Viral Love: Blog Post 3
Viral Love has reached a point where there is not much left to do but polish. The story is all there, and everything is working, or at least mostly working. The final scenes have been build, and we learned a lot from the experience of making the first two third of the story.
In the last couple sprints, I have mainly focused on on programming and art, but I have also done some story writing and soundtrack work. I made artwork for Ada, the adware virus. Nathan's dialogue script required Ada to have three separate costumes in addition to her standard appearance. It was a lot of fun for me to design each of these.
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| The dino costume is my favorite |
I spent a day on building scenes for the rest of Nathan's story, including the scene where you speak to Ada. On a basic level, this is a matter of taking all the lines of dialogue and copying them into a series of text files. In practice, things get a bit more complicated. One of our goals for Ada was that her dialogue would reference some of the player's earlier decisions. Paul came up with a system that allows us to set a bool or integer value when the player reaches a certain place in a conversation. For example, if the player provokes Anna into ranting about talking toasters, the game will remember that it happened.
Tracking these random variables was easy enough. Figuring out how to actually use those variables was a source of some confusion. Paul's system worked nicely once I got the hang of it. At first, I was just having a hard time starting at the code, trying to understand how it was supposed to work.
Another problem was that we had no easy way of changing a line of dialogue to reference an integer variable directly. I ran into this problem at a point in Ada's conversation where you can ask her for random facts about yourself. In the original plan, she was going to tell you how many times you wiggled your eyebrows at Troy. It quickly became clear that it would take a lot of extra programming for that to work out. Instead, Ada will simply tell you whether you wiggled your eyebrows more or less than seven times. In the end, it kind of works with her personality as some sort of broken AI.
Going forward, my current tasks involve finalizing the soundtrack, making any changes to the dialogue, and creating art for the user interface. One of our playtesters suggested we lean into the old-school computer theme for our art style. To that end, I modeled a Commodore PET computer, with the intention of taking renders of it to use as a frame in the user interface.
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Viral Love: Blog Post 2
We have made major strides on Viral Love in the last couple sprints.
My tasks have been focused on story writing, art, and programming. I share my writing responsibilities with our lead, Nathan, and I share the programming work with our main programmer, Paul. We finally found a good balance in our team arrangement and in the design of the game.
I wrote out the main beats of the overall story, and handed it off to Nathan for him to write a more detailed story outline. Nathan got back to me with a very solid base for the story, and he wrote all of the dialogue for the first scene with our second malware character, Anna.
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| Troy |
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| Anna |
Paul's work on the dialogue was instrumental in allowing us to craft a compelling story. He took the rudimentary system I cobbled together and made something efficient out of it. Previously, our system only supported an oppressively linear conversation flow. Nathan's writing has been excellent, has made the workload much more manageable for all of us.
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| I cracked up laughing when I saw this screen go from script to reality. |
The biggest problem right now is writer's block. For the most part, that issue can be dealt with by taking well timed breaks. Usually I end up struggling when I get carried away and spend hours upon hours writing and implementing dialogue. By the end it gets a bit more robotic. I get to a point where I have just a few more lines of dialogue to write to tie it all together, but it's hard to find something compelling to say when you're fatigued.
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| Started at 9:50, ended at 9:50 |
Viral Love is in a very good spot right now. We have some exciting ideas brewing for the final chapter of the game, and we are now much better equipped to handle it then we have ever been before.
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Viral Love: Blog Post 1
The experience of building our game, Viral Love, has overall been enjoyable and interesting.
So far, the process of making a mobile game has mostly been similar to my previous experiences, but with a slightly different set of opportunities and restrictions to keep in mind. It is not easier, but it is easier to get away with minimalistic designs.
So far, the main difference for me has been that there is more freedom to use minimalistic designs. Mobile games are traditionally narrower in scope There is less pressure to come up with innovative game mechanics, but it is also important to give your game personality to keep people’s interest. One of the insights we picked up from our first playtest was that personality, charm, and humor go a long way towards making an appealing mobile game. There was a moment in the dialogue with one of our characters, Troy, where the player could go back and forth wiggling eyebrows at Troy. Everyone seemed to like that, so we are going to include more of it and lean heavily into that type of humor.
Going forward, if I decide to continue designing mobile games, I hope that I would continue adapting my way of thinking. My first thought was to lean towards a basic core game concept that would work on any platform, mobile or otherwise. Dating sims seemed like a good opportunity. The basic format of games in the genre has already been proven, so it would give me room to innovate on story and art aspects while worrying less about complex gameplay mechanics. I also had the instinct to make sure the game was very light on resources.
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| Initial art of the three characters, based on different types of viruses. |
Very recently, we decided as a team to convert Viral Love into a full-on visual novel type game, instead of the dating sim / strategy hybrid we were making so far. We originally arrived at the first concept by merging two separate ideas, but we felt like we found a way that would make them blend together. It was a bit strange, but we think it still has potential if we were able to give it more time.
If we continued down that route, it may have still been a mistake even if we were able to give it more time and resources. By combining two genres, we risk alienating some of the people who prefer one of the genres but not the other. I feel like there is traditionally not a lot of overlap between the audiences of strategy games and visual novels, especially dating sims. Putting them together on a mobile platform would narrow the target audience even further. Even if we could make a very good game that way, it could quite easily fail to reach its audience.
Time is limited, however, so it is best to invest in making a really good and funny story-driven game, rather than developing two half-games that were still only connected in theory.
