Tea for Two - Development during Adventure Jam
Sunday, June 30, 2019Hello, I would like to talk a bit on Tea for Two which is my entry for Adventure Jam 2019, and the ideas and inspirations for it.
This is the first Adventure Game I write and design, along with the usual management and coding. Adventure Jam is a two weeks event, I only selected the tools and thought about the prompt before, and used the first week to actually build the story and design the game, mostly on paper, and the second week to implement everything. One base idea was to explore the mood as dark days, but without taking itself too serious.
I decided to use the opportunity to create a game that relates to Future Flashback. In previous jam I participated, there is always a point when the team thinks "we can grow this game later" but after the jam each person goes back to do their thing, so with this in mind, I decided to make a small story, that is self-contained, but can be expanded. Guilherme has built a whole universe and timeline for Future Flashback, while that game focus more on the characters and their stories, this leaves a lot to explore by picking specific events and particularities from this universe. I briefly talked with him about the idea I had to play around Logan, and build a part of his past, and he gave comments around, but ultimately said don't worry, do your thing - he was very focused on the level he was working on Future Flashback.
Since Logan is a detective, this would allow me to make a detective story, which I have been reading about on scriptwriting books. And with this came to the part of figuring out the crime, the events that lead to that crime, and the minimal environments needed for the crime. This made me create the first sketch of what the story would be.
Once I had this in mind, I started piecing how the game would work, and to me, I really wanted to pick similarities on the Sierra Interface, where you pick special mouse cursors to do things, but I wanted to do something different for the buttons. I really liked how Wadjet Eye solves in Blackwell games how Joey is always there to make the look ats conversations instead of a person talking to themselves, and I also like a lot on Firewatch when the player talks through, and I liked the over radio sound too, but I didn't want to lock myself at explaining things over radio. I also liked the Unavowed proposal of having an inventory of character abilities, so I decided to juggle around these ideas.
I wanted to make the character talk about the room environment, and talk about clues, and being able to figure clues from the environment by talking. To reduce scope, I decided there would be no objects inventory.
When I was a kid, I played a lot of times with my sister a game that here in Brazil is called Scotland Yard, but elsewhere, in US and UK, it's called 221 B Baker Street. In this game, each time there's a case, the case presents elements from it that you have to figure out things, like a murder weapon, where the murder happened, why and other elements, and you play walking around in a board, competing with other players to solve the crime first.
Originally I wanted the player to be able to talk about things in the scene, and the clues at any time, but this proved challenging to write the dialogs during the jam timespan. I mostly wanted the dialogs to be interesting and do at least one thing:
After I had written, and typed everything, I showed to the musician of Future Flashback, Jordan, and we talked about the script and the dialogs, and many details and reviews came up during our conversations, and he helped make my jokes work in English too, but the main characters, even though they are Americans, they have families from foreigner background, and I wanted to keep some ideas I originally had.
Once the basic dialog lines were figured out, I showed the initial build to some people. It had just bad placeholder graphics, and no sound of any type, and the reception was bad, people complained they didn't want to be clicking and reading a text, they thought the game made no sense. I then added some game elements that to me gave the game a lot of rhythm, and I showed it to more people, and I got back the complaint "these game elements, they remove me from immersion, I like the texts, but the game elements don't feel rewarding at all". So now at this point I have no idea what to do. I decided to go with the vision and finish as is.
At this time, Jordan gives me his last review of the game dialogs, and I ask help for Morgan Willcock, from AGS Forums, to give me some input and he decided to give me his review of the game dialogs.
From there on, the pieces eventually just fell in, after reading the many encouraging messages from Sally Beaumont on the Adventure Jam discord channel I eventually gather strength to start messaging the voice actors. Every actor I approached, agreed with the role and the conversations with them are way easier than I could imagine and they start working on their lines quickly. Francisco warns me that cutting the audio files will take double the time I imagined, and he was right, it was the most time consuming task. Meanwhile Ricardo reached a good spot of the level he was making for Future Flashback and we talk and he is focused on delivering the needed backgrounds, meanwhile, he convinces his wife Melany to join us, and she quickly makes the awesome cover the game ended having. At this point, I also am in need of music and ambient sounds, and after asking Edwyn Tiong and Arishgokol, both join in and quickly deliver their contributions. After each Voice Actor delivers their voices, I deliver them to Edwyn to add the radio effect that ended in the final version.
The end of the development is a blur of lack of sleep, cursing the computer, all I remember is that the game got done in the end and I won a weekend laying in the sofa alternating between sleeping, watching tv and eating.
Completely unhealthy development but got it done.
Since Logan is a detective, this would allow me to make a detective story, which I have been reading about on scriptwriting books. And with this came to the part of figuring out the crime, the events that lead to that crime, and the minimal environments needed for the crime. This made me create the first sketch of what the story would be.
Once I had this in mind, I started piecing how the game would work, and to me, I really wanted to pick similarities on the Sierra Interface, where you pick special mouse cursors to do things, but I wanted to do something different for the buttons. I really liked how Wadjet Eye solves in Blackwell games how Joey is always there to make the look ats conversations instead of a person talking to themselves, and I also like a lot on Firewatch when the player talks through, and I liked the over radio sound too, but I didn't want to lock myself at explaining things over radio. I also liked the Unavowed proposal of having an inventory of character abilities, so I decided to juggle around these ideas.
When I was a kid, I played a lot of times with my sister a game that here in Brazil is called Scotland Yard, but elsewhere, in US and UK, it's called 221 B Baker Street. In this game, each time there's a case, the case presents elements from it that you have to figure out things, like a murder weapon, where the murder happened, why and other elements, and you play walking around in a board, competing with other players to solve the crime first.
Originally I wanted the player to be able to talk about things in the scene, and the clues at any time, but this proved challenging to write the dialogs during the jam timespan. I mostly wanted the dialogs to be interesting and do at least one thing:
- help you solve the crime,
- give a piece of background information on a character,
- give a piece of background information on the world, and
- be fun.
Once the basic dialog lines were figured out, I showed the initial build to some people. It had just bad placeholder graphics, and no sound of any type, and the reception was bad, people complained they didn't want to be clicking and reading a text, they thought the game made no sense. I then added some game elements that to me gave the game a lot of rhythm, and I showed it to more people, and I got back the complaint "these game elements, they remove me from immersion, I like the texts, but the game elements don't feel rewarding at all". So now at this point I have no idea what to do. I decided to go with the vision and finish as is.
At this time, Jordan gives me his last review of the game dialogs, and I ask help for Morgan Willcock, from AGS Forums, to give me some input and he decided to give me his review of the game dialogs.
From there on, the pieces eventually just fell in, after reading the many encouraging messages from Sally Beaumont on the Adventure Jam discord channel I eventually gather strength to start messaging the voice actors. Every actor I approached, agreed with the role and the conversations with them are way easier than I could imagine and they start working on their lines quickly. Francisco warns me that cutting the audio files will take double the time I imagined, and he was right, it was the most time consuming task. Meanwhile Ricardo reached a good spot of the level he was making for Future Flashback and we talk and he is focused on delivering the needed backgrounds, meanwhile, he convinces his wife Melany to join us, and she quickly makes the awesome cover the game ended having. At this point, I also am in need of music and ambient sounds, and after asking Edwyn Tiong and Arishgokol, both join in and quickly deliver their contributions. After each Voice Actor delivers their voices, I deliver them to Edwyn to add the radio effect that ended in the final version.
The end of the development is a blur of lack of sleep, cursing the computer, all I remember is that the game got done in the end and I won a weekend laying in the sofa alternating between sleeping, watching tv and eating.
Completely unhealthy development but got it done.