The technical side of things
October 3rd, 2009, 1:37 pm
1/ If you've never worked in Flash this won't mean a lot to you, but the entire game (discounting title and preloaders) is on one frame.
2/ the art - which i'm sure you've seen screenshots of by now - has cost me almost $1,000. flora is a world class artist, and worth every penny of it. the money is money that was raised from past games i've made, msotly from ads, and a few small donations from various people. so for those of you who were here playing my games when we used the awful Clicksor popups, and for those of you who leave your adbloocker disabled whiel you play my games so that the Google ads can display; this is my thank you to you :D
3/ The size of the project makes bugfinding now pretty difficult. even a typo in a caption can take 5 to 10 minutes just to find.
4/ last time I checked, the size of thr compiled game was over 6mb. for a flash game thts' pretty big (Kongregate and many other sites have a 10mb limit). if you're still on dialup internet: sorry :P
5/ Earlir this year, the game was already getting pretty big in fileseize, to the point that I ended up buying a new PC partly to be able to handle it. it was gettin impossible to add anything more to it wihout lagging the whole system, and compiling would freeze the computer.
6/ most of the development time has gone into caption / dialogue writing. When I started, I wrote an engine that can handle almost any part of the game with just one or two lines of copy pasted code, but the script didn't write itself :)
7/ initially there was no diagloue in the game except for the intro and a few characters to talk with planned. however, this felt empty and wasn't that engaging compared to the colourful nature of the world.
8/ TO counter this, I decided the main character would have a lot to say. the problem was, he was talking to himself. So nowhe has a brother to talk to.
9/ not everyonel ikes the dialgoue system. i've added an option to disable all but essential captions - this leaves the game feelign a bit empty again, and somewhat misses the point of it, but it's the player's own choice whether to read the captions or not.
10/ The aptions are as userfrieldny as possible, allowing players to skip through them with a click of the mouse eevn if they left them enabled. To save your time, most captions will only display once per game: if you read the conversation for a particular item once alredy, you won't have to read it a second time. Exceptions are important objects, and other characters.
That's it, thanks for reading. If you'vebeen following work on my game for this long its probably fair to mention why its been delayed so much,despite being nearly finished for so long - in short i've had a couple of big personal problems that have realyl affecetd how much I can work. This isnt a LiveJournal blog so I'm not gonna go into huge amounts of detail on that, but its enough to say that the past year hasn't gone how I hoped at all.
2/ the art - which i'm sure you've seen screenshots of by now - has cost me almost $1,000. flora is a world class artist, and worth every penny of it. the money is money that was raised from past games i've made, msotly from ads, and a few small donations from various people. so for those of you who were here playing my games when we used the awful Clicksor popups, and for those of you who leave your adbloocker disabled whiel you play my games so that the Google ads can display; this is my thank you to you :D
3/ The size of the project makes bugfinding now pretty difficult. even a typo in a caption can take 5 to 10 minutes just to find.
4/ last time I checked, the size of thr compiled game was over 6mb. for a flash game thts' pretty big (Kongregate and many other sites have a 10mb limit). if you're still on dialup internet: sorry :P
5/ Earlir this year, the game was already getting pretty big in fileseize, to the point that I ended up buying a new PC partly to be able to handle it. it was gettin impossible to add anything more to it wihout lagging the whole system, and compiling would freeze the computer.
6/ most of the development time has gone into caption / dialogue writing. When I started, I wrote an engine that can handle almost any part of the game with just one or two lines of copy pasted code, but the script didn't write itself :)
7/ initially there was no diagloue in the game except for the intro and a few characters to talk with planned. however, this felt empty and wasn't that engaging compared to the colourful nature of the world.
8/ TO counter this, I decided the main character would have a lot to say. the problem was, he was talking to himself. So nowhe has a brother to talk to.
9/ not everyonel ikes the dialgoue system. i've added an option to disable all but essential captions - this leaves the game feelign a bit empty again, and somewhat misses the point of it, but it's the player's own choice whether to read the captions or not.
10/ The aptions are as userfrieldny as possible, allowing players to skip through them with a click of the mouse eevn if they left them enabled. To save your time, most captions will only display once per game: if you read the conversation for a particular item once alredy, you won't have to read it a second time. Exceptions are important objects, and other characters.
That's it, thanks for reading. If you'vebeen following work on my game for this long its probably fair to mention why its been delayed so much,despite being nearly finished for so long - in short i've had a couple of big personal problems that have realyl affecetd how much I can work. This isnt a LiveJournal blog so I'm not gonna go into huge amounts of detail on that, but its enough to say that the past year hasn't gone how I hoped at all.
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