Hi there! Welcome to the first devlog for HIS LAST MACHINATION. This week is liable to look extremely material-dense, but it's because the team and I did a lot of configuration-work!

First and foremost: this project would not exist if not for encouragement/slightly devious enabling from Kylie and Rumi. I remain absurdly grateful to you both. (My gratitude to Zeke and the entire Interactive department has been relayed elsewhere, so I'll abstain from it for now purely because I want to make this devlog as succinct as possible...but just know that I'm beyond thrilled that the game jam waiver is now fully public-facing.)

Learning that I had the option of entering a 2-month jam from March 1-May 1 was genuinely what made the prospect of spearheading a game development effort feel feasible; both logistically and personally (mentally, energetically/physically, and emotionally), I understood that my first foray into game direction in >4 years needed to occur in a small-scale, extremely low-stress environment.

Conceptualization and Pitch

Before starting the process of recruitment, I drafted a pitch document in a bid to more cleanly organize my thoughts, determine game scope/necessary deliverables, and determine exactly what roles I needed to find coverage for. Because I already had coverage in terms of an additional "audio brain," a UI artist, and an artist willing to fill whatever I needed coverage on, my priorities were on finding folks for character art, environmental (BG) art, special cutscene (CG) art, with a bonus ask for music if I could find an interested party. (If I could not...my composition skills are passable, but not overly interesting.)

I had a very firm idea of how Abram and Pietro looked in my mind—though, interestingly, I did not and still do not have any concept of what they sound like—which, thankfully, made finding visual references relatively straightforward.

(Visual references for Pietro in both age-states, alongside sprite expression requests.)

Narrative Design

My approach to narrative design always involves some level of messy outlining; this time, it came with a side of conditional formatting in a bid to make future-Jett's life a little bit easier. All in all, the narrative itself is not overly lengthy—the game is meant as a "snapshot" of its characters' lives—whilst still feeling capable of supporting emotional weight.

For script formatting: overall, my goal is to make the content as Ren'Py-friendly as possible. This causes the formatting to depart from typical theatre or screenplay layouts, but my experience in working with scripts in the engine is that having even a little bit of pseudo-code baked into the script throughout the drafting process helps immensely in improving efficiency of programmatic implementation.

"Why's the dialogue like that?"

As I started drafting lines for the audition sides, I realized that this was the type of game that lent itself extremely well to my writing at its most flowery and verbose. In talking with a friend (via text-chat) as I was drafting, I mentioned how

"[The flowery writing is] honestly much truer to how my brain Naturally Works, but I figured out very quickly in life that I can't talk like that to normal people because it's disconcerting and gets parsed as pretentious.
...
"It comes out a little more in my speech, particularly in the mornings (because that's when I'm most mentally 'with it'), but I had to concertedly make an effort to learn casual-people-typing-parlance."

Because my main workflow goal with this project is to make things as easy and comfortable for the entire team as I can, I elected to proceed in a writing style I was already naturally inclined toward—helped further by its congruence with the overall aesthetic and narrative "flavor" of the game.

Configuration and Setup

Very rough conceptualization for this project began on February 28th. This was when the pitch document was created and I started throwing initial narrative concept onto it. The most succinct explanation I can provide as to the line of thought that led to the game is essentially "I got really angry about modern dialogues about the Renaissance et al erasing contributions to science and technology from non-European countries, and am bummed that exploitation by capitalism's made technology predatory to the arts."

Primary resources established this week included:

• Pitch documentation/conceptualization document for narrative and character breakdowns; eventual reference list
• Outline/major plot points (3 in-game days, 3 endings)
• Core project filesharing structure (Drive)

• Project management hub (Discord)
  • Our project management hub has been designed to be as unobtrusive/notifications-light as possible for actors who would prefer not to receive nonessential updates; configuration-wise, this means that access to development channels is opt-in (i.e. actors who only want essential notifications/maximum professionalism + minimum silliness have that environment running by default).
    • A through-line for everyone on the team is "Pretty silly by nature; able to hone in on being a highly effective professional when required," so rather than going "No, we shouldn't be silly," my approach in designing our hub was "We can absolutely still be silly; we just have to plonk it over here."
• Casting call document (casting is open until March 13th, if you're an actor who'd like to read for the game!)

• Audition form for CC document
• Script document with approximate structural breakdowns re: background art usage

• Dialogue spreadsheet (initial configuration)

The dialogue spreadsheet itself can be formatted in a few different ways, but I most commonly use and enjoy the version of ingthing's template that Kylie lightly modified and I added a couple of additional components to (most notably, the Session Progress Tracking spreadsheet; this holds total line-counts and generally helps me remember what materials have already been recorded).

I was extraordinarily fortunate to have teammates who were willing to immediately mobilize in working on the project; Lu delivered full-color renders of Abram and Pietro in both age-states incredibly quickly, which I'm absurdly grateful for.

(Pietro before becoming colorful, AKA "The image Jett looked at and went 'I can see the Sutherland!'")

It meant that I could get the casting call out on the 5th rather than my initial plan of the 6th, which ended up being extremely advantageous, because...

Outreach

I understood going into HIS LAST MACHINATION that the specs I would be requesting were both irregular and just specific enough to present potential issues. To that end, I reached out to both Voices of Color and Queer Vox on the 6th for access to their respective talent databases; VOC was extremely responsive (thank you all!), which allowed me to pull contact data and slowly prepare an email draft to send out the following day. Being wholly candid: my own social anxiety was staunchly unhappy about sending out an email with so many people bcc'd, but I managed to poke at enough of the brain-piranhas that it was feasible.

Other Deliverables and Progress

Drafting of the script and adjoining code components began this week; so far, a majority of the first of three in-game "days" has been written, clocking in at roughly 7 pages (though not all of this is narrative, as I'm writing pseudo-code as I go). My script notation/placeholders remains predictably silly—because, even though the game itself is fairly serious, the team thus far is comprised of people I could best describe as "goofy" (albeit with the ability to hone in on mildly ridiculous amounts of productivity when requisite).

Additionally, the team got to experience an initial draft of a musical track idea and I had both a CG concept and background concept floated in my direction—everything looks and sounds phenomenal, and is very thoroughly in line with my aesthetic/aural intentions for the project. If I were to attribute this to anything, I would say it has markedly less to do with the references and more to do with the fact that the folks I pulled onto this project already know me in other contexts—and many of us have significant areas of overlap in terms of visual and musical leanings.

Our first team meeting was scheduled, which meant collecting availability across 5 timezones (there are 7 of us in total); I'd like to extend my gratitude to the ever-trusty Crab Fit for allowing cross-timezone schedule coordination that's relatively straightforward. The meeting itself is not particularly formal; my intention is mostly to allow those in the cohort who haven't worked with each other previously to have a chance to say "Hi" in real time.

That's it for this week, but stayed tuned for more development progress on HIS LAST MACHINATION!