clocktower-fifty

[clocktower-fifty]

[4] Week 3 - Very Rough

Week 3, starting to get busy (but not on the game)...

Yeah I’ve been dreading this weekly update because I have not done much :< I had an assignment due every weekday. That university life schedule won’t let up, but the most important thing is to keep on trucking along and doing the best I can nevertheless!

What I have done is the RPG Maker Roughs on Sunday.

Above is the RPG Maker pre-made tilesets versions of the outside of the clock tower, one of the many rooms, and the very top of the tower (where the bell should be). 

The main part is all those rooms. (As you can see in the second image, that huge list on the left are all “playable” rooms.) They all have an entrance, and doors that connect to the proper connecting rooms.

It’s simple and easy to make, as well as not at all glamorous, but I do think this is an important step. This is a video game. Technically, the game is now “playable”. I have a character that can walk around and reach the end. This is slowly not becoming a bunch of ideas in my head. (Yes the program did practically all the work so this is not very impressive, but I still think this step is important!)

Now for the other thing I needed to get done this week, that flowchart. I have not touched that flowchart all week. But while making those choices and following that path is half the gameplay, that is still not all of them. The puzzles are important too. Next week was supposed to be “Content Rough Draft”, where I used that flowchart in order to make temporary dialogue for each room. I can mix the two, and it’s not crucial to make it solid content right now, so even though I’m technically behind this shouldn’t stop my current schedule.

If I can’t finish the flowchart and/or the Content Rough Draft, yes I have to extend my schedule (but I was expecting that anyway), but I will not be stuck on that. I’ll just skip that part and move onto the following week’s “Puzzle Generation” task I set for myself. I don’t think it’s good to be stuck on that for too long (even though it’s hard to make time to work on it).

Until next week!

[clocktower-fifty]

[3] Week 2 - Lots of Flowcharts

Wandering onto Week 2, starting to wonder if I’m getting in over my head, but we’re just going to have to wait and see!

On a personal note, I’ve had acquaintances hounding me all week to play Among Us with them... Guys I can’t make video games if I keep playing them :< Very fun, but very socially draining. I’ve also bought the Into the Spiderverse Art Book today, it makes me super pumped to work on a story idea I’ve had for a long time, but nooo, I gotta work on this game >:( So many fun distractions.

But you guys are here for Clock Tower 50, so here we go.

At the beginning of the week, I’ve taken that paper I made last week and put it all down on a Google Sheets file. Then, I’ve started ordering the rooms until I’ve made...

...This thing! The general blueprints of where each room is in the Clock Tower. I’ve made this using diagrams.net. I was a little apprehensive using this program, since I’ve tried it once to make a flowchart for a university computer science project and got frustrated, but I needed a quick and easy flowchart program and this one is free + online. It ended up being very simple to use this time around, so that’s nice!

As you can see, these rooms don’t make any sense space-wise, but we’re ignoring logic here. Each colour is a different floor, with the highest level on top in yellow and the lowest level at the bottom in green. Each rectangle is a room, there’s fifty rooms in total, hence Clock Tower Fifty :)

The game’s main “gameplay mechanic” is choosing which door to go through, and depending on their choices the story will shift ever so slightly.

A day or so after that, I drew some quick character mockups instead of paying attention to my Physics lecture:

(Ignore the weird turtle creature at the top left, that’s for one of my dream games which I can’t work on until I get more experience.)

Daphne is one of the teenagers (originally named Sofia in the previous post), and Reese is the player (originally named Charlie). I’ve also changed Gabbi’s name to Jasmine, which was actually her original name when I first thought up the plot (Tony [Reese], Skott [Samuel], Jasmine [Jasmine], Gabe [Travis], and Laura [Daphne]). Don’t worry at this stage I will stop changing the names. (At least in my notes until I redesign everyone.)

Speaking of designs, I really like Reese’s design that I doodled in my sketchbook. I like Daphne’s hair as well, but I feel like her design will probably see more work.

Anyway, in the previous post I forgot to share that pilot / piece of dialogue when I was first thinking up of the game. This was the draft for how the game was supposed to start...

...but I made that on September 1st, so I’m definitely not keeping most of this dialogue. (Travis/Gabe is also extremely out of character here.) We’ll see when I get there.

Alright enough meandering. From that flowchart/blueprints of the tower above I tried using the program Twine to plot out each choice the player can make.

The player starts off choosing between two doors. They have the choice of going through either door alone with the four other teenagers through the other door (2 choices), or they can go through either door with one person (8 more choices), or they can go through either door with two people (12 more choices), or they can go through either door with three.............

Let’s just say about an hour in I knew going through with that idea would be too insane, even for me. I was tired trying to plot out all the choices after the first door. So, I deleted that flowchart.

Time to downsize.

The first choice is made in the Observatory. The two choices are either the Aquarium room or the Space room. I decided to make the choices blend in together a bit more-- it doesn’t matter how you split up, but some split up scenarios would cause a different story. In this example, Samuel prefers the Space room and Jasmine prefers the Aquarium room. If you choose for them to be alone in the room they DON’T want, they get angry and that’d change the story. Daphne would not want to be alone period, and there’s also a branch if you choose for everyone to stick together, not splitting up. Five choices, that’s not so bad, I was thinking...

...Until it lead to this mess. If you look at the blueprint above, you can encounter the group you split off from if you choose correctly. That was on purpose, I like forced character interactions. However that leads to this problem-- if a character was split off from everyone in the previous room, what happens if they encounter the rest of the group again in the next next room? Depending on your choices, this can lead to all sorts of interpretations, and oof. There’s just so many storylines from there.

I attempted to shorten it by making bad endings (there’s a bad ending on the square with the red side), but looking at everything I know it’d take forever to complete this game. I do not have forever, I have dream games I want to make eventually. (Side note, I actually really like that bad ending, but I don’t know if I’d ever use it... If I never use it, I’ll probably tell you guys what that ending was supposed to be when the game is finished.)

Okay okay, back to the drawing board. 

It pains me to do this, but in order for this project to be doable, the player cannot choose which room their friends go to. They can only choose their own, or alternatively insist on everyone sticking together.

Okay I know this doesn’t look any better from afar, but trust me this is much more doable than the two previous attempts. Not only have I limited the choices drastically, but depending on the choices some paths would end up the same way.

While I personally hate doing that (what’s the point of choices if some choices would lead to the same ending??), I’m trying to keep to one rule-- each time you make a choice there will always be at least two paths. You cannot enter a room and have your choice be useless, i.e. no matter which door you choose it’s the same ending. This same ending must be conscious in a way.

As you can see from above, I’m not done with this flowchart. I’ve only done 12 rows out of the planned 26. (I would say I’m almost halfway there, but each row gets more and more complicated so I would say it’s more like I’m a quarter there, haha.)

I’m also debating on going with the bad ending thing, to cut off potential paths, but we’ll see.

Finally, to end this devlog, I’m trying out Todoist. I’ve never used that website before, but I think ending devlogs with a brief outline of my current workflow would be a cool idea? I put in some temporary dates of when I’m planning to finish certain tasks, but right away I can see that I’ll probably not make my planned January 18 release date, haha.

Next week, I should have the rough maps on RPG Maker, as well as finished the flowchart above.

Until next time!

- Marisol Cast

[clocktower-fifty]

[2] Week 1 - Room Theme Ideas and Rough Character Designs

Alright, here we go! My first ever update!

To start things off, here are two pages that I made before starting this devlog.

This is when I first had the idea-- I drew that clock tower first in a fit of inspiration. I’m not 100% sure if I’d actually stick to the details on here, but this was a good starting point in my opinion. While I had drawn the layout of inside the tower here (as well as some sort of description of what each floor entails), I’m definitely scrapping those blueprints. The tower will have very large rooms with dimensions that don’t make sense, but I do want to keep the idea of having 50 rooms and 7 floors.

Now onto the little progress I’ve made this week.

I started off with a list of room theme ideas. Anything goes, if it pops into my head and it sounds passable then I place them on that paper. I think I even went for a walk at one point and kept my phone handy to write random scribbles of theme ideas.

Next, I marked down the dumber ideas and compiled a list of 50-ish room themes where I can conceivably think of a puzzle there.

While I had purposely planned to leave some spaces for extra rooms that fill a sort of plot purpose, I ended up with more empty spaces than I bargained for. That’s alright, since this is a first draft and I’m not much of a planner anyway, but hopefully when the time comes I can easily fill this in.

Finally, some basic character designs.

These are all purposely rough and the designs + names were kind of thought up on the spot. The top four characters are NPCs (the other teenagers) and the three at the bottom is me brainstorming the protagonist. Everything is subject to change, obviously.

I know I want the player to choose which pronoun (he/him, she/her, they/them) they want to be referred as, but I don’t know yet if they can choose the basic character design or should I just leave the protagonist’s character design androgynous. I love choices, but leaving the character androgynous means less art/work in the future... I’ll think about it.

There’s also a quick attempt at a logo on the bottom-left :) Kinda weird-looking, so I’m definitely not keeping that, but at least an attempt was made.

And that’s all so far! Next week, the plan is to get every single scenario down on a mind map sort of thing (I will most likely be using Twine, but it depends on what I need). It should be a short-ish update, but a lot of work for me, oof.

Thanks for reading!

[clocktower-fifty]

[1] Clock Tower Fifty

Here it is! The first game I’m planning on making and finishing to the end!

The following information are all placeholders. Anything is subject to change.

TITLE: Clock Tower Fifty

GAME ENGINE: RPG Maker MV

PREMISE: A bunch of teens enter a clock tower in order to ring the bell at the top.

GAME PLAY: There are fifty rooms, most rooms have a puzzle. The player delegates which teenager goes to which room, and depending on your choices the story changes.

PLAY TIME: Thirty minutes for the first play through, two hours to 100% complete the game.

ESTIMATED COMPLETION DATE: January 18th, 2021

Oh boy, can’t wait to see how off I am! (Especially the completion date, haha.)