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I think a good road trip story is one where I feel like I’m some spectator in the backseat who is trying to figure out why this trip is so important to everyone else. But as the backstory and relationships of the characters unfold, I reach a point where I become just as invested as the characters to reach their destination; where it goes from “THEY need to get there” to “WE need to get there”. But I feel like the story didn’t reveal enough of the characters for me which resulted in the payout at the end not being as rewarding as I hoped.
I’ve reached a point in development for Wayfinders where I can actually show some of the features off. Because of that, I figured it would be a good idea to make a Pitch Deck for Publishers/Investors. Here are some of the things I’ve put together for it:
Got the first draft of the game completed. Now to have some close peers playtest it to get feedback. Here are a few screenshots:
Here's an updated video of the scene I previously posted. If you played my RPG Maker demo, you'll hopefully recognize this scene. I'm getting more familiar with how the Unreal Engine works so I wanted to add a few things like visual effects and camera work. I also figured out how to trigger dialogue in the game (very different from how they're put in the sequencer/cutscene in the beginning). Next will be including choices and occasional branching dialogue.
For about a month, I've been trying to figure out how to make a dialogue system for my game. Back when I was making the game with RPG Maker, it was as simple as pressing the right buttons to put together the functions I needed. But sadly, Unreal isn't as simple. The reason why it's been taking me so long to figure out how to put this system together is because there are 5 main functions/mechanics I want it to have:
Some dev friends of mine gave me a great suggestion to greybox/block-out my town. For those of you that are unfamiliar with greyboxing, like I was before my friends explained it to me, it's where you create the layout of a level with blocks (usually grey ones) to not only see how the level looks but also how it feels when having your character run around it. Since I had some preset buildings in my assets, I figured it would be a little better than just using blocks.
So yeah, first big change is renaming Wayfarers to Wayfinders. I'm not sure if anyone cares to here the detailed explanation of why so I'll just say the story will get to a certain point where "Wayfarers" wouldn't fit. This being an RPG about adventure, discovery, and other adjectives about exploration, "Wayfinders" seemed like a better fit for the story as a whole. If this name change has left you lightheaded, then you may want to take a seat for the next part.
Whenever I start to get burnt out with writing, I try to switch to working on something different for a while. I look at it as letting my creative muscles take a break while I exercise the technical part of my brain.
As mentioned in my previous post, I put aside Wayfarers to work on another project. I didn't go into detail about the project since I wasn't sure about what I could and couldn't say in regards to NDA. However, some recent events have made it pretty clear that I can talk about it now.
A couple weeks ago, a story pitch I submitted for an interactive fiction (IF) mobile game got accepted. As a person pursuing a career in writing and narrative design, this is a great opportunity for me. But this also means I have to make the difficult decision of not working on Wayfarers until the story is finished.
While I was learning how to use some plugins for RPG Maker MV, I realized how I could make the harvesting task Archie has to do in the demo a little more interesting.
I’ve made some significant progress on my endless runner (which I decided to give the code name “Little Nemo”) so I figured it’d be good to show what I have so far.
So it’s been quite a while since I updated my blog. But not because I was taking a break from pursuing my career in writing and narrative design; far from it, actually. I recently took up learning how to use the Unreal Engine 4, a powerful game engine that has a nifty visual scripting system called “Blueprint”. I first made a kind of tutorial sample for an FPS type game. Here is a video of what I made:
I’ve been so focused on Wayfarers and sending updates via dev logs on my Itch.io site for it that I forgot about my blog on my own site! If you’re interested in following strictly Wayfarers related stuff, click here and take a look at the Development Log section.
I've been pretty silent since publishing the demo of my game, Wayfarers, and feel it's about time I provided a brief update on what's been going on with it.
A few weeks ago I was asked to write up scripts for a romance based interactive fiction game. Along with character bios and a general idea of what the story was about, they gave me 4 very specific scenes to write with a surprisingly low word limit…
I enjoy all of Mark Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit videos but I found this one particularly interesting. He makes a lot of interesting observations and even has given me a few ideas I may want to try out on my next Interactive Fiction project.
One of my all time favorite games that acted as the turning point in my desire to become a writer.