Monday, February 16, 2015

45's Devlog: Part One (in Which I Introduce the Game Idea and Pretend-Complain about Everything Else)

Here's the typical opening line for such things: This is the first in a series of daily devlog posts I intend to write about «45», a game I've been working on, on and off, for the last couple of years. With little to no progress. Let's start with how the project's git log looked like: 


The first thing I couldn't help but noticing was the uncanny repetition compulsion, only working on the project during the fourth quarter of every year, which is somehow relevant to the game's concept and the persistent notion I've been stuck with since 2012. Repetition.

Overview

In technical terms: it's yet another one of those interactive-animation/walking-simulators-with-emphasis-on-story kind-of-game. In parataxis: it's an interactive story; a pastiche of characters/conversations/events/sounds/etc that have, intrusively, perpetually, collared my mind since a certain self-inflicted accident back in 2012. Hence the game title, 45; for a while this number was all over the place in my head, all else in the background, and I was a bit confused, and maintaining the appearance of a functional human being was harder than ever, and Google pointed at me laughing; so I decided to shrug it off and make a game out of it.

The quest began in 2013. The plan was to integrate the concept in a game I shelved back in 2011 documenting my last year in teenhood, conveniently titled 19:

It didn't work out, I wasn't exactly prepared to drown in nostaglia, not in the state I was already in, so many broken prototypes and uncomfortably bizarre life events ensued. I had to restart the whole thing.


Fastforward to the end of 2013, the obsession was fully directed towards the project, outlined a couple of segments in arabic, jumped the polygonal art wagon, initial commits, coded some basic Arabic language support for Unity and then. Nothing. No idea what happened, I guess it was college, the graduation project (volume rendering engine for medical applications, eventhough I only worked on that seriously for like a week and ended up with a hacked mess) and well, maybe hazardous life in general, I got out of the year with some random stabbing scars attained in absurd circumstances in an equally absurd country's everything (i.e. Egypt).


I picked up the project again by the end of last year, now in a completely different situation where I have a job in an ad agency in Cairo, which I took just for the lack of a better distraction in the purgatory period that is waiting for conscription. Anyway, I made some progress with a shader I'm writing for the game, I know this won't even dodge the typical-lazy-polygonal-artsy-fartsy-game label, but whatever.





And so until I get drafted I'll try to get rid of this project once and for all. I'm not really sure of the purpose of maintaining a daily devlog, for a project as personal as this, but as far as justified insincerity permits, hopefully this will provide any kind of motivation to finish the damn thing.



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