It's been a week since I started expanding The Will of Arthur Flabbington to what I hope can be considered a full game (albeit a short one maybe - it's difficult to estimate the length of an adventure game since they're nonlinear by design). This is the first time I write a longer adventure: my only commercial game, Kill Yourself, can be considered a full game... but it's not a long game, it's 30 short independent puzzle chains. All my other games are jam games developed in two weeks, where the scope is very limited.

So, for the first time I find myself with doubts I never had when making jam games. Are the puzzle chains too long? Are they too short? Are they too interconnected, or run too much in parallel? Will the player lose focus?

This is what the puzzle dependency graph looks like at the moment:

While the left part (the one you can play in the demo) seems roughly half the size of the middle part, I think the second act will take longer than just double the time of the first act (which is roughly 20 minutes of playing time, according to all streams I've seen). There's much more to explore, more characters to talk to, and the puzzles are more complex. In total I think I'll have 20 rooms, which is roughly the number of rooms you find in Mêlée Island... if the game ends up as long as the first part in The Secret of Monkey Island, well, I'll be very satisfied. There are a couple of nodes I want to expand (red) or rewrite (yellow), but in general it feels like a nice middle act, with two to three main plot lines that interconnect in a bunch of different short term quests that keep the player with plenty of stuff to do. Oh, and disregard the third part: I have a rough idea, but I didn't want to draw lines because I'm pretty sure things will change during development.

Rooms, rooms and rooms

Another new thing for me is drawing for a longer game. The small scope of jam games makes it easier to design rooms: there's not much to do, so you draw what's needed in a limited number of rooms and you're done. Players also have lower expectations in terms of exploration when it comes to jam games. But in a longer game, I need to shift my vision and start accepting that some rooms may be just for ambience, and may host only one vital hotspot. It seems a bit of a waste, and I always try to find a way to justify the existence of a room by adding more puzzles or maybe moving that vital hotspot to some other room and remove the need for a new screen, but looking back at my favorite games, it's perfectly normal.

In the end, it all comes down to the most precious skill I've learned during all the game jams I've took part to: learn to accept when something is good enough, and move on. This is SO much more difficult to do when you don't have the time constraint, because there's no short-term penalty in spending too much time perfecting some small detail.

The next steps

I'm eager to start implementing and writing. I'm having lots of fun imagining the puzzle chains in my mind, the dialogs, the cutscenes, and I want to see it all on my screen. I spent the last week drawing (those of you who follow my twitter account have seen a couple of quite detailed screenshots) but now it's time to produce simple wireframe images just to have a basis for implementation.

I'll try to write here at least once a week. However, if you want more capillary updates, I highly recommend to follow me on twitter.

Cheers,

Guga