TSoG&B: First days

cyhawk on 2013/04/24 00:42 of The Sea of Good and Bad

Planning out everything had the advantage that we could immediately start implementation on Sunday. I threw together the skeleton of the game in an hour that had all the core components (in a non-working state of course :)), and everyone could start plugging in parts in parallel.

The downside of the big team was that I could not follow progress closely. Since I was working on other designs in the pre-production phase I barely understood what was the game we were making about. I thought I'd let those who knew more work on the game logic. The pre-production design was rather vague about the setting (the white wizard of Life battling the black wizard of Death) so I went to spice it up.

I wrote a goofy script and sketched portraits for the characters. Game dialogs are not an easy genre. They need to be so short as to not bore the player that every sentence has to serve multiple purposes. You have to expand the setting, advance the story, explain the game mechanic and build the character with the same dozen words that fit in the constrained space at the bottom of the screen!

So I probably failed at all of those goals :). But it was a good effort. Players with a keen sense for detective stories may be able to work out the plot. Who sent the Kraken? Who was Tom working for? What the hell is Aunt Menace going on about?