Revising Rough Drafts

October 5, 2018

I’ve been living with rough draft versions of the backgrounds in Sleuthhounds: Cruise for some months now. Although I’ve been getting a lot done on the game it doesn’t look like I’ve been getting a lot done because of how rough the backgrounds are. Just as I was really getting the itch to start refining the backgrounds I was very much reminded why I haven’t done so.

Backgrounds require a fair amount of time to create as a finished game asset. They have to be drawn, coloured, and lit. Depth information needs to be generated for them to allow characters to be rendered in front of or behind parts of the scenery as appropriate. Walkable areas need to be outlined so the game engine knows where characters are allowed to stand. Lighting regions need to be defined so that characters appear to match the lighting as they move about a room. Scaling information needs to be defined so that as characters move farther away they shrink in size to match the perspective of the room.

Ultimately, final rooms must be created, but experience from working on the previous Sleuthhounds games has taught me to delay creating “good” versions of rooms for as long as possible. The reason being that if something needs to change in a room, it’s far, far easier to make that change when the room is no more than a pencil sketch rattled off in five minutes or less.

This was exactly the case I ran into this past week while working out a particular puzzle sequence in Cruise. This puzzle sequence requires a character in a cabin on the cruise ship to be able to summon a maid to that cabin. Initially I was thinking the maid would be working in the hallway outside the door and the summoner could just call into the hallway.

Several rooms needed phones added to them. Kinda, sort of a phone.
Click to view larger.

As this puzzle evolved and I reviewed my game design information I realized that the maid couldn’t be in the hallway at that particular point. It’s complicated and gets into spoiler territory to say why not, so I’ll just leave it at that. Anyway, I needed a new way for the summoner to be able to contact the maid. The solution I came up with was to introduce an intraship telephone system. However, this required making changes to several different rooms.

Lines along the ceiling represent phone cables and will be even more prominent in the final versions.
Click to view larger.

First of all, the middle and upper class cabins on the ship all needed to have telephones added into them. Second of all, I wanted to have a way to explicitly show that different locations were connected by telephone. My solution was to add fairly prominent telephone cables to the ceilings of the hallways. It’s important in an adventure game (and in software in general) to provide context in connections between different areas so that players can understand how those connections work.

It took about fifteen minutes to sketch in phones and cables in all the rooms affected by this change. It would have taken far longer to do if I had already polished up the rooms and then had to add the phone equipment in. I’m still tired of looking at the rough draft backgrounds, but it’s cases like this that prove that it’s a good idea to leave those backgrounds alone for the time being. It’s just added incentive to get the game both puzzle and story complete as soon as possible so that I can move on to doing more polished visual assets.

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