Dev Blog #017

The past week has seen a lot of training; I subscribed to the complete Adobe package, a Black Friday deal, for 12 months because I really wanted to dabble with After Effects (AE).


New Main Menu & Splash
Like last week I haven't done any more renders that count towards the story. I have, however, rendered all the images for the new dynamic menu. This took about two days to get a rough draft in place and A LOT of tweaking before I was happy. Once I got the rough template, I needed to render all my final images and adjust them to fit the larger render sizes. The result is a menu I'm pretty proud of, I know it's not groundbreaking, but for me, it's quite the achievement.

Another project I've been working on this week in my AE upskilling initiative is an animated splash screen. My original idea was to have a 3D extrusion of the logo with the white and purple acting as fluorescent diffusers with lighting crashing around "powering" it up. I got pretty close to my vision, and after watching some tutorials, I ended up with a close approximation that I love. I took the rendered animation into HitFilm Express (yes, I could do this in AE), but I'm more familiar with HitFilms workflows for finishing video content; I added sound effects and got the timings right. The splash screen for Postboned Games was then added with the PoD logo introduction and the 18+ content warning.

That's been it for my week; those two little projects took five days (7 hours per day) of my time on top of my day job to get sorted. "But Snowy, there are SEVEN days in a week!" Yeah, I know! What I did for the other two was make a Chapter Title scene. With my game heavily on sci-fi and technology, I went with a parody of the Matrix. I Took one of my scenes from Chapter one, added edge effects, and created my own Matrix-style rain composition. Then for fun, I added a custom-made glitch effect to the chapter title. The result was pretty awesome and got me thinking about what I should do for other chapters. I believe each chapter title should pay homage to something sci-fi'y 


A Wild Conundrum Appeared!
With all the super busy self-learning and uber creativeness I have done this week, you'd think I wouldn't have much more spare time. Wrong; there's always time to get lost in your head; this is what I have done. This self-reflection led me to the conclusion PoD is NOT the same story I initially set out to tell. If anything, it only resembles it in a teeny tiny way. This got me thinking that the title has nothing to do with the main story elements.

Originally the synopsis was something like this: You are a mega-rich dude; he gets whatever woman he wants and loves it. One day he realises that every woman he's been with is only giving him what they think he wants. This drove him to pursue his ultimate desire to experience a woman's true desires. He sought women who would act sexually to satisfy their own wants and needs without considering male gratification. The story follows the MC banging women who only care about what they want, and he is just the afterthought.

During the early initiation stage of the project, back when I was sharing stills of ladies, I made a certain proofreader curious, wanting to know more. So he started asking questions about who's who and what they're like as a person etc. He seemed to latch to Zero Seven, who at the time I had intended to be my Mascot type character whose "job" was to introduce the players and pop up now and then with some boring Dev communication shit, you know? The more we talked, he mentioned she should have a more significant part than just a mascot, BOOM!! The table was flipped!

A sudden bout of inspiration hit me, and before I knew it, I was writing a ton of extra content and trying to fit it into what I had already written. Over many weeks of this verbal collaboration, I'm sure he sees it as him being interested in my story and not collaborating with me; I had a different story that still resembled my original intent. Only this time, it was a Game within a Game; wooooow! I know your mind is blown. I started talking with more than just him; at this point, some other devs began to open up to me more as I got more involved in their work, and we naturally started talking about my story. Again this unofficial collaboration spurred even more creativity in me, and things changed again. And now I'm at a point where my story is no longer the same, and I feel the title is all wrong. 

Now, listen here; take it from someone who's born every lesson to be learned in this gig the hard way. Think twice and leave for a few weeks or months, come back, re-read and think twice before committing to something like this. I released my demo of PoD months ago and was SOOO excited. But six months later, there's still no Chapter 1! Besides two months where real life and work took over, I have had NO IDLE time. If you've read the above, you'll know that I have constantly progressed my story, rewrote things, re-rendered others, etc.

Where am I going to go from here? Well, I'll tell you. I'm going to finish Chapter 1 and continue my story and probably get inspired randomly along the way, BUT the difference is I NOW have an ending in mind. No matter my direction, yes, I haven't got it all planned out, but my story will now flow into the end I have fallen in love with. This gives me direction, something I can continuously reorient when inspiration takes over and makes me take the scenic route. 

With all that babble out of the way, I need a new game title, hopefully before Chapter 1 drops. I'm pretty set on one, and it wasn't even my idea. It was again an unintentional collaboration that didn't take at first, but eventually, the seed took, and I can't think of anything else. But keep tuned because at some point in the not-so-distant future, I will pull a poll together to seek your opinions; I will provide you with the revised synopsis to help you choose.

That's it from me; I've written 80% of this half-cut (For those who aren't familiar with my British colloquialisms, "half-cut" means mildly drunk.). I got home at Cinderella hour and had this urge to drop some pearls. Let us hope that tomorrow when I wake up, I can proof this for the atrocious spelling and grammar and make sure I don't sound preachy or pished! I mean, pissed.

Snowy