Reality Falls - some mid-development thoughts [28/12/11]

[Lewis]

Reality Falls is an idyllic place. At least, it is on the surface.

Yet beneath the green of the trees and the blue of the sky lies a seedy underworld â€" and you’re a part of it.

You’re Jack, and you’re a drug dealer. You act as a middleman between a major supplier and the guys who pedal the product on the street. But when an ordinary transaction turns weird, you find yourself caught up in a mystery that reaches beyond the confines of your black-market business and into the unusual nature of the town itself...

A first-person point-and-click adventure by games journalist Lewis Denby (with music from the ever-wonderful Kevin MacLeod), Reality Falls will be released when it is finished, which should hopefully be at some point in the first half of 2012. Follow development both here and at http://realityfalls.wordpress.com.

(Click images to enlarge.)





PROGRESS REPORT (updated 16th December '11):

Art: 40%
Sound: 65%
Story: 95%
Puzzles: 85%
Scripting: 40%

13th December 2011
Looking for a small group of people to test the game so far. See most recent thread update and PM if interested.

[Matagot]

Sound like a Twin Peaks/Blue Velvet style adventure! 

I'll keep watch on your progress, looks pretty cool.

[Lewis]

Twin Peaks

Well, clearly. Everything should be influenced by Twin Peaks. ;-)

Thanks dude!

[Lewis]

I'm a firm believer in 'test early, test often'.

Currently playable are the first two of four acts of Reality Falls (acts 2 and 3 are longer, so it's not quite half the game, but there's a decent chunk).

If you'd like to test what's there so far, and offer thorough and constructive feedback, both positive and negative, please send me a PM with your email address. Please note, I do require some people who can take this seriously, and ideally continue to test subsequent builds of the game.

Things are ticking along nicely. Self-imposed deadline was to have this build finished by the end of this week, so I'm a few days ahead of myself. Wahey!

[Lewis]

New screenshots! Click to embiggify.

Bloody bouncers...


Well, somebody needs to wash his mouth out...


At least its cover's not blown, ahahahaha!

[Lewis]

[Cross-posted from http://realityfalls.wordpress.com]

Test early, test often. There is no other way to make a computer game.

That’s especially true when you’re still learning. When you’re still establishing formulae and generating ideas. You can make a game that seems like it’s absolutely fine. Until other people play it, you have no idea.

I’ve assembled a fantastic team of testers for Reality Falls, all of whom have provided some wonderful feedback at regular stages throughout development so far. And significant changes have been made to portions of the game as a result. Most of them are small things that haven’t required massive reworking, but have had an enormous impact on play. And the reason they didn’t require massive reworking is because they were caught early, and tweaked before anything was finalised.

Small things. Not everyone plays adventure games. Not everyone knows instinctively to use the hand icon on the object in order to pick it up and add it to the inventory, then use the inventory item on the character to give them it. You don’t need a massive tutorial to explain how that works. You just need the first task in the game to be, y’know, doing this. If you can’t progress until you’ve worked it out, you work it out quickly and it’s not a problem, it turns out.

Some players like reams of dialogue, while others want to get straight to the point. You don’t need to compromise. You can have all the optional stuff below a sub-menu and go into as much detail as you want, allowing those who want to hit the ‘what do I do next?’ prompt to do so straight away. It seems obvious. It’s only obvious when people point out where you’ve gone wrong.

Speaking of dialogue, researching its use in adventure games has been fascinating. Of course, I’ve played a great many adventures over the years, but you only ever really process anything on a superficial level. The range of dialogue amounts in adventure games is quite spectacular, but what’s been interesting is seeing how adventure games I always thought of as overly wordy actually aren’t, and how games I never levelled that accusation at are actually filled with text. There is a quite extraordinary amount of dialogue in The Longest Journey. It never feels like all you’re doing is talking, because the topics of conversation are ones you’d naturally be interested in asking about, and a vast majority of it is optional dialogue anyway.

Anyway.

Reality Falls is about 40 percent complete, I’d say. I’m working on adding a little bit to the game as the pacing was seeming a little off â€" lots to do at the start of the game before the story really kicks off, then a bit of an info-dump section that I really would rather avoid. So there’s that to add. I’m going to get back to working on it in the next couple of days. Having had a Christmas break, I’m itching to crack on with it again.

[EDIT: Also, it's looking like the game's running time will be something in the region of 2 hours.]