Noirmancer July update: Progress, but hard-earned
LAST TIME ON NOIRMANCER DEV BLOG:
I'm still on pace to hopefully have a demo out in late July or early August.
Uhhhh, yeah that ain't happening.
This a monthly development update for my mind-erasing stealth game Noirmancer. I've decided to not be precious and show you some screenshots and clips of areas that are very unfinished, so please take the opportunity to smugly judge as much as possible.
STATUS UPDATE
So I spent the time since the last post working on this new level. All the rooms in the level are blocked out and have their distinct bits of gameplay implemented although I still need to fill most of them with actual intel (loot), that's not the hard part though. All the level's objectives are rigged up. While most of the level is still greybox and underdecorated, I have started working a bit on the aesthetics of the exterior:
I got to implement a bunch of fun little ideas for the level, including the unique objects mentioned in the last blogpost. One idea that I had thought of a while ago and wanted to incorporate into the levels at some point was the ability to escape a space via turning to mist and getting sucked up an extraction fan:
As with every month, the game's repertoire of pre-built gameplay components has increased. So I end another month with a more fleshed out game than I started.
But, I'm behind where I wanted to be. Why? When I left off last time I was still ideating about gameplay ideas for different parts of the level and that took me longer than I hoped, so that was one part.
Last time I talked about making some unique objects with unique effects related to the level's story as a way to give this level some unique toys when it otherwise lacks many of the game's supernatural powers. But the objects I chose affect NPC behaviour and so it required a fair bit of programming to get them in, which caused a bit of a slow down.
And third was just I was fairly unproductive. This was surprising to me because I had been really productive in the 2 months before launching the game's steam page and my expectations were for that to continue. But no, I really dragged my heels on a lot of this. Perhaps part of it was a winter slump (I'm in New Zealand) but I suspect a big part of it is my personal tendency to hesitate in the face of uncertainty. This was really annoying because again, it wasn't a problem I encountered in the 2 months before the Steam page launch, and I wasn't expecting it to be a problem during this phase of development either. This is something I need to be stricter on myself about; just bloody do it. It's pretty rare that I actually find a problem that turns into a real quagmire. Even my design gaps tend to be resolved quickly when I commit to sitting down and not getting up until I have a solution.
This past two weeks has been fairly productive again in part because I went back to my old faithful technique of self-manipulation: the pomodoro technique. It just really clicks with my brain; "Clock says I gotta stay working!". I started using this technique a number of years ago at a job and I've always found it effective. But for whatever reason I've been bad about employing it in my own endeavours? That seems... stupid? I guess in summary, I am a stupid baby.
DESIGN RAMBLE
For this post's design ramble I talk a bit about ability design. If you just wanted to know how the game was going, feel free to skip it. Or, click below if you too enjoy overthinking things:
The Square Peg Problem
A big part of the gameplay identity of Noirmancer is your repertoire of supernatural abilities and therefore a core design challenge for this project is trying to make those abilities interesting. An observation I have is that it's very easy to encounter what I'll call "the square peg problem", in reference to the famous type of children's toy about fitting wooden shapes into specific holes.A Square Peg Problem is when a mechanic in a game is:
- Only intended to be used in specific and narrow circumstances, often only when the designer decided to even add the thing it interacts with.
- When to use it is obvious; see square hole, insert square peg.
The reason I regard this as a problem is that I think there's no mechanical interest there. You simply walk from one room to another, see the obstacle in the new room, use the obstacle-defeating mechanic, and move to the next room. Sort of a glorified "Simon Says".
The first bullet-point is somewhat easy to address. You can add nuances to abilities that make them useful in multiple contexts. Ideally try to give it a use that applies to the game's core gameplay rather than simply applying to situations where the designer has put some down some specific object. In an FPS something that interacts with enemies is probably frequently going to be usable, compared to something that only interacts with say, pits of lava. Unless pits of lava are roughly as common in your game as enemies.
The second bullet-point is a little trickier. I think one of the most common things for a game designer to do is to add a resource-system to try to make you think about whether or not you should use that ability. This often works but the rest of the design needs to support that. Particularly you need to ask what happens when the player simply doesn't have that resource and needs it. A resource system isn't just a feature for a designer to add, it's a commitment that the designer has to manage.
I already made the choice several months ago that generally I don't think resource-limitations are the way I want this game to work; I want the player to use the abilities, and to feel encouraged to use them. Resource limits are discouragement. So currently, only one ability in the game is resource limited, and that ability is designed to be completely optional.
Instead, I've been coming back to this idea of Opportunity Identification; breaking up the square-peg gameplay arc by obscuring the square-hole. This isn't the right call for every game or perhaps even most games, but I think it works for a Thief-like. The gameplay is already about skulking around an area you are entirely unfamiliar with and searching for loot. It's very natural then to make opportunities to use your abilities something that you sometimes need to search for. Using the ability becomes the pay-off for being thorough.
This time, a specific ability I wanted to reform a bit is this ability you have to throw a little force-field on the ground. This ability was inspired by Thief's "Moss arrows" that allowed you to soften the ground at certain locations so that you did not generate as much noise when walking over it. And that is one of the ways you can use this ability too. But it also acts as a general floor-hazard evader. The game has pressure plates and this ability evades them. That's sort of neat in that it allows the player to live out some infiltration fantasies. I can create rooms that are meant to feel very secure and dangerous, such as via alarmed floors, but for the player, that's actually a fairly easy problem to solve. It seems counter-intuitive, but for this game having some obstacles that are entirely for show makes sense, it's part of the experience that I'm selling.
But, looking at that description you might think "that sounds awfully like a square-peg" and I agree. So I wanted to find a way to use this where I could obscure the use-case a bit. And in this case, one of the options I came up with was fairly simple: use it to make some tricky or impossible platforming much more viable, via simply expanding the surface area to stand on.
To me, this seems like something you reasonably can obscure sometimes, and therefore reward the player for noticing it. In this case, simply putting the opportunity up on some columns is more obscured than you may immediately realize. Players are typically pretty bad about looking up and thinking of the space above them. Worst-case scenario, I've given the player a tool to help alleviate platforming which is one of the worst things in a first-person game.
So what's next
So the next week or two will be making the level not a whole bunch of grey, filling it with decoration and actually putting down all the intel.
In terms of moving towards a first public demo, there is sadly something else I must do. I decided I didn't want to burden this level with introducing the core gameplay. That means I need to make a short linear tutorial level that'll introduce the basic ideas and the hook for this level I'm working on right now. So I think at the moment I'm hoping for early September for that demo. Which sucks, but that is the reality of it. I'm glad I started working towards that much earlier than I really needed to. Hopefully I'll feel more certain about when that is coming in the mid-August update.
Apologies this update is at the last minute for July. I decided I at least wanted to get all the unique gameplay stuff and mission objectives in for this level before bothering to make a post in which I mostly just said I wasn't done.
Follow along
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