Milestone: Act 2 Done-ish

Febraury 1, 2019

This blog post has been a long time in coming, far longer than it should have been. The big announcement, of course, is that scripting for the critical path through act 2 of Sleuthhounds: Cruise has wrapped. My interest and excitement in the project is at an all-time high and I’ve already moved into work on the critical path for act 3 (of 4). However, before jumping into the next act I took some time to do a little look back on act 2 for any lessons to be learned.

A collection of characters at the conclusion of Act 2.

As per an earlier post on the high level design of act 2 the actual development of said act started about July 30th, 2018. Development officially ended on January 28th, 2019. That’s six months, which is way longer than I had anticipated act 2 would take. In reviewing the numbers though (I keep track of all my time spent on my game projects) roughly 75% of that development happened in the last two months. So what was I doing for the other four months?

As I mentioned above, my interest in the game now is at an all-time high. But not quite six months ago my interest fell to an all-time low and hovered around there for some time. I kept pushing through, but when your interest is low you just don’t work as fast as when your interest is high.

Several factors were responsible for this:

• There was some “real world” stuff going on that was demotivating, taking time away from game development, or both. Fortunately, that all cleared up by the end of 2018 and I’ve found my center again.
• A number of the early scenarios in act 2 required improved or specialized tech and/or scripting to get into place. This type of work takes a bit of time to do and there’s not much progress to show for it. On top of the “real world” issues this too was rather demotivating as it didn’t seem like a lot was getting accomplished.
• The core of act 2 involves searching the cabins of various characters. I wasn’t happy with my initial designs for these scenarios and for the longest time just couldn’t figure out how to get them to work. That was frustrating and, not surprisingly, also demotivating.

By mid October I was struggling to keep progressing on the scripting front of the game. I wasn’t completely squandering time though as I had switched my focus to working on a bunch of the basic character standing, talking, and walking animations. Progress was being made, just not in the area that I was really hoping for, which was act 2, and not as fast as if my interest had been higher.

On any large projects interest waxes and wanes and I figured the slump I was in would naturally end. However, as the year progressed and the general malaise continued, I realized I needed to do something to kick start my interest again. I had been tossing around the idea of doing a second Amelia Deerhart adventure game for a while and decided I’d play around with that for a week or so.

Setting aside Cruise temporarily I jumped into this new project (new projects are always shiny and interesting to start with). I’d had this idea of doing the Amelia Deerhart game like an olde timey movie serial with multiple very short episodes. The episodes were so short, in fact, that they really only had one or two main puzzles in them and all the pieces in the episodes were focused on solving those puzzles.

It was that focus of puzzle design that I had been lacking in the cabin investigations on Cruise. My general problem with the cabins was that they were all feeling the same. The player would go to a cabin and have to search it for three or four pieces of information about a given character. Since all the cabins have the same basic layout they all had the same basic hiding spaces. It just ended up feeling very repetitive, very mundane, and not a lot of fun to me. And if it wasn’t fun to me I thought it was asking a lot for players to find those scenarios fun.

However, right from the first Amelia Deerhart episode I played around with I realized that the focus of design it had was exactly what I needed. I came back to the design for Cruise and changed all the cabins so that instead of finding three or four generic pieces of information in three or four generic hiding places the player had a definite goal that they needed to work towards by combining various elements in a given cabin all related to the matching character for that cabin. Suddenly everything fell into place. The puzzle scenarios were all unique and interesting and my interest in the project rose.

I now consider the real start of development on act 2 to be the moment when I made those design changes, which was roughly the beginning of November. Throw out a couple of weeks for a Christmas break (which also helped reenergize me), a week for another Amelia Deerhart episode, and another week for other obligations I had and the bulk of act 2 was completed in that roughly two month time span I mentioned.

High level breakdown of Act 2.

When I first designed act 2, I had a basic high level break down of the things the player would have to do in it. These amounted to key story points of character relationships, cabin investigations, and so on. The above diagram illustrates this high level breakdown which is still applicable to the act after the various design changes and embellishments I made.

Low level puzzle dependencies of Act 2.

To illustrate how act 2 developed from that initial high level breakdown, the above diagram shows the final dependency chart for the critical path – the absolutely essential steps – the player has to take through act 2. To save you some counting there are 189 total nodes in this chart. Some of them are just notes I made to myself, some of them are for ideas I deleted because they didn’t fit there but wanted to keep a record of in case I need them in future acts, and some of the nodes are alternative solutions to puzzles. The act itself proceeds from left to right and so anywhere in the chart where boxes are positioned vertically relative to one another are different paths the player can explore. Most of the paths ultimately all have to be followed but the player is free to choose in which order the paths are carried out in.

Act 2 is the biggest act in Cruise. Between it and act 1 I believe I’ve passed the halfway point on the critical path for the game. If I estimate acts 3 and 4 as taking the same amount of time as act 2 to complete – even though they should be shorter – that should put their finishes roughly at mid April and end of June. There’s more scripting to be done after that and most of the final visual and audio assets still need to be created, but at that end of June point the game should be complete enough that it can be played through from beginning to end.

I’m really excited about where the game is at now. Even though visually it’s still very rough, there’s enough story, puzzles, and character moments implemented in the first two acts that it feels like it’s all coming together now. I’m especially proud of the fact that there are quite a number of sequences and scenarios that I’ve never seen in an adventure game before and that everything is being driven by character and story. It’s still going to be some time yet before the game is finished but for now it’s full steam ahead to get to that point.

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