Are you enjoying winter?

I know I am not. Not that I am here to complain about Winter, instead I would like to talk about my game Lords of Illic. If you read my blog you would know I have been writing entries about motivation and art. If not, it doesn’t really matter either way. I have written more to organise my thoughts and record them for myself. Much in the same way I have been making Illic. Recently I went to some local game developer talks. One of the speakers talked about the importance of user experience and play testing. It was an interesting talk, which focused on how to get the most out of playtesting. So I was inspired to ask for some feedback from a friend. The first impression I got was that he did not like my game, it seemed as though everything he gazed at was not to his liking. That is not an easy thing to hear, especially not on a day when you are exhausted and have spent most of it wrestling with both virtual reality and networking in the most frustrating way possible. The first thing I want to say about it is it kind of reminds me of a line in a book I read once. "If you can't be medicine, be poison. Otherwise you're nothing but water." Which I will admit was terrible advice in the book however… Sometimes the best thing to hear is someone honestly telling you what they don’t like. Maybe in this case the best medicine is poison? Which is not to say I think the advice was toxic. Toxic words are not advice, they are just verbal abuse and they are never okay. I felt like it was a bit harsh but it was so valuable for that exact reason. It was a call to action. If you are creative you have to be able to accept this kind of advice and if it makes you mad for a moment you have to accept that feeling, reflect on it, the advice and be able to grow from it. (Actually maybe that is just how to live as a reasonable person).

When it comes to growing from advice I would like to bring up an idea from another author. One of my all time favourite authors Haruki Murakami wrote a great book about writing called Novelist as a Vocation. It has a great section where he talks about how he takes advice from editors. He takes it as a signal that there is something wrong with that section of the story. So whenever he hears that X part had some issue with it, he goes back and works on that part. He doesn’t follow their advice, instead he trusts his own skill and creativity. I think this is a great strategy because while you may be too close to your work to see issues sometimes, in the end the user is still a user. They only know about their experience and not what your intent or direction is. So with all this advice under my belt I had a long talk with my brother and came up with a lot of ideas of how to adjust the experience to make it better. 

One of his big pieces of advice was “show not tell”, I think being told that was the hardest part because that sentiment is part of my creative DNA as it were. I hate, hate it when people give you power point presentations when starting a game. Which is exactly why in Illic you only have a small paragraph about the information you need at that exact point. Now you might think “if you are using Unity, wouldn’t it be easy to add some event based stuff to your game. That would be a way better tutorial”. Well simply the answer is no. If I was making an action game for instance I would never have tips. I would use the game to teach you everything. In fact in my student game Poppy in Paintland we did exactly that. In that game setting up things based on events was easy. You just made a few pop-ups and gave the characters dialogue. Could I do the same thing in Illic? Well it would be difficult. I use the same scene for each battle in the game, so I can’t make one time events like I could in Poppy. 

To add something like that I would need to create a system to be able to serialise events into the scriptable objects that hold the level data and then parse them at runtime. Not something I can just throw together. The hard truth though is that if I want Illic to stand out that is exactly what I need. Well joke’s on everyone! That is already in the cards, but it won’t be done before AVCON so it is on the backburner. So one day maybe? 

What is on the cards you ask? 

• Fixing previously mentioned bugs
• Improvement of visuals of the title
• Delayed tooltips for elements like buttons 
• Diving straight into the first map without going to the campaign map
• Visuals of tile bases
• Ability charge UI

Now if only I had a week off to work on the game. Wait I do! I took the whole week off to give myself space from the networking virtual reality project I have been working on. I thought it wouldn’t be that bad when we first discussed the project and created a basic schedule.

Feel free to laugh for a solid minute or two if you want.

That project is a whole other thing, though. My boss suggested I write an in depth blog entry on the subject at some point and perhaps I will. I am going to do my best to not think about it this week though. Instead I will do whatever I feel like. Since I adore Illic (whatever anyone might say about it), it will likely be towards refining the user experience of Illic. I have also been wanting to improve my art skills and work on some writing. Maybe I will just end up lazing around playing video games. Whatever the case I will do what I feel like doing and try to relax. Don’t worry though (which is also a laugh I know no one is waiting for Illic updates with bated breath) Illic is evolving and with my test driven development no longer slowly sliding backwards.

Until next time.