Posted December 24, 2023 by exodrifter
#devlog
The following content is a transcript of the video.
Loneliness is something I struggle with a lot and, judging by the many videos and academic studies, you probably struggle with loneliness a lot too.
I want to make a game that captures this feeling, help people struggling with loneliness, and inspire some hope. I’ve made a similar game called Gender Dysphoria, but it didn’t really have a hopeful ending. I think it’s important for negative experiences to exist, like Gender Dysphoria, but I also want to do things in a more positive way this time.
This game I want to make, lost contact, is a narrative-driven, hidden object game about loneliness. You play as a scientist who is stuck on a space station by themselves, long after everyone has left, with a broken comms array that needs to be fixed if you have any hope of getting back home. The station is littered with clutter, with things that you need to fix machines, and with memories of past conversations with friends and coworkers.
Without any way to talk to anyone or leave, this station is both your home and your prison, and time seems to stretch into infinity, just like the pitch darkness of the black hole you’re supposed to be researching.
That’s the idea.
I left my full time job so being a full time indie dev is my job now, which means that I need to figure out how to make enough money to keep doing this.
My plan is to release an evocative, narrative-driven game every six months. This sounds like a lot of time, but it isn’t, actually. You see, I mean that the game needs to be released on storefronts at the end of six months.
It means, in my head, that the general plan goes something like this: I spend the first three months making the complete game, barely making it across the finish line with a janky unpolished experience, and the other three months polishing it furiously while i trip over myself getting it onto itch and steam and telling everyone that it exists.
Thankfully, I do have some help. All the models you see here are created by my friend Tanuki, or Titanseek3r on Twitch.
Um, the camera has an orbit mode, so you can wiggle the camera around and take a look at the scene, and you can also zoom in on items to take a look at them closer. There’s a bunch of important items in this room: these drives.
This won’t be the final version of the game. Uh, so the drives are a little bit more obvious than they might be in the final version of the game. This is just a prototype for me to test all the different interactions that I might have to build. I’m actually planning on deleting this prototype – burning it to the ground – and starting over when I’m ready to create the game for real, which will probably start next week.
We’ve got a bunch of drives that we can put inside this computer, and when you click on the screens up here, the screens will turn on and you can actually select one of these drives to read the chat log. And because this is about being on a station by yourself, you don’t actually get to pick any choices, but it does show you the kinds of choices that the player, uh, the character might have had when they were in the moment.
But since this is just a recording, we’re stuck with picking just one option. This is also a test dialogue, so I don’t have any plans on having this end up in the final game, but that’s more or less what the game looks like and I’m- I’m pretty happy with it so far.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now. I’m planning on releasing dev log videos every week, though… I guess we’ll see if I can actually keep that pace up, and if you’re a patron on Patreon or a subscriber on Ko-fi, thank you. You’re watching this video before anyone else and, uh, I’m sorry. I haven’t uploaded stuff in basically forever. Uh, if you’re watching this somewhere else and you’re excited about the experiences I want to build, I would love to have your support, links are in the description somewhere. I’ll figure that out at some point, I guess. And I also stream game development four days a week on Twitch at exodrifter_, if you’d like to swing by and see how the game is doing.
If you have any questions for me, you can send them to skeleton at exodrifter dot space and I’ll answer those in the next video! See you later!