Diana Update #5: Zelda and Inktober
Hi there!
I got myself a Nintendo Switch, and promptly spent the next two weeks of my life playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I've now beaten it, so maybe I can actually do other things with my time now.
What I've been working on
Playing Legend of Zelda, of course. In all seriousness, it's actually been about 70% of my life for the past few weeks. It's terrible. In my defense, I had surgery at the beginning of the month (it's all good now!), so there wasn't much else I could do.
Inktober!
Inktober is an event that lasts all of October, where artists draw an ink drawing per day for the entire month. I only started on the 17th (because I had surgery), but I've since done Inktober consistently, with I think 5 drawings done so far.
Here's one of them, and you can find the rest on Twitter (https://twitter.com/dmliao/status/920480659797413888)
I've begun to more seriously move away from Photoshop for drawing; most of these Inktober pieces are made in Clip Studio Paint, some in Krita. (I never actually settled on a single drawing app...)
This is because Photoshop, to my knowledge, still doesn't have a built-in line stabilization tool. Line stabilization tools take each stroke and 'smooths' it out, allowing me to more easily create smooth curves. My hand tremors have worsened recently, so I've become more dependent on such tools to produce reasonable looking lines.
Farsider Corner
...taking away the time spent on Inktober and Zelda, there really isn't much to show for Farsider. A lot of time was spent thinking about design rather than actually making assets for the game.
I decided that Farsider should have an inventory of some sort, because I couldn't think of any other way to add gameplay depth. The premise (of being a non-combat narrative dungeon crawler) already limited it in gameplay, since a lot of roguelikes and dungeon crawler games rely on combat to add strategic and mechanical depth to the levels. Farsider isn't really a straight exploration game either, since the world is procedurally generated, which means that it's also difficult to add various secrets or parts of the world to explore.
Most of the challenge of exploring Farsider's dungeons is from environmental hazards: fogs, chasms, obstacles. There are enemies in the form of hostile spirits, but without player combat, they become like hazards too, just hazards that chase you.
The secondary challenge is time: as of right now, you can only stay in each dungeon for a fixed amount of time. To go as far as possible, you not only need to avoid the hazards, but also do so efficiently. (This is a similar concept to the 'food clock' found in most dungeon crawlers, where the player gets hungry as they explore and so has to keep pressing forward to find food in the dungeon. It ensures that players don't keep staying in one place, and encourages faster, more efficient gameplay.)
The items, then, would be used to shorten the amount of time needed to clear hazards, and do so in different ways. Items that heal you can allow you to just rush through a cloud of toxic gas, and then heal you after you clear the other side. Another item might just clear the entire cloud instead. I'm still playing around with the exact mechanics and gameplay design, but I think the general 'game loop' has really come together.
Anyway, I coded up the inventory system, but it's not that pretty yet. Here's a screenshot anyway:
Misc. Rambling
I'm in a Zelda mood, so let's talk about Zelda.
If there's anything that impressed me about Zelda, it's how satisfying the game made 'doing everyday things' look. I spent the first four hours of the game just climbing trees, picking apples, foraging for mushrooms, and cooking, and somehow that was incredibly entertaining. Obtaining resources just seemed terribly natural: you can use axes to chop down trees for firewood, you could mine for rocks and collect flint, and then use your firewood and flint to make a campfire and cook your collected plants and your hunted meat. And somehow, despite how tedious I would find all those things in real life (except maybe cooking), this was all enjoyable.
Resource collection in adventure games and RPGs usually fall under 'grinding' for me (where grinding is defined by Wikipedia as a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive tasks.') In a lot of games, there's often one way to to collect a resource (usually killing monsters), and so you have to do the same thing over and over and over again to get the parts you need to become stronger.
In a way, Breath of the Wild does the same thing. To collect wood, you need to chop trees. To find apples, you need to pick them from trees. What makes it different, I think, is the variety of resources (and methods of collecting them), as well as how integrated into the rest of the game collecting resources is. What I mean by 'integrated' is that Breath of the Wild is, ultimately, an open-world exploration game. You have this giant world map, a few points of interest on it, and then the challenge of getting from point A to B, which usually involves going through a few forests and climbing a few cliffs. Along the way, there are a lot of resources that are just lying in the open to be collected, as well as some landmarks that you can examine in depth.
If you're in the forest, it doesn't take much effort to go a little off the trail to collect some health-restoring fruits. If you're on a mountain, rocks and metals litter the trail. And without even noticing, I realized I'd obtained quite a collection of items, so very rarely was I actually lacking in materials when I wanted to cook a recipe / upgrade my armor / use those resources.
...also, putting all these thoughts to words makes me realize how strange a lot of video game mechancis are if you're not familiar with video games. The very thought of game progression by way of revisiting old dungeons and beating up the same enemies feels a bit odd to me now. I'm not sure how that'll impact what I do with Farsider from now on.
Despite the fact that I claim that this is supposed to be written every other week, I have been terribly inconsistent about that. Writing not-fiction doesn't come naturally to me, so it's actually fairly difficult for me to write these out. I'll see if I can get back to every other week, but I'll be moving to Seattle soon, so things might get a bit hectic!
I'm also still figuring out what it is I want to write about, and what people are interested in reading about, and I worry that my ramblings in particular might go down rabbit holes about things nobody really cares about?
Anyway, if you have any thoughts as to what I've been putting out, or if there's anything in particular you want to hear from me, definitely feel free to let me know!