Shadow under the Mountain | Devlog #10: Radical Changes

So, hi! Long time no see. The thing is, I’ve been thinking. I wasn’t quite sure of the direction in which the game is heading. I had some struggles with designing all the stuff I wanted to be in the forest, so I took a… pretty long brake, but it gave me some time to think about my vision. Even though I made some minor changes and adjustments to it, since the beginning I’d rather stick to my initial idea. And that is good, generally. But I think that I didn’t think enough. My initial idea was formed in a spark of inspiration, rather than in a careful design process. I’m not saying it is bad, but because I’ve never really stopped to think and maybe change something that didn’t fit, the game wasn’t all that cohesive. To my mind, there was something lacking. I thought that the game lacked a solid through-line. Initially, I wanted SutM to be a game about adventure. That’s what my synopsis said. But my problem wasn’t that theme, my problem was… the game didn’t seem to follow that theme all that much to me. So I decided to make some radical changes. First, in the setting.

While maybe for some games the setting of a dark forest is fine, I had some problems with it. First, I’m not all that good at level design. And I was struggling trying to make, technically, a small open world. And designing open worlds is hard. Because while we want to give a player freedom, too much of it will make him overwhelmed. And the open world also has to be consistently filled with interesting stuff; otherwise it will be boring. I also was thinking of the best examples of adventures that come to mind. While some adventures take place in a forest, I probably wanted something closer to Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider style. So I decided on a much more linear setting of an ancient underground temple.

I thought of things that are essential to the feeling of adventure, which you may also suggest if you have some. To me – it was treasure. Maybe the influence of pirate movies, I don’t know. So I decided to add treasure to the game, not just loot like knifes and potions. But there was a question – how to make collecting treasure (mechanically useless gold) important to the player? And I made the gold coins you would collect sort of a final score. My idea for now is that when you go to the end of the temple, you beat the boss, probably some kind of a huge monster, the temple starts collapsing and you have to quickly get out, go as quickly as possible to the place where you started. I think that’s an interesting idea that adds some fun to it. And when you successfully get out, you’re shown how much coins did you get, and what’s the maximum. This might encourage several walkthroughs, but I still have to think how to notify the player that coins are important when the game just starts.

A very funny issue arose when I had to consider a seemingly obvious question – whether there should be an ability to jump? It’s somewhat difficult to implement, it has some implications, but in any case… I decided that it’s essential enough to the adventure experience. Almost everyone I asked included danger, exploring the unknown and strong emotions as essential parts of an adventure. And if we think about it in that way, jumping kind of symbolizes all of these. I’m not talking of just slightly jumping in place, but imagine jumping over a deep hole. It’s dangerous, somewhat, there are strong emotions, and you kind of leap into the unknown, since as soon as you jump, you don’t know what’s going to happen. And so, as I realized how much fun vertical gameplay I was missing (I’m not talking just about jumping here), I decided to change the visual style. Though it is a great challenge to me, I want to move the game into the third dimension. That means several things. I would need to redo most of the code I’ve written so far (and I was going to do it anyway, my architecture was lame). I also would need to abandon the old visual assets. And because I’m not able to make 3d models myself (and none of my friends can do 3d either) and I don’t have any money to hire anyone, I’ll have to look for new assets online. But we’ll see what comes out of that.

So, I’ve changed quite a lot of stuff. I’ll need to make it more concrete, think of it more, do more planning (it seems problems arise every time I don’t do enough planning). So most of my work in the coming year will be just writing stuff. But that doesn’t mean I will not do any devlogs. After all, you might have noticed, I decided to make radical changes everywhere, including my devlog format. I think since now I’ll try to do it more like what I did today, kind of a journal with my thoughts on design, how and why I should change something. If you have anything to say about the new format you’re welcome, though I mostly do it for myself.

Also, a couple of announcements before I end this episode. Since I made so many changes and I’ll probably abandon my initial project and sort of start anew, I decided to just publicly post whatever I’ve done for now. So I just opened my Unity, checked if everything’s fine, compiled and threw it on the itch.io. If you’re interested to see what the SutM used to look like you’re welcome to check out the link in the description. Another thing isn’t related to SutM. I suppose not so many of you are familiar with my previous game, Turan’s Artifact. And I’m somewhat glad you aren’t, because it is a poorly designed piece of crap. But in any case, after a few years, I decided to come back to my “creation” and improve what made it especially bad. I’ll not be able to do everything I want, so Turan’s Artifact will mostly stay as it was (I wanted to radically change some mechanics and even write a better character controller, but all of these are too time consuming). I hope to finish as much as possible till the 7^th of January, and we’ll see how it goes. I’ll post a link to the Turan’s Artifact in the description along with the link to the SutM prototype if you’re interested, and that’s all for me, thank you and have a very nice Christmas.