Mini-Updates

Oh interesting, that sort of low-fi simulacrum seems obvious in retrospect. I'll definitely be trying out that approach soon. Thanks for the interest, and also always can't wait to see your next projects! :D

Hi Adam! It's funny, Elizabeth messaged me through my website about this same subject! And, yeah, playtesting adventure games is a thing that rarely happens until the game is pretty well locked down, for a lot of the reasons you mention. Something the Myst team did as a kind of playtesting was to basically run people through the whole game as a kind of oral D&D. They just described the environment and asked people to roleplay in the story. It let them see if there were things players wanted to try that they hadn't accounted for, or see if an idea was too obtuse, before having made any graphics whatsoever. I've considered mocking up ideas in Sleep is Death as a way of testing out puzzles and plot beats before putting them into production, if I ever get to make an adventure game myself. Not sure it solves the problem, since I have no real dev experience, but it's something I think about. Can't wait to see the next project you all work on! And, yes, I plan to talk to a few indie devs with How Do You Eat, whenever that project gets off the ground. <3

Ian Danskin

Hey Ian! My friend Elizabeth Ballou and I were the primary folks behind Gray Skies, Dark Waters. Great to hear your thoughts, and we're honored you tried it out. :) Definitely in agreement that GSDW is flawed, and we've reflected on that a fair bit since finishing. An interesting thing we discovered about the process of making a branching, story-driven adventure game is that it's awfully hard to get really useful feedback on the experience as a whole until the point that it's hard to change things. In other genres, you can make the barest sketch of mechanics and have folks try it out, tweak, and polish. With an adventure game, things are a bit different: there's not always a core mechanic that you can, for example, have a stranger try out for 5 minutes at a time, and it's hard to get folks to meaningfully engage with the work until it's quite significantly together. You can have folks read scripts and look at art and so forth, and you can even have folks explore disjointed rooms, but it's quite late in the development process before the game is really telling a story in a complete way. I think that was one of the biggest reasons for some of the bigger flaws in pacing and overall feel of the work: we failed to find an effective way to assess those aspect until we were something like 2 years in (out of an eventual ~3 total). And at that point, after spending thousands of hours recording dialogue and aligning the paintings and 3D world for the 2.5D effect and everything else, our assets were inflexible. There are certainly ways we could have structured things for greater last minute fluidity, but such is hindsight. I figure that whole angle may be a useful thing to think about for any other folks here considering an adventure game. And yeah, the minimal budget did not do favors. The project was started as students, was worked on alongside primary jobs, and was primarily self-funded. All of that was combined with various over-ambition like doing 2.5D at all or doing auditions throughout the traditional Virginia acting community, which led to driving about Virginia running recording sessions in a variety of locations. Many things were learned to say the least. :P I'd be quite intrigued by the finances of other indie studios and how the economics works for other folks in this space. (maybe related to your possible How Do You Eat project). Anyways, I've appreciated your work for a while, and I was stunned to open a Patreon email and find GSDW. Thanks Ian! :)