Starting Out Again
A/N: This post was written before this website was made - the original text is kept, even though the proposed “future link to this set of posts” is now a thing that exists as part of this site.
Alright, so, take 2 at this I guess.
Hi! I’m Emma, I’m trans and I make video games.
Original, huh?
As far as I can see, there are two ways people could get to this post. One, you were reading my previous blog posts about a game I was working on (and, I guess, still am working on, ostensibly), in which case you already know the approximate deal here. Or two, you got here from some future link to this set of posts directly, in which case, welcome :)
Group One already knows what these posts are; I’m a writer, this is how I most naturally express my thoughts, and I write about making games and other related things here. Occasionally I also write about less related things, like my gender identity and how that changes my experience of the world. A/N: You can find these other, less related blog posts on my personal site.
Group Two probably knows what I am working on right now. I am working with a handful of other people on a currently untitled game about a blacksmith. It’s very time management-y and story driven, and it’s a long way outside of anything I’ve worked on before but it should be interesting.
I like to think there’s some weird timeline where this game gets finished and then absolutely blows up, all of the grand plans that seem unlikely right now manage to fall into place, and two years from now there are lots of people reading these posts by the lead programmer of their new favourite game. And like, wow, no pressure, huh? But you people don’t actually exist yet, so it’s fine for the moment.
The Premise
Last time I started out with an explanation of the game I was trying to make, and I guess that’s a good place to start again.
Untitled Blacksmith Game is a game about making tools and changing lives. You are the blacksmith of this small(?) town(?), people come to you and say “I need X thing to solve Y problem”, and then your job is to make X thing for them, and try to balance the work and the deadlines for your various orders, and try to meet their requirements at a price you can both afford. And sometimes those requirements will be obvious, like they’ll ask for a tool made of steel that weighs less than 4lbs, and sometimes they’ll be less obvious, like they’ll ask for a sword to avenge their family, and if you don’t ask them enough about the situation you won’t learn that the family was killed by werewolves, so you won’t give them a sword made of silver, and then they will die horribly. But you’re just a blacksmith, you don’t get to see that, you just hear about it later.
So it’s partially a management game, and it’s partially a puzzle game about figuring out what someone actually needs and how to get those specific details to come together, and it’s partially a visual novel, because the whole point of this game is the characters who come into your shop, and how the choices you make and the tools and weapons you build for them affect their story.
I’ll be honest, I am one of the two conceptual main writers for this game and I have never written anything like this before. But I have written a lot of questionable fiction, and I have played a lot of games that I am taking as inspiration. So we’ll see how it goes.
What I’ve Been Working On
Like I said earlier, I guess I am the closest thing this game has to a lead programmer. THAT’s a horrifying thought. The actual team is two of us, Sean and myself, and right now Sean is doing a lot of good work on the business side of it, since that’s something he has more experience with than I do. So it falls to me to design and build the base of the game.
Right now I am working on individual systems, trying to design parts of code that work well and smoothly with others and with things that don’t even exist yet, trying to use what I think are good programming principles because I have never been at the front of something of this scale before. Nothing that has actually reached that scale, anyway.
And it’s been going great. I made a system for thinking about and building Makeables (weapons, tools, that kind of thing) out of Parts, but it turned out that it didn’t match the way we are now thinking about things, so it will probably need some redesigning soon, and I’ll leave writing about it more until then. Right now I am working on a dialogue system that is nice to use and write in, which is a modification of an existing system/dialogue language called Yarn. Which is also not finished yet, so I can’t write too much about that either.
In the spirit of previous posts, this week I am working on extending GDYarn, the plugin we are using to parse Yarn into our game engine (Godot), fixing some bugs and adding support for stage direction, like “this character is angry” or “this character moves to the left side of the screen”. I got to mess around with regex, it was so much fun.