave a lot of time for polish and debugging. Unfortunately this doesn't leave much time for the actual development. Here's a schedule I drew up with weekly goals:

12-5: Story fully outlined, ending written
12-12: Areas finalized, all puzzles designed, backgrounds started
12-19: All maps finished, story finalized
12-26: Portraits finished, story draft finished, backgrounds finished
1-2: Item graphics finished, story edited, engineering finished; polish begins
1-9: Portrait animation finished
1-16: Feature freeze; start debugging
1-27: Store submission

I'm guessing there'll probably be more polish I want to do after the contest is over, so I'll probably allocate another month or so to that before I release it for real. One issue is that I'm visiting my mother for a week over Christmas, and I'm not sure how that's going to work out, so I may need to update my schedule.

 

[Xilef]

I'm tempted to offer help if you need it. I've mentioned before that I'm interested in making precisely a visual novel/point-n-click hybrid so I am very interested in this project, especially knowing the quality of production you typically go for.

How much are you going to be posting about the development process?

 

[Perihelion]

Thanks for the offer, but we're going to use a dialogue plugin from the Asset Store, so I don't expect the engineering work to be very heavy. I think Sailerius probably has it covered.

As for the development process, I'll post about it in as much detail as people care to hear and show WIP assets and stuff.

 

[Xilef]

Thanks for the offer, but we're going to use a dialogue plugin from the Asset Store, so I don't expect the engineering work to be very heavy.

uch: my feelings

 

[ZenVirZan]

As for the development process, I'll post about it in as much detail as people care to hear and show WIP assets and stuff.

excited af, i care to hear as much as possible :cheers:

 

[Perihelion]

Thanks for the offer, but we're going to use a dialogue plugin from the Asset Store, so I don't expect the engineering work to be very heavy.

uch: my feelings

Oh, sorry, I just assumed. The whole game is gonna be in 2D, and I've only seen you do 3D art, I think. Granted, all the backgrounds will be rendered 3D, but I doubt you're familiar with my pipeline.

As for the development process, I'll post about it in as much detail as people care to hear and show WIP assets and stuff.

excited af, i care to hear as much as possible :cheers:

Okay, will do. :biggrin:

Right now I'm trying really hard to hammer out a story outline I'm happy with. The writing will definitely be the hardest part. For me, the story is the whole point of the game, so I care a lot about trying to make it as good as possible, whereas I'm satisfied with "good enough" for everything else. Unfortunately outlining is like 95% angst and 5% outlining when I try to force it, so we'll see how it goes. I've managed to shake some decent ideas out of my brain, though. My plan is to write the ending first so I can know it has a satisfying conclusion and know what I need to foreshadow. The hope is to have the story more or less figured out from a high level by the end of this week because everything else hinges on it. I wish I had more time to work on it, but my development schedule is unforgiving. :sad: I want to start backgrounds next week. I expect to produce 2-3 areas I can render backgrounds from per week, and I don't know how many areas I'll need, but it's probably safe to assume it'll be at least 5-6. So if I want them to be done within a month, I need to get started on them now.

 

[Perihelion]

Progress is going pretty well. I've got my ending drafted now, although large chunks of it aren't fully written out. This is the main thing I hoped to accomplish this week, so that's good. Altogether I've got about 6000 words drafted on this, so I'm making good progress since that's about half the total length I want to end up with. I have the first and fourth acts mostly written out now, so I just have to do the middle two. I'll plan them out more tomorrow.

 

[Perihelion]

Okay, starting to bring in team members. I'm gonna talk to the artist I intend to hire tomorrow, and Sailerius is going to start on engineering this week, hopefully. Here's my updated schedule, subject to change:

A big outstanding question right now is how I'm going to do the puzzles. I don't think I can afford to have more than one map per puzzle, and the story doesn't permit moving around a lot, so I'm wondering if traditional adventure game mechanics would be weird. Maybe a more traditional Myst approach would be better, but those are also harder to design. I'm going to need to decide soon because it influences whether I have inventory mechanics or not and how I design the puzzles. I also need to figure out where I'm sourcing the UI from. I'm going to contact the person I want to hire and hope that she's taking commissions right now.

Since I didn't quite finish my outline this past week, I'm going to try to do that today. I also need to fill the last major plot hole. In the meantime, I've been doing some sourcing of environments.

 

[Perihelion]

Writing's coming along pretty well. I have most of a skeleton draft done now, but a lot of things are going to need to change. Hopefully I can get a barebones draft done this week and clean it up next week. In the meantime, when feeling burned out on writing, I've been sourcing models to use for backgrounds. I've also now written a script to convert all the materials in a scene to Pencil+ materials with configurable color ramps. Here's a car I ran through my script:

Obviously this still looks shitty (didn't actually pick colors or do any lighting or anything), but the automated material conversion should save me a lot of time.

Edit: Pfffff, it turns out there are like a million materials in this scene even though it looks like there are only a few colors. I should make my script combine materials with the same color. Here's a color ref I'd like to mimic if I don't have to wrestle with an awful material setup to do it. If it's too much trouble, I'll probably just do some crude color adjustments in Photoshop.

 

[Perihelion]

This week has been mostly prep work. I have a draft that's finished-ish, but now that it's done I see that I did a bunch of things very wrong, so I need to go back and rewrite them all now. Writing is very difficult. :crazy: I think I'm going to go back and try to write it out as a detailed summary + important dialogue so issues are more evident to me before I spend a bunch of time on it. Next weekend was my deadline for getting the story into a state where the events don't change much, so hopefully that happens. I've also done some more MaxScript-writing and asset sourcing in preparation for making backgrounds, but none of that is done yet.

 

[Perihelion]

Okay, I've miraculously fixed most of my plot problems and written up a new outline, but there are still things I need to figure out. I'm feeling a bit burned out from crunching through this so fast, so I think I'm going to spend the rest of the day working on a background. I need an office. I'm starting with this model I got from 3D warehouse:

This is with no work done on it at all. I'll post updates as I go. First thing I'm going to do is improve the geometry and move some things around.

 

[Perihelion]

Now with better geometry. Next is materials and lighting.

 

[Perihelion]

Here's some materials... Needs AO, reflection, spec, and so forth now.

 

[Perihelion]

Ambient occlusion is so pretty!

Now I just need a reflection pass and maybe some postwork if I feel like doing any painting.

 

[Perihelion]

Eh, I guess this is fine for now. I feel like I should add some glass in the window so it doesn't look like a hole, and also I want to put some buildings or something outside instead of my shitty placeholder sky, but I'll come back to it later.

 

[Perihelion]

Is anyone following this? I'll post more often if people are. I'm skeptical of my ability to finish all of the backgrounds by the deadline, but the rest of it is coming along well. I'm going to finish up the second draft and do a final editing pass this week before passing it off to the editor. Portraits and tech are in progress. Here's another background:

 

[OldPat]

The screenshots are pretty neat!
So you have until the end of January to release it? Game Contests may be really difficult and stressful, but also very satisfying.
I wish you good luck. You seem to be doing great thus far.

Can you share some more information with us? Like, the game title or a tiny bit of game story? Since it's a short game, I'll understand if you want to avoid reveal any of these until it is released.

 

[ZenVirZan]

I see every post, even if I don't comment.
I'm following, for sure.
Post more often :thumb:

 

[Ellie]

I'm watching, I just don't feel like I can add anything useful, apart from that this looks amazing and I can't wait to see how it all works together.

 

[Perihelion]

The screenshots are pretty neat!
So you have until the end of January to release it? Game Contests may be really difficult and stressful, but also very satisfying.
I wish you good luck. You seem to be doing great thus far.

Thanks! I wish I had more backgrounds done at this point, though. I have zero expectations of placing, but I'm taking the deadline seriously to make me more productive. I'm definitely not going to get all the polish I want done by the deadline, though.

Can you share some more information with us? Like, the game title or a tiny bit of game story? Since it's a short game, I'll understand if you want to avoid reveal any of these until it is released.

Uh, I haven't picked a title yet, actually. I'm really bad at titling things. :blush: But the story is about a lady who's basically like magical James Bond. She works for a private military corporation and makes unbreakable contracts with clients. It's intended to be a series, so the first installment is kind of a "day in the life" establishment of the premise. I hope the first one sells and I can justify making more, because I'm excited for the story. It looks like some shallow supernatural action thriller thing, but actually it's about the evils of debt.

Thanks, guys!