• Skipped Gruedorf for 3 months
• Got and/or drew some real art
• Finished most of the core systems
• Lots of refactoring and bug fixes
• Built a demo of the first chunk of the game (sorta)

Hi again. In my last post I closed with the words “If it comes down to it, I’ll always choose putting time into the game over posting a devlog.” That turned out to be more prophetic than I anticipated! There’s a lot to talk about and I’m not sure how much I’ll actually manage to cover but here we go.

How’s Black Mountain?

It’s actually looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. I’ve been working on it close to every day since my last post, and it has changed a lot – looks like I’ve made 390 git commits since then. Obviously, nobody has the time for an exhaustive cataloguing of each thing I’ve done, so instead I’ll just describe where I am now.

At this point I have a demo, which seems to be about 30-60 minutes of playtime (depending on how quickly you zoom around, how much time you take to look at everything, etc etc). It’s essentially the opening of the game plus the game up to the first boss, without any of the optional side areas that will be littered around. I’ve had a few people play it, and it’s been a bit buggy but feedback has been essentially positive.

The Art

In the demo, there are no (well, almost) pieces of placeholder sketch art left; everything has been updated to some level of coloured and polished. Our cast is looking much better these days.

The world is also looking better.

A lot of the background painting there is the work of Hyptosis, which should be a familiar name around the Verge community. The small pieces that aren’t from him are from me, looking very carefully at what he painted and trying to match it. It sincerely made me a better painter, and I’m even actually starting to enjoy painting, which has never been my favourite.

The cast also has far less scribbly portraits now.

These are the handiwork of my friend Cil, who I am eternally indebted to now.

Campfires

I do want to actually talk about one of the new features I added, though! I’ve got a backlog of them to talk about, I suppose, so maybe I’ll manage to work through them over time.

Spread throughout the world, there are a number of campfires. You can kind of think of these like save points, though the game allows you to save anywhere you like. A checkpoint does autosave (along with ANY map change), and it also completely restore your health and energy, and remove all adrenaline (a system in combat that I’ve added), and respawning all monsters that have been defeated. It’s sort of a reset point to let you recover from the last section of the world and prepare for the next.

Growing up (if you’ll permit me to get a bit weirdly personal for a moment) I did a lot of camping and, especially as you get older and the world starts feeling a bit too big and a bit too small at the same time, there’s something liminal about sitting around a campfire with your friends. It’s easier to talk, it’s easier to reminisce and think. This is also true in Black Mountain – the characters are (through mostly but maybe not entirely their own faults) dealing with something much larger than they’ve had to deal with before, and only have each other to lean on. When they stop at a campfire, they might have something to say.

Technically speaking, the way this works is that I have a bank of campfire scenes (built with the same scene definition stuff I described in the last post; the campfire area is actually just its own map, internally), and at any given time I can throw one on a queue of campfire scenes. Every time you rest at a campfire, it checks to see if anything’s queued up, and if there is, it will play it. At the moment, this is mostly used just to provide another scene every few campfires that you encounter, to give a good idea how it works, but the idea is that if anything in particular happens, the next time you rest the characters might have something to say about it. I’ve thought about adding something the first time a character is knocked out in combat, for instance, or it could be used to add some reflection on the part of the characters after they’ve done something big.

The important part here is that it gives a little bit of space for the characters to talk about what’s going on, and give the player a bit more insight into what’s actually going on in their heads. I want to focus on making the characters relatable, and hopefully this will go a long way to doing that.

Back to Talking

I have been in a bit of a self-imposed hermit state for a while now, trying to grind out the main core features of the game (and also on helping with the demo for Alice is Dead, a remake of the classic Flash game, that’s in the Steam Next Fest! You should go check it out!). I’m in a spot now, though, where I need to return a bit to the world of the living, and so I’m going to try to start talking more about my game and what I’m up to, and that sort of thing! At a bare minimum, I’m going to try to get back on that Gruedorf horse and start posting here on a weekly basis again.

Cheers!