The hard way to my first Visuals

It is with great pleasure that I write this devlog: the game finally has at least some kind of visualization. At the beginning I had no idea how important visuals would be, even if they are as crude as the ones I made for this game, because I had forgotten something: I don’t tell a story with words or music, but with images. Of course, these images can contain text, but there is a big difference between reading a sentence and looking at something that lets your brain work its magic. Before this update there was simply nothing for the brain to work with – every piece of information had to be acquired the hard way, and in an unpleasant manner.

The code to generate these images is simple in principle, but there are many things to consider, like the art itself and its readability. It’s not enough to just add some placeholder sprites, even though the ones I’m using aren’t that far from placeholders. On this topic I realized two very important things: First, it is impossible to master everything – there is simply not enough time in the world to master every skill. There isn’t even enough time to just get good at every skill. Second, even as a solo indie dev, there is a necessity to get some help with at least some aspects of the game if I want to build a system of quality and complexity, and to use some money to make a serious attempt. In this regard I asked a friend for some help with the artwork and made some concept art to get my ideas across. I hope he finds some time in the next days to replace my own sprites with something more pleasant and hopefully more animated.

Another thing I learned in the past few days is that until now the credits of a piece of art meant little to me, aside from seeing the names of some famous people. But now I am happy to learn how certain parts of a work were made, and to use this as guidance to improve my own work, because this information leads me to new sources for music, SFX, or similar things.

As for the future, because this game is far from finished for me, I plan to do two things before I add more modules. The first thing is to add some sort of mission screen. At the end of the day, I want to tell some kind of story with this game, or let you forge your own. This is pretty hard while playing with only one level of intensity – you don’t just watch the highlights of every game. This approach also allows me to bring in more meaningful choices and to differentiate tactical from strategic decisions. Maybe I will refactor the research system to happen in between missions, to reflect the duration these kinds of things tend to take, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself, so I’ll make those decisions when I get there.

The other important thing for the future of this game – as for many games – is to make the game deep. As of now it is very obvious that two or three of the mechanics were at some point the same, or nearly identical. This is shallow and not fun at all, but it was an easy and fast way to start. Being fast is important to get your game to players so you can use their feedback as guidance. After that, though, it is important to show what you can do with the systems you have. Maybe the game is original, but that doesn’t make it good. In this way I want to avoid making the game wide before I make it deep.