10.4 Retrospective

Greetings! Today's post will look at 10.4, its development, what went right with it, what went wrong, and some lessons learned from the whole process. If you haven't played the release yet, you may want to avoid reading this post, as there will definitely be spoilers ahead!

Evaluating the Release

What I Was Trying to Accomplish

The main purpose of 10.4 was to reopen the Commercial District, Ogremarsh's final district. The District was supposed to be big, it was supposed to be fun. And since it houses Bloodfist, the last guild you need to recruit to face the dragon, its reopening marks, in a sense, the beginning of the end of the Zameroth storyline.

Chapter 11 - all the 10.x releases - is intended to have a lot of sidequests and such because this is the last chance to "play" in Zameroth. Once the fight with the dragon begins, major plot events will be happening pretty quickly, and I want to make sure the game is able to do all the fun stuff with characters and the setting that I wanted to. There's also some foreshadowing and other plot threads I want to weave in during this part of the game.

Finally, I wanted to provide the player a chance to advance Alex's relationship with Ana. They'd mentioned the Commercial District's restaurant in their last quasi-date (at the corn dog place), and the District's reopening seemed an excellent opportunity to do that.

What Went Well

Overall, I liked 10.4. I thought it was fun, interesting, and kept to the feel of the story and characters. The scenes were mostly entertaining, a few were quite funny, and the writing was good overall. (I had particular fun with Val.) I also liked that there were several different choices and branches in Ana's date scene. I think this makes it feel more engaging and provides some replayability.

I thought the Commercial District itself looked nice, and had a fun, lively feel - which is what I was going for.

Finally, I was pleased with the Relationship Plugin. I've written about it several times in previous posts, but basically it makes it easier to write events and dialogue that account for your relationship with a character. It gets used a few times in 10.4, it did what I intended, and I'm certain the game will use it more in future releases.

What Didn't Go Well

The release was, in a way, both too short and too long. Too short in the sense that only two things really happened - the District intro/tour and the date. And the date was both optional and possible to miss if your relationship isn't high enough, which would make it feel especially short. The 'too long' part comes from the length of the scenes. The District intro/tour was about 30 minutes, and the date itself took me a bit over an hour to play through. That's a long time to go and only make 3 choices. The game has always had something of a visual novel feel - which I'm very ambivalent about - and 10.4 definitely continued that.

Many of the District's buildings aren't open yet, and this makes it feel a little incomplete. Many buildings that are open also probably don't feel like they have much purpose. Why they might be in a commercial district is obvious, but if a building is there the player probably feels like they ought to be able to do or learn something meaningful there. Some buildings don't really meet this test.

And finally, this release took much too long to get out. More on that below.

Challenges

Problems of Conception

Much of the delay in getting 10.4 out had to do with problems in my plan for the Commercial District. First, it is and was always intended to be big. I wanted the player to feel a sense of grandeur and wonder in the District. That size is a problem, though, because as far as the main plot goes, the Commercial District isn’t meant to be particularly important. The only things that make it notable from a plot perspective are that it houses Bloodfist’s guild hall, and (to a lesser extent) that it has random adventurers looking for groups. There's something minor coming in 10.5, but otherwise... that’s it. Making the District according to my plan thus left me with tons of buildings that weren’t important to the story, but which I still had to do something interesting with.

This problem led to a lot of paralysis. I hemmed and hawed over which buildings I really needed, and which I could afford to cut. I spent tons of time thinking of what each building's interior was like, what sorts of people would be hanging out there, what sorts of skit possibilities there were, quests I could tie in with it, etc. I was also acutely aware of the fact that players would likely be confused by a large number of buildings that they couldn’t do anything interesting or related to the plot in, which led me to go back to the question of: “can I cut more stuff?” after already thinking I’d answered it. Slowly but surely, this whole process became less about advancing the plot and more about filling up a great number of pretty but ultimately unimportant buildings. This, quite naturally, led to a lack of enthusiasm for the release.

Another problem: the obvious purpose of a Commercial District should be for people to buy things there. But buying stuff goes against the whole concept for rewards in this game. I want to reward players for exploring and doing quests, not grinding monsters, thus the good stuff comes from quests. I got around this a little by having some District shops sell slightly depowered versions of quest gear - and this is even good, because it lets players who didn’t do all the sidequests end up somewhere close in power to those who did (which makes balancing fights easier.) But there’s really not much for sale in the District and I don’t see that changing. I imagined players going around saying “why have a bunch of shops if they don’t have anything for sale?” And I could only agree with them. Which led me back down the rabbit hole of “do I really need all these buildings?”

The Commercial District should have been much smaller. A few useless buildings would have been fine; many definitely isn’t. But this experience did teach me a valuable lesson: don’t create huge spaces with tons of buildings you need to fill up. Smaller spaces filled only with necessary or truly interesting places is ideal. And if I later need more room, it's easy to just add another smaller map!

Writing Romance

I always thought that I disliked writing romance. I don’t have a lot of experience with it, I don’t read romances and such, and I think this comes through in my writing. I do awkward pretty good, but Alex and Ana’s relationship has been going long enough that I no longer felt punting was a viable strategy.

One problem, of course, is that this is an H-game, and unless every scene in the future was to involve only Ana, there had to be a way for Alex to see other people, at least from time to time. Without, that is, Alex becoming a cheating SOB - which I didn't feel would be true to the character. It took a while to figure out how I wanted to handle that and, like with the “which buildings” issue above, it led to a lot of second-guessing the decision.

I said many times “I hate writing romance” but maybe that’s not really the issue. I don’t know how to write romance, so I tend to approach it logically: what are you looking for? What are your red lines? Are we compatible? And in this situation that was probably the right course. These aren’t strangers, they’re friends who know each other pretty well, and they've been through a lot together at this point. So the question isn’t “what kind of person are you?” and they’re not getting swept away by hormones and emotions - they’re looking at this and asking: “could this work?” So I think I made the right call, and while writing it was sort of painful, I think it turned out okay.

By the way, you might have thought the date scene was long (it was) but you have no idea how much I cut from it. Like, 30-50% of what was originally there got cut to make the version that ended up in game! Editing it down was also quite painful.

One more lesson learned: I'm going to avoid big romance set pieces in the future. Small romantic interludes here and there are fine, and will probably give the relationship a more real feel, without making the player think they took a wrong turn somewhere and somehow ended up in a VN.

Anyway, maybe I don’t hate writing romance? I just hated to resolve the tension in Alex and Ana’s relationship, which led me to a solution that (spoiler alert!) didn’t resolve anything at all!

Radio Silence

Struggling with the things described above eventually led to me not posting much. It felt like the time for talking about it was past, and that I really just needed to get past these problems by finishing the release. This led to a scaling back of 10.4's plans - hence all the closed buildings. I just wanted to be done with the parts I was struggling with so I could move on to something else. And scaling back actually did turn out to be the right call, since I'm now working on a quest that will involve a currently-closed building I was originally going to do something entirely different with.

I've learned I have a tendency to turtle when development is going badly, and the Commercial District and date with Ana were the most I've struggled with anything up to this point in the game. I apologize for being silent for so long, and I'm very grateful to those of you who stuck with me.

Conclusion

Anyway, getting 10.4 out felt like a great weight being lifted from my shoulders. I definitely wanted the release to have more, but I mostly like what's there. I hope you do as well. And I did learn a lot of very valuable things in this release cycle. World 2 (the final one, other than the real world) was originally supposed to center on a big, impressive city, but this experience with the Commercial District will definitely have me revisiting those plans. (World 2 is planned to be much shorter than Zameroth, btw.) If you have any thoughts to share about the release, please let me know. I'll have more to say about progress on 10.5 and the plan for the next few releases in future posts. Until then, thank you very much for your support!