Header

3 more screenshots from Dawn’s Light 2. Next week we’ll be having a video to show off a few things

I though you might be interested in knowing what we’re up to:

Dungeons

All dungeon maps are done, most have stories and dialogue done. No treasures or barrels are done yet and we haven’t placed any enemies. I do however have a cool new way to place enemies so I can’t wait to try it.

Towns

Towns are in place. Shops, inns and the important people are in place. We still want to add a whole bunch of people to make them more exciting. Plus a few little quests.

We’re doing mini games in the towns like in DL1 but they are much better and we know not to have time limits now.

Side Quests

The journal stuff is done for side quests and some of them are in place. We’ve recently thought of a couple more so those are only partly done.

Story Scenes

All story scenes are written and ready to go into the game. This week Andrew is going to be putting all of them (I hope) into the game. Some are easy to do but others with lots of animation and movement take a long time.

Weapon Crafting

I planned out all the materials and building process a while ago. Last week I made a rough version of the crafting process. I still need to make it so your weapons have the features you choose. I couldn’t do that before now since it’s very closely linked to …

Battle System

I’m right now working on a new turn order system. You’ll be able to see who gets a turn next and you’ll have some skills that can change the order. We had speed before but you didn’t get to see how it affected the battle so I think this will make battles more interesting.

After that I’ll work on putting in all the enemy data which is pretty easy.

4 Weeks

Our goal is to have the game finished by July 23 so we can start testing. Will we make it? Only time will tell.

Also I am batman … this batman.

One of the reasons it’s tricky to guess a release date is the fact that we don’t have a set order for making the different parts of the game.

What should I do next?

As usual, we just work on whatever seems the most inviting at the time. You might think that would leave a whole lot of boring jobs for the end but that never seems to happen.

I’ve got quite a few tricks that I’ve learned from our other games that let us skip a lot of the less exciting things. Looking at some of the ways we did things in DL1 was a shock.

Also whenever I’m not feeling creative or technical I put on a movie and work on mindless tasks. It’s works out a lot better than trying to force myself to be creative.

So more often than not, all boring jobs are done before the more interesting ones. And since my motivation to work is at it’s peak when a game is almost done, the system works!

I won’t pretend that I’m a supreme work machine though. Sometimes I just don’t get that much done.

Let it happen

We’ve learned not to plan too much in the beginning. So our initial plan for the game before we get started consists of:

• A list of dungeons and towns
• A storyboard showing how the dungeons are linked
• A few possible side quests

That’s pretty much it. Then we start. Andrew usually starts by doing some concept maps for towns and dungeons but they don’t get finished for a long time.

I usually start building the backbone of the game. Our game files are pretty well organized, everything fits in it’s place. Everything is so much easier with a well organized game. Towards the end things get a little out of control but not enough to cause any trouble.

From this point forward we just choose something and do it until it’s no longer interesting. We just assume that at some point we’ll have a good idea for a side quest or dialogue for the characters in a certain town.

Most of the best scenes in the game are just spur of the moment things that seem like a good idea. So we just try to make it as easy as possible for those things to find their way into the game.

Why make Dawn’s Light 2 now instead of Nexus?

When we were deciding which game to make next, we just had a lot more material for a Dawn’s Light game. Stuff we’d come up with during development of Lilly and Sasha.

Having just finished L&S we felt like we had already used all of our ideas for that. We are coming up with more stuff now of course and when DL2 is done we’ll be ready to go on Nexus.

When is Dawn’s Light 2 coming out?

I don’t like giving release dates because it’s really to guess when a game will be done. I try to stay positive in order to stay motivated for the whole project so I tend to think the game will be done more quickly than is humanly possible.

If I let myself think that the game is too far away, doing work right now doesn’t seem so important. If I knew in December that Lilly and Sasha wouldn’t be done until March, I probably would have given up.

On the other hand, deadlines, even if they are optimistic, are a great motivator. I always set target dates but they aren’t really important since only I know what they are. So if I were to give a date …

Go on, say it!

Fine! So my optimistic answer is the game will be complete, ready for testing in one month. Add another week or so because I’m forgetting some stuff. Then add time for testing and you have a release date of mid august.

When is Nexus coming out?

Lilly and Sasha: Nexus of Souls will follow. We have already started work on the game. The story is pretty much done but we’ll probably add more. I would love to have it out by September 23rd to make it 6 months since CoTI.

It depends how well things go with DL2, there should be some overlap, I can handle the Dawn’s Light bugs while Andrew starts on this.

So that’s it then?

Never! We would like to get something else out this year, as well as redoing our site. Then there’s the sequel to Christmas Tale. So like I said, pretty optimistic.

Nope, not Victor

Not Victor and not Joss. It was a bit mean of Andrew to show that one since we can’t reveal who it is. It’s a cool surprise in the game that we don’t want to ruin. So to make up for it, we can show you this guy:

I’d like to introduce you to another person from Dawn’s Light 2: the second member of Harvey’s party. Their identity is currently top secret, but I will reveal that they also appeared in Dawn’s Light 1. See if you can guess who it is.

Hint: Not Swordhand

I guess you could call this the spiritual successor to Dawn’s Light. This game will be far superior to any before it, with features such as…

Bearded Harvey

Reprising his role.

We’re deep into development of our next game. Dialogue is being written, maps are being made and so on. This is when things are calm. After a game release, things are pretty crazy. It’s hard to get enough time to do any real work. Then things start to settle down and we get back into development mode. Everything starts to slow down, kind of like going to sleep.

There’s still the occasional problem that interrupts my work. Today I’ve got some guy hacking open our games and giving away the contents. But other than that, things are going smoothly.

Jack of All Worlds has been doing quite well. It’s very unlikely that we’ll do any more with the series. It was always intended as a one off. We have other ideas for smaller games that we’d like to try later on. Jack of All Worlds wasn’t a very efficient game to make. The battles, menus and other new features took far too long to make in comparison to the rest of the game. Oh well, we’ll add those to the lessons we learned from Dawn’s Light and Lilly and Sasha.

We’re looking forward to sharing some info and screens from our new game. I’m just waiting for some art to be ready so it will be a more exciting reveal.

The Lilly and Sasha guide did really well, much better than I expected. A few guides for other games have come out since. I downloaded a few to see if there was anything we could learn from them but I was underwhelmed. So I went and bought some guides for console games and now I’ve got a lot of ideas.

I’m considering new delivery methods for future guides. The PDF download has caused a few problems. Plimus only lets you download your purchase for a limited time. There’s instructions in the purchase email for how to download the guide but instructions are boring and most people don’t read them.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with our site. I made the original site with just Dawn’s Light in mind. We’re almost ready for a new site, probably after two more games. I’ve never liked making websites but after looking at some of the fancy frameworks that are available, that may change. I’m excited to start the new site and that’s a first for me.

If you don’t get enough of me saying things on this blog you can read this interview I did for Gamezebo where I say even more things!

http://www.gamezebo.com/news/2010/04/16/john-wizards-daniel-newey-talks-indie-rpgs

While making an RPG, you spend a lot more time on tedious tasks than you do on creative ones. I’m talking about things like putting barrels in every room or setting up the extra party members on each map so they can appear during scenes. These are things that players will never notice but they take up so much development time. They also cause the most bugs.

The Stupid Reset Switches

With each successive game I’ve been developing techniques to automate as many of these tasks as possible. For example, in Dawn’s Light, the reset switches were done manually. I would have to move each piece of the puzzle back to its starting position. Then I would have to make sure all state changes were reverted – things like rocks being in water. Even after I’d figured out the reset system, setting up the resets took time, especially if I had to change a puzzle later on.

The Lovely Reset Switches

In Lilly and Sasha, I have an automatic reset system. I just make a list of the objects involved and call a function – init_puzzle(id,objects). Then to reset I can just call reset_puzzle(id). The time I spent making these functions is far less than the time it would have taken me to do them manually. I can also use the same system for future games.

Super Common Events

Recently I’ve devised a new system for speeding up development. Replacing tiles with events. Every save in Dawn’s Light was pasted from our master save book. Now we can just draw a tile, like we would a rock or tree and it will be automatically replaced with the save. This means we can easily change the graphics or functionality without having to replace every save book in the game. Think of them as super common events, if you know what a common event is.

Walk Right

My favorite trick is automatic map transfers. For every doorway or map change in Dawn’s Light we had to manually select a map to move to and pinpoint the position where you would end up. Now we can just draw an arrow in the direction of the transfer and the rest takes care of itself. One of the common bugs that pops up during development is a transfer to a room that’s changed. This won’t be a problem anymore because the room is checked and the player is always placed at the doorway.

Less Tedium, More Speedium

There’s a bunch of other ones as well but you probably get the idea by now. The plan is to make the tedious parts easier so we can concentrate on the good parts that players actually see.

Now I need to write a system to replace a tile with a puzzle or some witty dialogue.

I’ve finally finished setting everything up and the game is available to download and buy. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if people like it.

I’ve written a lot on this blog about the game but there’s so much more I haven’t said. So many subtle changes that we have made since Dawn’s Light, as well as some not so subtle changes.

We considered making a smaller, cheaper game after Dawn’s Light because I worry that with all the $7 games out there, people will be less willing to take a risk with a more expensive game.

In the end though, we decided to just make the game we wanted to make and let people make up their own mind whether it’s worth spending a little more.

Here’s some links:

More Info

Download Demo

Buy Full Version