I ended up dropping a class, which I'm ashamed of. It's made things a bit awkward with the professor from that class (whose office happens to be right across from the game lab I work in). But hey, I learned two things from this ordeal. One, I now know fairly accurately how many hours a task or classwork will take up. Two, I should never be too apologetic in my emails. It doesn't really do anything for anyone. In fact, it may make the other professor even more uncomfortable around you, which you can't really do anything about since another apology isn't really going to improve things. I'm more interested in my first point, my ability to discern the amount of time a task will take. When this semester started, I was still fairly poor at this and faced paralyzing fear when faced with my assignments. Now, I am able to know precisely how many hours a paper, a coding task, a painting will take. It was by working out how many hours the remaining assignments for this semester would take up that I realized I could not keep up with all four classes without compromising or dipping into lab time, so the CS class I was doing bad in gets nixed.
More importantly, I then jotted down the tasks remaining for the current game, then discerned how many hours each phase would approximately take. It had kind of felt like this game was just a murky haze kind of taking shape in places with no clear pattern. Now I can visualize at what state the game will be in at various points in the future. Old remnants of doubt and dismay that the game would ever get finished are little more than wisps now. I am also confident that the game will be 2D now. The whole scope of the game is more manageable and doable. Based on current projections, I should have a prototype of a social interaction system done around the end of January 2015. It'll be a pretty rough prototype, but it will hopefully hold the potential for deeper gameplay. So yes, I will definitely have something posted at the beginning of February.
The story world and history are also coming along quite nicely. I think I'll refrain from divulging any of the history, since uncovering it will play a major part, but as for the setting, it will take place high up in the mountains. I mean, I wanted there to be perpetual snow throughout the year, so I didn't have a lot of options. It was either mountains or the poles. I also pictured a frozen caldera with a small village illuminating its center, and wanted to capture that in the game.
I used to crazy love science, and one of the things that excited me in geology was calderas. They're collapsed indentations at the top of dead volcanoes. Sometimes those indentations fill up with water, and you get this beautiful quaint, quiet lake, encircled by a rim sloping inwards and surrounded by sky. Sometimes those caldera lakes will freeze. A perfect, circular frozen lake with a village in the center would be really pretty.
I'm a bit sad I'm not rendering the setting in 3D, but alas it would take me twice as long to finish the game if I did use 3D. Originally I wanted to make something akin to Animal Crossing that looked similar to this really beautiful WebGL demo. I really want to have a beta of the game done, at least before I graduate though. So bye, pretty original vision for the game!
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| Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - by OutsideOfSociety |
Another fairly important bit: I have a title for the game now! It will either be called 'the Clarity of Ice' or just 'Clarity.' The direction the game goes will determine which one I go with. If ice plays as much of a symbolic role as I hope in the narrative, then I'll go with the first title. Otherwise the second title works as well. So hooray, I can refer to 'Clarity' instead of 'the current game I'm working on' or 'that red, ice themed game.'
I dunno, I've also played around with the chara design a bit more. I can't get myself to picture her with long hair but whatever, I've been trying it out. Have a sketch to end the post with!
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