Dev Diary 27: First Playable Demo

This past week marked a pretty big milestone. Or at least, it should have. There wasn’t a specific moment where the game went from a prototype to a playable demo, but we’ll just say it did. If you want to get technical, it’s been playable ever since I first included input support; it’s just been very, very crappy.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t believe that I’ve hit an actual first playable demo as I would describe it (that being a playable demo level, with a start and an end). I’m missing a couple small, albeit key points. The level isn’t complete, and I have not included any way to identify the end of the level. But it is playable. So, I’ve hit my goal, sort of. A ringing endorsement, right?

But, what is most important: it’s showing very clear signs of promise.

I’ve been going back and forth between two design mindsets: Top down (i.e. designing the overall game and working out the feature set from that) or bottom-up (iterating over the control mechanics and individual features until the global design emerges). I feel the need to focus on the top down approach because of pressure from the self-imposed deadline to have a publisher demo ready in a month’s time.

However, my gut tells me to focus on the core control scheme and iterating over the feature set because it makes more common sense. This method requires patience and trust in the process. It requires the confidence that if I continue iterating, something good will emerge.

This is not to say that I don’t have any ideas. The game already has an overall theme, which was largely defined by the direction of the tech and allows for a great amount of variety and experimentation. All the brainstorming has produced tons of ideas, enough for 10 games worth; I only want to make one really good game though (and 2 cash-in-the-money sequels, of course), so it’s a matter of picking the right ideas, experimenting,  and discovering what works best.

Work Done Last Week

I had an up and down and up week. A great start to the week with a breakthrough on the basic avatar movement. It feels nearly right. In fact, I’m convinced that it’s within 10% of what the final movement behavior will be like. It will just need tweaking and iteration.

Then, I fell prey to a major slowdown later in the week. Some of my ignored issues with the editor came crashing down on me, inducing coding paralysis. Having three different versions of the editor cobbled together has been gnawing at the back of my mind, but when I came to add some new gameplay features to the editor, the jumbled mess left me unsettled. Only the latest editor code uses the component based object system. Meanwhile, all my physics tools were using the older version, which either didn’t save out correctly, or left memory leaks all over the place. After lots of thought, I figured out how to convert some of the older stuff without breaking everything.

I then spent the week-end working on that aspect of the editor to make up for the unproductive days, and the whole thing is now looking much nicer underneath the hood.

The week-end was also filled with a lot of brainstorming on the game, on features, on abilities, on game modes, on challenges, stories and puzzles. Pretty productive, to say the least.

Work Planned This Week

I want to finish up the Milestone 3 review for tomorrow. I’ll be addressing a few bugs and usability issues that have cropped up during some play tests.

I’ll do a bit of work on the editor, wrapping up some of the improvements, and will introduce gameplay objects (such as goal areas). I will also improve the current demo level, fleshing it out a bit more.

Finally, there will be work spent on a new feature. Following on from earlier, I am going to aim to produce and play test a new feature every week for the next four weeks.

Related posts:

1. Dev Diary 22: Road to the Demo
2. Milestone 3 Review
3. Milestone 3 and 4: The Demo
4. Dev Diary 28: Simplicity in Design