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Before we even finished Dawn’s Light I decided that I was going to do a new menu system for our next game. I’m not very artistic so when I have to design something like this I have to use a process of trial and error.

It works like this:

1: Draw a layout on paper

2: Look at other menus for ideas

3: Procrastinate

4: Force myself to make a concept

5: Decide that it’s awful and that I’ll never be able to make a good design

6: Go back to step 1 a few times

7: Eventually make something that I’m happy with

It’s not the most efficient method but it works eventually. Here’s a few pictures of how I came up with the final menu design for Project Viper. I usually do mock-ups like this until something just clicks and I get an idea of what the final menu will look like.

This is my very first attempt at a menu design. I wanted to use textures instead of flat colors and possibly offer different skins for the menu. I have a couple of other layouts for this one but I just never got to the point where I saw something worth expanding on.

I took a break from the menus for a while. When I came back to them, I decided to try a more simple style.

I never really like this menu but I was planning on using it. I had no more ideas and decided it would have to do. I even spent some time scripting it. I grew to despise this design more and more and eventually I just had to try again.

One day I had an idea. I can’t remember where the original idea came from but I wanted to try a design that would look like a book. I found some textures and made a mockup. The top and bottom bars were pretty ugly but I could still see something.

There was a problem with the text. On the paper background the text didn’t stand out and the icons looked wrong. I put the shadow behind them and I liked it. The problem with that is I couldn’t generate the text from a font so I would have to use images for text.

It felt so wrong and inefficient but eventually I gave in and went with it.

Here’s the final menu design. I found a better book texture and after some adjustments, it fit in great. I’m satisfied with the menus now and I’m very happy I didn’t keep that older design. This menu fits in much better with the way I see this game.

This is Viper, she stole her name from Project Viper. It’s not the name she was given at birth. It’s more of a codename.

Now that I’ve revealed the Viper character, we’ll have to announce the name of the game. That will probably happen in a couple of days. It’s not for suspense. I just need to do some work on the logo and I’m not really in a graphics mood.

Once the dungeon maps are done and the puzzles are working the next step is to set up all of the events. This includes things like locked doors, spikes, switches, bridges and dialogue.

A guide

I’m not a big fan of maze like dungeons that are just designed to waste time. We try to push you in the right direction so you won’t spend too much time wandering aimlessly. It costs us play time but we’re not trying to make long games. We’re trying to make fun ones.

I think the Mansion in Dawn’s Light is a good example of what we try to do. It’s a big place with lots of little rooms but there’s really just one path through the dungeon. The keys and the color coded doors point you to where you need to go next.

The story

We don’t usually go through the same steps with our dungeon story scenes as we do with our main story scenes. They’ll still go through multiple iterations but they don’t get as much planning. I think it works better to just let them change according to the dungeon.

Scenes are also a good way to break up the dungeon. Doing too many puzzles in a row or fighting too many enemies can because tedious. We like to break things up so you’ll do a puzzle, look for a key, fight a couple of enemies and then watch a scene.

Start to finish

Once we get to a point where the dungeon is mostly done we’ll do what we call a start to finish. This means we start from the very first room and work through the exact path that the player will take. We make sure every room is set up to do it’s part. We’ll make sure we have every scene and every bit of dialogue. By the time this is done you should be able to play through the dungeon without any enemies.

The only thing left is to place enemies and items in the dungeon. This part won’t get done until the very end. Just before we start playing through the game, we’ll go through and place every item and enemy.

The end

That’s our process for making dungeons. They are a lot of fun to make and I think they’re one of the best features of our games. For Project Viper we’ve tried to refine our dungeons to make them even more fun and interesting. They are bigger and they have more variety than Dawn’s Light.

Once we get to the point where we’re ready to start building a dungeon, we’ve already got most things planned out. We have a sketch of the layout, an idea of the story and we know the kind of puzzles we want to have.

A blank canvas

Dungeons are pretty much the first maps we make when we start a new game. We’ll have a rough world layout at this point but it can easily be changed if the dungeons need it to. Everything at this point is subject to change so we don’t spend too much time perfecting things. If we have a new idea that will add to the dungeon, we can easily change our layout now before we get too far in.

Usually a dungeon will be made on one giant map. That means we don’t have to worry about hitting walls when we want to try a different room layout. It does however make the next part a little more difficult.

Here's an early concept for the vault.

The cutting

This part isn’t much fun but it’s the point where the dungeon really starts to take shape. We’ll take the giant dungeon map with every room and cut it up into smaller maps. Each room usually get it’s own map, it helps with the immersion. If you can see over a wall into the next room it takes away from the atmosphere.

Cutting is a long and boring process. It is however, a very effective method of getting a final dungeon made in a shorter time. If we make each room in it’s own map the first time we’ll end up spending a long time moving things around. The final part of this stage is linking the rooms together which is another boring job but it is easy. I usually watch a movie or something while I do this part.

Puzzles

The next thing we do is get the puzzles working. Sometimes Andrew designs puzzles when he makes the giant map. Other times I’ll design them as I’m making them. Then I have to convince somebody to try them. This is much harder than you might think and I often end up owing all sorts of favors. It’s strange, after the game is released, people pay to be able to play the puzzles but before, I have to pay people to get them to play the puzzles.

Some puzzles are not that hard to make, especially with all of the helper scripts I’ve made. Most of the common puzzle elements are automatic. For example, I’ve set up puzzles to automatically remember their starting layout so the reset is automatic.

Other puzzles just take a long time to get working and it’s usually not the ones you expect. If there’s a similar puzzles, I’ll copy bits and pieces to speed up the process but it’s still quite time consuming.

Viper Puzzles

The puzzles in Project Viper are all a step up in complexity from Dawn’s Light. So while I’ve sped things up by making some helper scripts I’ve also slowed them down by trying to do a lot more with each puzzle. There’s a much greater variety of puzzles now. The first dungeon has 4 completely different puzzle types.

Luckily I’ve also streamlined my video guide making process.

Dungeons were a big part of Dawn’s Light. Especially since we used islands for the world so there wasn’t a lot of forests and deserts to walk around in. Project Viper takes place on a single land mass, partly because we wanted to try doing some bigger maps and partly because it fit better with the story.

The thing I like about dungeons is that they can have a story of their own, completely unrelated to the main story of the game. They are like their own little game within the game. Instead of just having a maze like cave full of monsters to fight we tried to guide the player through the dungeon with the story.

The Brainstorming

Dungeons are one of the first things we plan for a new game. We’ll try to think of some crazy ideas that would be fun and interesting to make. Then we’ll build the world and sometimes the story around that.

During brainstorming there are no limits. We don’t stop to think whether something will be too hard or if it will even be possible. If we think too much about how much work will be involved we’d end up just cutting everything.

Mine Cart Chase

A good example of this is the mine cart chase from Dawn’s Light. I said, wouldn’t it be cool to do a scooby doo style chase scene in mine carts. Then of course I kept putting it off because I knew it was going to be so much work.

Eventually I forced myself to do it and it was even more work than I imagined. Just getting each guy to jump into the mine cart was a hassle. Even the first room where your 4 party members and 4 skeletons run in and jump in the mine carts took forever.

You were saying

So after we have an basic idea (Twin Castles with witch sisters) and a story (The cats are in trouble) we’ll think of puzzles that would fit into the dungeon. So in the case of the Twin Castles the puzzles had to involve cats so we thought of a bunch of puzzles involving cats.

Once we have puzzles worked out, we move onto layout. Is it going to be a straight path from start to finish? Do you go back to places you’ve already been with new keys? Is there a specific order or can you choose a path? This is usually obvious at this stage since we know the story and the puzzles.

The mansion ended up being very close to this initial layout sketch.

Sketching and concepts

Each dungeon starts out as a rough picture on paper. Just different shaped rooms with the major points marked. After a few different layouts we’ll settle on one that works. Then we’ll mark the locked doors, the keys, the puzzles and so on.

The final part of planning is the concepts. We know the style of dungeon we want to make so we’ll make a couple of test maps trying out different looks for the dungeon. Sometimes this part is easy and we’ll get the look we want right away. Other times it just won’t look right. The Vault got a complete graphical revamp right at the very end because we just couldn’t get it how we wanted it.

So it’s finished now

The planning stage is now complete which means it’s time for the next stage, building the dungeon.

There’s a lot of work to be done on Project Viper and I’m really trying to get it done. There is however a problem. There’s this guy who seems to be intent on making the game take longer to release. He does everything in his power to stop me from getting work done. Why is he doing this? I have no idea.

Yep, that’s the guy and yes, he is always that dirty. He may be small but don’t let that fool you. His powers of distraction and interruption are unmatched.

One of his tactics is to take his ball and throw it so it rolls under a desk. If it doesn’t make it, he will “accidentally” push it under with his nose. Once it gets far enough under that he can’t reach it he will yell at me until I get it for him. So of course I do and as soon as I look away he does it again.

I’ve tried to catch him but that’s impossible. He’s just too small and too slippery. So I give in and play his little games. We become friends and then my sister gets home and it’s like I never existed. Then I remember what work I was supposed to do that day and I end up staying up really late working while he’s sound asleep.

But do I get to sleep a little longer the next morning? no because he jumps on me until I wake up. Then he tells me that he “accidentally” put his ball under the desk…

Here’s another character from Project Viper. This is Sasha, one of our two female leads.

A Serious Approach

We’ve decided to take a more serious approach with this game. Harvey and friends were all very hilarious (at least I hope they were) with their interesting perspective on things The problem was that they often took the more serious aspects of the game a little too lightly, which might have taken away from the atmosphere of important scenes.

For this reason, we’ve decided to make the characters in Project Viper more serious. They are a little more sophisticated and they don’t erupt into spontaneous free-for-all verbal altercations at every given opportunity.
Having said that, I soon realized how boring a 100% dead serious game would be. There’s only so long you can remain serious when writing out a quest involving tracking down somebody’s fugitive Grammy who sneaks out of the house every time they leave the front door open.

A Semi-Serious Approach

I was in the middle of making my first side mission and I realized just how boring they were being and how the main character just said the same thing over and over again. I’ve made this one especially terrible on purpose, but here’s an example of how starting a quest would have went:

Person: I’m in trouble.
Main Character: What’s wrong?
Person: I have to get a souvenir from each town but there are monsters on the way.
Main Character: Oh no, how terrible.
Person: Please get them for me.
Main Character: I’m busy.
Person: PLEASE.
Main Character: Alright.

That’s pretty much how every quest would have to go, because normal people don’t really have anything interesting to say when it comes to side missions.
It was at this point that I decided that the side missions could serve as the less serious part of the game and the weird conversations could come more from the people that you meet instead of from your own party. It’s sort of like if Harvey was handing out a side quest.

Still Exciting

Of course, while the game is more serious now, my plan is to still make it exciting. You won’t have to put up with never ending conversations with people where they have some kind of loop set up and they keep repeating the same information OVER and OVER again. Some games I’ve played have dialogue that seems like a first draft. As if they just wrote the dialogue for the first time, right into the game and left it.

We use a process that involves revising and re-writing a lot of the cutscenes to make them a lot shorter and to remove a lot the things that don’t need to be said.

My writing process goes like this:

• Take a scene from the storyboard.
• Work out the main points that need to be said.
• Do a first rough draft of the scene.
• Read through the scene and make sure no information is missing. I also need to make sure that each character is getting a chance to participate and that the characters are saying things that fit with their personality.
• After a few passes the scene is finished.

All of this is usually done between the two of us. We both read the dialogue and make sure there aren’t any things that need to be changed.

You find that you can remove a lot of the boring stuff and condense it into a few sentences. Sometimes conversations can even be cut down to half of their original length.

Where would you like to see us take the dialogue in the future? Would you rather a more serious story, or more of a casual, fun story? Do you think that conversations should be short or do you think people should have more time to talk?

Hi, I’ve been working on lots of boring things for Project Viper so there’s not much to say. The thing about making new menus and battles and so on is that it’s exciting at the start and then you realize just how many screens there are in an rpg menu system!

The end is in sight however and I’ve got a picture to show. This is Griffin, one of your party members in Project Viper. I thought about making him 12 but then I remembered that 12 year olds can’t even pay their rent so how are they going to save the world?

Griffin: “Hi, I’m Griffin. I’ll be your tough yet sensitive guy for this game.”

Christmas is gone now and that means our Christmas game is getting less and less downloads each day. I thought this would be a good time to write a quick review of how it went.

More Traffic

We were pleased to see many sites mentioning the game either in their Christmas game roundups or just as a separate news item. This got us some fresh traffic from people who had never even heard of Dawn’s Light which definitely helped us with the next thing.

More sales for Dawn’s Light

Soon after we released Christmas Tale, our Dawn’s Light sales picked up. Not quite to where it was when we first released it but enough to make the time spent on Christmas Tale worth it.

Knowing that people had played about 5 hours of content in Christmas Tale and then buying Dawn’s Light was a good feeling. Instead of just playing a short demo they got to really see what our games are like and they wanted more.

Christmas Spirit

This was my favorite part. We received many great comments and emails telling us that they loved the game and wishing us Merry Christmas. It was really a great way to spend Christmas.

Since this went so well, I would love to do it again this year. Maybe we could do a free game every Christmas and include characters from whatever games we made that year.