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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.

Made this logo, I like it. How about you? I also like the name, we had some really terrible ones we were going to use before this one came about.

I’ve been doing some more work on the new game lately. We weren’t sure about a few things so I’d been putting my attention to the other game we’re working on. I think that we’ve finally worked out how the battle system and the item collections are going to work now, and I just finished playing through the game without it breaking  so we’re getting there. There’s still a few things that we need to do:

• Putting in enemy stats, finishing battle system and putting in the enemies
• Menu (stats and so on)
• Putting in the music
• Putting in the items that you pick up
• Refining of dialogue
• Finding and recording all of the tiny little problems and then fixing them
• Testing

In the meantime, I’ll show some more screenshots of the game.

It’s robert! He’s back, and now he’s in his natural habitat. But this time he’s all business.

Explaining the current state of vampires.

Time to dish out some justice!

Just doing hero stuff.

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 got a bunch of new screens from the new game today. One of Jack’s missions will take him somewhere very familiar.

In the Lone Wolves HQ.

The whole pack is there.

The Twilight Forest is looking a little different these days …

He doesn’t want to get his suit dirty.

Can the Lone Wolves reclaim their original headquarters?

Hi guys,

The new game is coming along well and the other secret new game is doing very well too. Nothing that will be obvious to the player, but will make the game much easier and more efficient to make. If you remember the helper tiles blog from a while back. We now have a few more rows of them and they are going to make this game very efficient to make.

We can now do things like automatic transfers (no events!), barrels as tiles (no events!) and even pop outs as tiles. And that’s just to name a few. This cuts down copy-paste procedures by about 1000 times.

Back to the new game. I’ve got a couple more pictures today. In the first picture, Jack ponders what to do with the pile of grass. In the second one, Jack daringly climbs around the rooftops of a building.

Stay tuned tomorrow for screenshots of a very special mission.

Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently. Once you stop doing them for even one day, it becomes easier and easier to forget about them altogether. The good news is today I’m going to get the daily blogs started again, and I’m going to start with screenshots of our new game that will be coming out very shortly.

I’d been making rapid progress on this game up until a while ago when I was overcome by an unforeseeable wave of laziness, but that’s over now. The maps are all done and I finished doing all of the events today. Now we just have to put enemies in and set up fighting and finish all that other fun stuff like tracking down places I decided to use switches without naming them and then using them again later.

I don’t want to give away too much about the game, but I will say that get various masks that give you new abilities when you equip them. It’s a pretty small game, think of it as a bunch of ideas we had that weren’t big enough to make a full game that we’ve put together into a fun little package.

And now for some screenshots. In the first one, Jack appears to be wearing a mask that lets him use some kind of grappling device. I wonder what he is planning to do in the second one …

Keep reading each day for more updates. Tomorrow I might post some more pictures and we might even be revealing another new game soon.

Here’s some reviews:

Gamezebo

GamerTell

CaptainD

I wrote an article about making the battle system. It’s too long to put here so I posted it in the forums. I don’t know if it’s interesting for anybody who didn’t make it so let me know.

http://johnwizard.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=887

Some of you will now know that the next Lilly and Sasha game is called The Nexus of Souls. If you haven’t completed CoTI yet, don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler. Andrew read something about ‘x’ sounds being good for titles plus Nexus is just a cool word to use.

Most of the storyboard has already been worked out. Even once CoTI was feature complete we kept getting new ideas so we wrote them down. Now we have a massive list of things that we can choose from to build the next game. It will be a shorter development cycle because we already have menus, battles and mouse done and that’s what I spent most of my time on for CoTI.

Now that all the scripts are done, I can’t wait to spend more time making exciting quests and new puzzles.

We’re also working on another game. Something very different. Will it be awesome? I dunno, probably.