Design – Stepping Sideways to Move Forward

June 29, 2018

After finishing the critical path work for Act 1 and getting a good solid jump into Act 2 everything seemed to be going well on developing Sleuthhounds: Cruise. Then, shock, horror, the design for Act 2 ground to a halt late last week. I knew where I was at a little ways into the start of Act 2 and I knew where I needed to get to by the end of the act, but the stuff in between just wasn’t coming together.

From previous projects, I’ve learned that the cause of writer’s block is the result of something in the story not working. I decided to set aside work on the story/design of Cruise for a few days to get a bit of distance and perspective in order to later review what might not be fitting together properly. In order to keep the game moving ahead I did a bit of small asset creation, a few character walk cycles and such. However, at this point in the game’s development I want to keep most assets in a very rough form. Until I know all the needs of the game, by having the story/design complete, I don’t want to create anything that has a reasonable chance of needing to be changed later on. Rework’s not a great use of time.

One thing I was able to work on, though, was to go back through all of the previous Sleuthhounds games. In Cruise one location you can explore is a library and I thought it might be fun to include the various books that have appeared or been mentioned in the previous games and I needed to look those up. One of the entries in the series I ran through was Amelia Deerhart and the Elemental Temple, a lightweight game I slapped together in three days for a game jam. To cut development time on that game to fit three days I drew all the game backgrounds with much less detail than I ordinarily would. For whatever reason I got it into my head that, just as a whim, it would be fun to rework the backgrounds to better match the more recent games.

[Comparing the new (left) and old (right) versions of a room from the Amelia Deerhart game.]
Comparing the new (left) and old (right) versions of a room from the Amelia Deerhart game.
Click to view larger.

I quite like the new result, which, I’ll point out now, has not been updated into the version of the game currently available for download from this site. This was just something I was monkeying around with for my own amusement. However, the big benefit of taking this sidestep from working on Cruise was that it dawned on me what wasn’t working in that game’s story.

I now know what needs to be done in Cruise to move forward there. It does mean taking out some stuff I’d already put in place and making a few other changes – hence my concern with not wanting to create final game assets too early. I just needed a bit of space from my main project to let my subconscious work out what exactly the problem was. So it should be smooth sailing from here, at least until Act 3, which I haven’t started thinking about yet.