Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Painscreek Devlog #4: Making A Narrative Work For Games


Instead of discussing the menu and UI design as originally planned, we’ve decided to take this opportunity to explain a bit further how we utilized the content in the past two blogs to make the narrative work in The Painscreek Killings. We hope anyone finding themselves wondering if they can make a story work without it being forceful or too linear can benefit from this article.

Prior to sharing this blog with everyone, we want to emphasize that this is neither the best method nor the only method to create a game like ours. Instead, we just want to share what worked for The Painscreek Killings and hope it benefits others creating a similar type of game.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Painscreek Devlog #3: Designing The Game Mechanics

(An early draft of the game flow.)

Coming up with the game mechanics shouldn't be too difficult. Since we are trying to mimic a real life investigation, that would mean we could skip anything that does not happen in real life, such as quest markers, in-game compass, items highlighting, fast travel, hint button, etc. All we need is a flashlight, a camera, a player journal, an inventory system, a photo album, an auto save/load, character spawn locations, building instances, menu options, NPC navmesh, character health bar, different endings… Wait. What just happened?

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Painscreek Devlog #2: Designing The Story


(Image of the 3-act structure found online.)

When we first started, there were two areas to consider developing. First, the story and game design. Then there’s the technical part where we need to build the game, something that we are still learning to be efficient at. The story and game design is probably the more important part of making the game succeed, so on this week’s blog, we will explain how we designed the story.