Home Devlog #1

Now, this game is still in it's very early stages but I wanted to  talk about some triumphs, design ideas, and roadblocks that I'm currently experiencing.

Home I believe it the fist game where I've managed to have a story line already drawn up before the game even started production. For me this is a first. However, with having the story line, has caused me to take a step back and look at how I wanted to create this game. My biggest issue right now is text dialogue, I've never had a story rich game before. With that there is a large learning curve with learning how to incorporate a dynamic text/dialogue feature into this game. I'll admit, sometimes I'm stubborn and want to figure out things on my own, but this may have to be hours of tutorials to learn how to implement it. The problem with following tutorials is that the code isn't truly mine, in that sense if something breaks I have to go through lines of code that I don't fully understand, with variables that I wouldn't normally use. Of course in the future I could always play around and optimize and tweak the system into something that I would be able to understand.

Another roadblock that I'm experiencing is the animation aspect. First lets talk about my accomplishments, I'm extremely happy with how the Orcas have turned out, I can't imagine doing major updates or overhauls of them in the future, maybe some tweaks to their animation movements to make them more natural but that would be it. My biggest issue is tile sets and backgrounds, it all seems so.... tedious.  I'm not one that can sit down for hours and draw, I get the idea in my mind and I want it right away but my patience runs thin fairly quickly. I find myself just filling the game with mock-ups and experimental tile sets quite often, and then I put off the real work for as long as possible. I do feel with filling the game with real completed tile sets and backgrounds would make me feel more motivated to work on the animation aspect.

Music and sound effects is the next big hurtle, water sounds and whale sounds will be the hardest for me to either find or create. One idea for the whale sounds has been highly pitched instruments, I'm yet to try that out. The music has an idea that I'm currently sitting on that involves an acoustic guitar, I've always had a soft spot for acoustic guitars. With other sound tracks luckily I have 6 years experience of school band behind me but it has also been 12 years since I've played any instruments. This will also be a learning curve as well.

I hope to fill you in on the next devlog on more news about the game and how it has progressed, I will post more pictures and maybe some video clips of what I have.

Until then, thank you for reading.

Cheers!