Hello, in case you don't know, Welcome To The Dark Place is out now, and it has probably been the most frantic pre-release week of any of my games. For the last few days before the game came out, I completely reworked the Undergoing (which is why someone found a way into an alternate tunnel system through a glitch), created an essential character in the rainforest and all her dialogue and audio, and a fortune teller machine. Then I frantically playtested, but at that point my stamina was so low that I couldn't give it my best effort. I slept for three hours a day to make it happen, and I'm probably going to have to recover from that. It's like I just exorcised this game from myself.
The game got essentially one day of play-testing the day before release. There are plenty of bugs continually coming in, but it gladly seems to be playable, and thanks to the users reporting bugs in the discord, the game is gradually getting smoothed out.
Watching people explore the game and find the dragon pieces in the discord has been really fun. I'm getting extremely valuable info about what stuff is easy to miss, and I'll be using it to make the game more friendly.
Things I learned
Welcome To The Dark Place has probably been the project that I've learned more from than any other. It's a hodgepodge; you see the work I did when I had just left Roblox, then walk 20 seconds across the map and see the work I did just a few days ago. And there's everything in-between. That makes it really easy for me to see how I've improved.
So what have I learned since this game started development?
It's generally more fun to make a game for the player first, not for myself. It sounds like a no-brainer, but it's actually a very selfless mindset you have to put yourself into, where you really imbue your game with a personality that loves the player and wants to delight them and leave them feeling better than before. And for me that sometimes requires going in a direction that I wouldn't normally go. This was the realization I had before I made The Upturned. But Welcome To The Dark Place is quite unforgiving; that's why the majority of stuff I made for the game towards the end was about hints and clues and even a character lending simple moral support. If I continue to add anything, it will be in this direction.
If you haven't made or playtested many games, it's probably easy to say, "I'd rather make games for myself first, because surely a game that I enjoy is a game that others will enjoy!" But watching people earnestly struggle in your games for hours and days will shatter that illusion. That being said, there's a fine balance, and you have to think of it as the relationship between the game and the player, where it gives and takes.
I realized why it's so hard to make a choose-your-own-adventure style story. What happens to me is that I find a series of choices that lead to the most satisfying outcome, and then I don't want to give the player choices that will lead them away from that route. So it's very hard and unmotivating to make truly nonlinear areas. For me personally, it requires an intense amount of creativity and effort to write a story that I'm very satisfied with and then think to myself, "But what if it didn't go like that," and spin it off in another direction entirely. I succeeded and failed at this throughout the Dark Place's various "setpieces" and now I understand this difficulty in a way I never did before. It makes it even harder when I know that I'll have to create sound effects for every idea I come up with. I think this really might just be an issue solved by discipline and good planning.
This might be one of the biggest ones: I'm not very humble. While other people might have not enough confidence to commit to their vision, I can believe in my vision so hard that I become paralyzed by its imagined importance, mortified by the thought that I might not complete it. I literally become afraid that I will not complete it before I die; it's practically an idolatrous mindset, a kind of pride in which my worth depends on my work. Then when it's time to get stuff done, I wonder where my feeling of fun and whimsy has gone, and I wonder why I don't want to do it anymore! Because of this, continually leaving Welcome To The Dark Place to do other projects was a valuable exercise. A mantra that I repeat to myself is, "Keep your head down." Keep your head down while you build up the tower. Don't stand back to admire the size of your work until it's done.
Writing-wise I think I've improved a lot, but most of that improvement just feels like my instincts are evolving. There is a quote by Chuck Jones that I like: "Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out." It really feels true when applied to writing and prose and perhaps any art form. (But what about talented people who are already good at it when they start? I think what we call natural talent is just when someone's life has coincidentally prepared them for a certain kind of task without them knowing; out of chance, they have already done all that rigorous training.)
I still think I'm not a great writer, but towards the end of this project, I became more bold in going after stranger ideas, and my old writing sounds pretty cheesy to me now.
The New Map
I realized that there are two types of players who play this game: the players who make maps, and the players who don't. It's not just about making a map but the mindset of wanting to find everything and fully conquer this unknown world, versus wanting to immerse themselves in it and be totally vulnerable and lost. Both are good, which is why I'm a little hesitant about giving the player this map right off the bat. But even if the player doesn't choose to make a detailed map, it sort of cues the player in on the type of game they're playing, which is why I found it important enough to add.
Initially I tried making a more minimalist map that fit the game's black and white art style, but it looked ugly, and this paper map felt surprisingly natural despite the clashing visual style.
Getting the map working was one of those issues where I thought, "This could be really difficult or really easy." And It was actually really easy. As you can see above, there was some stuff to work through, but the basics of modifying a texture and saving it were already done for me (since I'm using a good asset to handle saving and loading, and Unity's SetPixel function is pretty straight-forward.)
The hardest part was probably dealing with UI scaling. The pixels get drawn depending on a hidden camera that looks at the map. The 2D camera is perfectly aligned with the texture, in order to convert the 3D world coordinates to the texture's 2D coordinates, but the camera wouldn't scale with the map. I luckily jerry-rigged a fix really quick by luck with just a line of code though, and that's why the map got released after a day of work! I will have to see people using the map before I can improve it further.
Adding in the pencil was just fun, and it's a decision to make the map more tactile and fun versus making it more practical. If it's more fun to use, it's more likely that casual players will want to use it for things.