This Started Life as an Environment/Art Build

I love creating atmospheric, haunting or just engaging environments. Foggy scenes, where the moon light casts rays of light through a silhouetted tree. A mysterious house in the woods, or ancient ruins.

I also love ghost stories, supernatural thrillers and other spine tingler movies or shows. One of of my favourites is the X-files. (That I have been rewatching lately and it’s as great as ever.) This is note to say though that I just watch a good story or escapism entertainment. I also like great drama, thoughtful and emotional pieces. A movie I watched an old movie again recently – ‘The Dead Poets Society,’ which is a great piece of work. An emotional engaging movie that also has a message. – But not a message that forces any political or economic views onto the viewer.

So generally, just great story telling. It can capture our emotions, educate, make us think and bring out positive feelings – like nothing else can. Whether done via a movie, video game, book, painting or another piece of art work.

The Tavern in the Woods began life as a scene – it was an environment build for some static renders. (Not optimised at the time – but this was intentional, as it was only meant for static renders or cinematics).

My intention was never to create a game/interactive story, at least not at first.

Approached by 80.lv for an Interactive Environment

The scene got very positive feedback and after a few months of it being online I was approached by 80.lv to see if I was interested in making the scene as an interactive environment for a new metasites project there were working on.

Basically, the site allowed for games/environments to be pixel streamed through a web browser. This would also be a profit share where people would pay for credits to explore the different environments. And those that created and shared environments would have some of the income shared from users playing their environments.

However, to cut a long story short – 80.lv got hit with some restructuring and the metasites website got transferred to a different firm and is now called Sxolla Metasites.

I don’t know a lot about Sxolla, but the games and environments are all multiplayer where many different players can enter into an environment at one time. This was not going to work with Tavern In the Woods, as it’s a single player experience.

This was a bit disheartening at the time, but I have a good relationship with one of the marketing managers at 80.lv and I understood that this can happen and there was also no guarantee that the metasites initial platform was going to remain as it was. Although for a time I was left wondering what to do with the ‘Tavern in the Woods.’ The next naturally step was to put onto a games platform. The most popular and with the most functionality is Steam.

It Turned Into a Interactive Story / Game

When I first sat down and started turning this into an interactive experience / game the initial steps where not that hard. Setting up a first person character, tweaking walk and run speeds are fairly straight forward. However, when I first started this, I had made just one other simple game and for that I just followed a tutorial series. This was made completely off my own back from what I had learnt over the previous couple of years.

After the initial set up, there were many steps along the way that were more complex and several of which I got stuck on. Each time taking me at least another 2 or 3 days work to figure out

For example adding the creaking sound to a swinging door, sounds simple, but I could barely find any information online about adding sound effects to a swinging door. Sliding doors are very simple, but old doors that swing backwards and forward is not so simple.

You have to consider the speed the door swings at and does it swing backwards and forwards, how many times etc… There are physics that can deal with this – with very little effort, but then you have to add the sound effect. That can only be triggered when the physics kicks in and then stops when the physics stop. This all adding to the complexity of just a swinging door!

Sometimes I was left thinking this should be simpler than this. But this is how game dev can be and especially when you are first working on a project. Of course, there is the power of hindsight and once a task is done – it does seem like that was not that hard to do. It was just learning how to do it. Of which I have now got much experience under my belt and for my next or other such projects I will be able to cover such ground much quicker and with much less frustration.

A Fine Grey Line Between a Game and Interactive Fiction

There is a grey line between what actually constitutes a game and interactive fiction. And where the two merge and become one. It could even be argued that interactive fiction is simply another type of game.

Whilst I won’t go into major detail and thoughts here regarding this. I will add that when I first started turning this environment into a game my thought was very much to have this as interactive fiction.

Although now playing this it does feel the story should be deeper that what is there. And to a degree this could do with improvement. Although I am happy with what is there, and considering there is no save feature there cannot be a lot more added.

Alongside this I want to now focus on my upcoming project(s).

Video Games are complex

Video games are complex. There are many interlinking parts and many dependences. If one part gets broken or is not set up correctly it can break other parts linked to it. There are also performance and optimisation considerations and so fourth.

After making this game – it dawned on me even further that the average time people work in game dev is around 3 to 6 years (although this does vary) and then they often leave the industry. There are other reasons for this – such as job security, constant crunching, burn out. But the stress that can come with the complexity and having to do these things to a deadline is not always pleasant (to say the least!).

However, on this project, I could work to my own deadlines, so I had little stress in that area – aside from the fact I just wanted to get it finished. Although this is where self-commitment must be strong otherwise you may never finish what you are working on! Timelines can be awful, but when setting for yourself, it is only you that keeps you on track!

Things I learnt along the way

I will honestly admit some of the elements that I added to Tavern In The Woods after I launched on Steam should have been there to start with. Especially having a menu with graphic settings and other such controls! Something that sounds fairly obvious to have – but I managed to pass over. This is very important especially when making video games for PC. As people have different PC specs and so forth.

One of the main reasons I passed over this – was that I simply did not expect so many people to purchase (for free) this game/interactive story. I was thinking it would get perhaps a couple of hundred downloads, but to date of writing this post has gotten almost 25,000 purchases! This is way more than I expected!

There were also some elements that should have been better optimised, specially the textures and the particles.  Particles effects can be very demanding, so you have to use them with caution.  I reduced the overall particle count – by around 50,000 across the game and lost very little in regards to the effect they were adding. Some of the textures were to high resolution, there were many 4k textures that can be rendered at 2k and very little visual quality was lost for example.

Turning an environment into a game/interactive story was  at times more complex than I expected. However, other times it was as complex as I expected. But I learned many things along the way. I learned about scripting, optimisation, user experience, audio, and the subtle art of guiding a player’s attention on a journey through the game – or least to give this more planning more implementing.

Some days, progress felt slow; other times things moved quickly. I reached out to online communities, learnt from tutorials, and absorbing the wisdom of seasoned developers. Each challenge after I completed it, deepened my understanding further of game development.

One Final Point:

When I was making this and specially for a period of a couple of weeks when I was making updates as quickly as possible for Steam. I was getting so sucked into the dev that I was forgetting about the actual story and experience of the game. A case of I wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees. This is really hard to avoid, especially as a solo dev. I could have taken a step back and then played again, but this would have slowed down my dev work.

In the future I am planning to work with at least 1 or 2 other people and therefore lighten my load, but also give myself or another tester the space to absorb the story and play through with a clear mind.

Feedback

On the whole I’ve gotten very positive feedback. More than I was expecting. Even a few of the reviews have left not recommended, but provided constructive feedback. That is so useful for me or any game dev.

There was a couple of reviews which were abit frustrating. For example, one review, left a ‘not recommended’ and said it wasn’t optimised, but then mentioned there system specs of their PC and it was below the minimum recommended spec.

So, of course the game isn’t going to run well below minimum spec and will not ever be optimised for anything beneath this spec. I was thinking of reporting this review, but have left it for now. Sometimes responding to a review can draw it more attention than it would ever get otherwise.

The bulk of the feedback was really positive and I have received messages, Steam friend requests, one Youtube play through and a mention in several blogs – including Retro Gaming blog.

This has all really encouraged me to move on to my next game.

Upcoming Work

Looking back, there are things I wish I had included from the very start, but overall I am happy with the work and for my first official game on steam it has done much better than I expected.

In the end, my first video game is both a finished work and a foundation. Moving onto my next project will deliver a far more accomplished and in-depth piece of work.