It has been 8 months since my last devlog. In that one I mainly covered my experience at Tokyo Game Show (TGS). And it has been exactly 6 months since I left Japan. Moving completely out of a country isn't like moving to one for a few years. I was busy, tired and stressed. I didn't work on Elfie all that much between TGS and my departure. I did however work on Elephant Grass as it was presented at the Hand Eye Society's SUper FESTival!
When returning to Montreal. I slowly started working on a new Elfie minigame: "A Sand Plan". Partially because December is not really a time to search for any kind of work but also to give myself some space to return. Sure moving back was hard, but surmounting the lingering reverse-culture shock feels a lot more pernicious and complicated. And will affect decisions later on.
So my intentions we're to find part-time employement or contracts and continue slowly working on Elfie. If you've seen my recent announcement, you might realize that this did not materialize. I already knew the job market was bad but yikes. (And similar things could be said about grant programs as the competition to get funding through those is fiercer than ever.)
At some point, around end of March, I was tired of trying to balance my mental load between job hunting, Elfie and the reverse culture-shock. I was wasting time and energy on the first. But that also made me realize that I'd much rather be working on Elfie... So how could I possibly do just that?
The big decision is that A Sand Plan will have a standalone version that will be releasing this year! This was always a possibility. I always had in mind that releasing Elfie's minigames by themselves could be something unique and interesting to do. Though at the time, I was thinking of the smaller minigames and have more of a free version for them.
However, as I kept developing A Sand Plan, it felt that the gameplay could really stand on its own. And after talking with my collaborator (@silentswimmer), close friends and family, the potential benefits of this course of action are worth the risks. Such as, but not limited to:
- Having something out there with Elfie
- Getting some attention for the main project
- A potential source of income to continue working on the main project
- The experience going through a release process to completion
While the main negative (that is still scary to think about) is that underperforming might make it harder to pitch the main project for funding.
A bit of a Catch-22 huh?
Now there are some development that I find important to mention that lead to this. It is a devlog after all. The biggest being how A Sand Plan got scope crept. The flexibility of being the main developer in a tiny team of two people allowed me to add to the minigame and also understand that in this case it was necessary. It was the first level-based minigame I was making for Elfie. The other minigames having more of an infinite loop type of gameplay going on. And the issue I saw with that at first is that with a limited amount of shapes, it limited the complexity of what the levels could achieve but also what the player could do when just playing with the sand blocks. Not to mention the necessary features and tools to make levels with just a few type of blocks didn't change when adding more blocks. For example, the level editor is still require whether I have a single shape cube of sand or I have over 20. Probably the most important thing I can try to remember for its development was is that I'm glad I thought about beforehand was giving myself room to add more blocks pretty easily if needed. Would I see myself add to this gameplay feature? Why? What need to be thought about beforehand if so? As someone who tends to overthink, these are probably questions I should be careful of, but at the very least should think about when it comes to central gameplay features.
Another important aspect that A Sand Plan pushed me to work on that was to refine some of the features that are part of the main game and all the minigames. Things like UI, option menus, cursor changes and control scheme. Aiming for a release really changes the priority of some things that I had kept barebone because I was the only one seeing and using it.
Finally, one important part that I should address and make clear is that A Sand Plan is still going to be in Elfie. The puzzles will likely be the same too. The experience will however be different. The focus will be on the puzzle gameplay while the pet simulator and narrative aspect of the main project won't be present in this standalone version. So instead of going to the beach with your roommate/friend, you'll meet a small elephant at the beach who'll ask for a nice strangers help with her sand castles. I know that sounds a bit unconventional... but if you're reading this far I imagine you already like unconventional so please trust.
To finish this dev log off, I would just like to thank my collaborator @silentswimmer for entrusting me with her compositions for Elfie. We recently applied for the Baby Ghosts Studio Development Fund and, though we did not get it, we learned a lot about our collaborative process, what is stronger and what may be amiss that we can work on. But most importantly, it was great to see how our values and goals aligned as it reaffirmed our collaborative synergy.
One of the collaborative process that I want to work on personally is keeping track in writing of milestones and vertical slices for the project. And though it's something that will be mainly for us, I am planning on doing monthly dev logs to give a better way to update anyone who is interested in the project updated on its progress.
That's all for now! Thank you for reading!
Honestly, considering it's been 8 months since the last one, this seems short. Thank god I didn't talk toooo much about all the non-project related things at the beginning. Part of it was a bit written in a stream of consciousness, so I hope it doesn't sound too rambly!
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