Week 2 (give or take 11 months)

I am one week into my latest attempt at completing the Edda project. There have been a couple of false starts, mostly due to me not having a good enough idea, then not having any structure to how I would even produce a game - even if I had a good idea.

Making this 3-act adventure is very different from my first "hur hur, maybe I make the little Belgian have monkey friend who lives in an alley" game. 

This has required an actual project plan. Thankfully, that plan has so far been a huge success - albeit, we are only one week in.

Development Progress 

One week ago I treated this project as if I'd just come up with this idea and had no preconceptions of how it would look or what would happen. Of course, it has helped hugely that I actually had that 11 months of procrastination and dicking about to turn to every time I needed a character or puzzle for this "new" project.

Last week I explained how I had fully plotted the story, planned the screens and (incredibly) designed all the puzzles. I will thank myself later for that. 

However, this devlog is about this week.

This week I had to think about those screens and puzzles and how I would have to populate them with people and objects. The writing it all down part was fine, but the latter half of the week required actual graphics and, even worse, me trying to make pixel art characters. 

I have gone cel-shaded for the characters - I sort of flirted with the idea before, but the look of them wasn't right. This time they look really nice, moving about the environments.

I've shown a lot of stuff before now, which now happily all lives in a digital bin, so observe the following with caution. 

Here are some things I made that I liked:

Nu-Edda, under a strange, stone arch

Tree trunks and webs

Obviously, Edda isn't scaled right in these scenes yet and gloriously floats around in some areas. This is not a superpower - it's a mistake.

I have finished the designs for the first 6 characters you see in the game. All of them have only one view at the moment - they don't talk, they don't blink, their legs don't move. They are basically teenagers (good one). But having those placeholders means I can build the whole first act now.

The music is all ready in demo form - I won't even look at that again until the very, very end. I anticipate a lot of harp. Whether it will be too much harp - well that is the question.

Next steps 

In the next week I will be focusing on writing the dialogue - which I quite enjoy; programming the inventory mechanics - which makes my brain hurt; and programming the dialogue - which I cannot say I enjoy much. It's fun once it's working though.