Denius-Sams Gaming Academy!

I'm happy to announce that I was selected to be one of the 20 inaugural participants in the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy under Warren Spector! I still can't really believe that I was selected, and I can't wait to do amazing things with these people.

Since I'll likely be spending most of my team working with the DSGA team, it's likely that I won't be able to post much of what I'm working on (NDAs and such). I apologize in advance for the lack of updates!

LIFELIKE Lore: The History, Stanzas 1-10

I'm in the process of writing the history of the Ethereal Eclectics corporate office building, and I decided that an epic fantasy-movie-opening-voiceover style would be the most appropriate. Here's a bit of a taste:

1.

At the dawn of the first age, in the fiscal year of our Lord sixteen, the world was stricken with a grey blight known as the Recession. Our domain, known by a since forgotten name at that time, was not spared from this blight.

(more after the break)

LIFELIKE: Polish, Polish, Tutorial

(I've decided to copy over some of my posts from the Lifelike dev blog, 'cause who's got time to read two blogs? No one, that's who.)

We're fully into polish mode for our demo for Game Demo Day at this point. We keep telling ourselves we're content locked, but new things keep sneaking their way in.

It has come to our attention that most people won't immediately know how to play our game upon seeing it (weird, right?), so I've been thinking about what we can do to create a condensed tutorial for our condensed demo.

So, I wrote up a design for a tutorial, but ended up getting way too into it and accidentally made it out of scope (woops). There's little chance that this will be ready for game demo day, but designing it with the demo in mind actually led me to figuring out ways to streamline the tutorial for the eventual full game.

The tutorial essentially only introduces players to the basic controls and game flow, leaving the rest to the players to learn for themselves. It also does a good job of introducing the player to the tone and narrative in the way without getting bogged down in exposition.

Anyway, check out the design doc for the tutorial after the break.

LIFELIKE: The Daunting Dialogue System, Part 2: Event Dialogue & Idle Dialogue

(I've decided to copy over some of my posts from the Lifelike dev blog, 'cause who's got time to read two blogs? No one, that's who.)

Time for round two! This continues where the first post left off, discussing the design for the dialogue system in Lifelike.

This second half discusses the two different large categories of dialogue: Event Dialogue and Idle Dialogue.

LIFELIKE: The Daunting Dialogue System, Part 1: Overview & Priority

(I've decided to copy over some of my posts from the Lifelike dev blog, 'cause who's got time to read two blogs? No one, that's who.)

So, I've finally finished the design document for Lifelike's dialogue system. Funny how a single bullet point ("Integrated, un-intrusive dialogue") can turn into about nine pages of specifications. The design for this definitely turned out to be more complicated than expected. The complexity is mainly caused by the fact that, while our core gameplay is turn-based, the dialogue is real-time.

Because of this, it's possible for dialogue to be triggered while other dialogue is already going on. Find the solution to this problem (and more!) in the first half of the Dialogue System Design Document, after the break.

LIFELIKE: Corruption Guidelines

(I've decided to copy over some of my posts from the Lifelike dev blog, 'cause who's got time to read two blogs? No one, that's who.)

So, as we've mentioned quite a bit, our game focuses around a transition from a realistic setting to a surreal fantasy setting. That's pretty much the extent of the detail we've shared about it, and that's not because we were being secretive... it's because we didn't know.

With nothing more than an ambiguous idea about normal things being slowly replaced by very not normal things, it became clear that we needed more clarity in order to move forward with art and design.

As such, I decided to write up a guidelines document, detailing what we want to do with our weird, eclectic inspirations.

an early corruption comparison sketch

So, here's the doc (after the break):

LIFELIKE: Our Initial Design Document

(I've decided to copy over some of my posts from the Lifelike dev blog, 'cause who's got time to read two blogs? No one, that's who.)

We've finally finished putting together our High-Level Design Document! It's pretty snazzy. Check it out after the break.

LIFELIKE: Narrative Tools

(I've decided to copy over some of my posts from the Lifelike dev blog, 'cause who's got time to read two blogs? No one, that's who.)

One of the loftiest goals that we have for this game is to create a story that does more than just rest alongside the gameplay. As much as we all love roguelikes and tactical RPGs, their rigidity and the level of abstraction inherent in their mechanics usually forces the narrative into a secondary role.

So, we want to find a way to tie the narrative and the mechanics of our game together in a more meaningful way than we've seen done before in this type of game. 

Being completely overwhelmed by this, I decided to start small. I wrote out all the tools I could think of that our game could have to deliver narrative to the player.

Click "read more" to see the document!

LIFELIKE: A Corporate Roguelike

Teaser!

Work on my final capstone project has begun! Hurray! It's such a big deal, in fact, that it has its own blog. Development progress will be posted to corporateroguelike.blogspot.com. Check it out!