Abyss news

Hi everyone!

I have great news for you and I am really happy to let you know about them.For a while I wasn't working on the project mainly because I don't have much time and money. Now, money won't be such an issue. I have been accepted for my AEC attestation. ( In Québec it is known as. Attestation d'Étude Collégial) Meaning a Collegial Attestation.

So what is it?
Basically, this mean I will be accepted at the college for Level design studies. I will learn more from professional level designers and the basic of the related job such as modelling and animating. It is a 1110 hours formation on Level design, Project management and information on actual jobs in this domain.

Nice, when do you start then?
I will start college on September 2015. I have one year to finish my actual class and prepare for College. I have to finish what here in Québec we call "Secondary school”, you most likely know something similar as the High school i believe. I didn't finished it entirely and I have one year to pass every exam possible to pass every class possible and get my diplomat. Then I will be illegible to start College next year.

What about your money issue, how come it ain't much such a problem now?
The money issue is almost fixed now because I have been accepted by "Emploie Québec", it is a government affiliation that help people to get back at school and we are paid ( about half of the minimum wage ) to live during the entire time I will be at school. But it has it's price too.

1. I can not arrive late at school, they can stop founding me.
2. I also need to show great result, they will cut me off otherwise. I try to get an average of 80% minimum.

Let's say it give me way more than enough money to live and spare some of it to help me out with the development of Abyss.

What about the failed kickstarter attempt?
The kickstarter was to help me out setting up a budget for the project. with enough money I could afford some talented people whose could help me out with everything that I can not do right now.I understand It was not a bright move, but it was also a desperate attempt to get back working on the project and help me out to get out of the misery since at the time, I had lost every income I had, meaning that I could have gone bankrupt. Fortunately I was able to find an other solution and I was able to have some little income, barely enough to get me out of problem.
Even if now money isn’t an issue in my life, I can not spent every pennies i have left on the project. however, I will still invest it into the project. It will just make a longer credit line.

Ok, Nice to see everything is going well again. Would you mind telling us more about Abyss now?
Absolutely, I started working more on the major game mechanics, First is the idea of a non linear storyline, I may already have told you about it, but since a while, I work on a way to create a story that is non linear. I don’t want to make it like every other games do it. I want to make it sort of Unique in style and being very Unique.
I don’t want to spoil anyone so I will try to be very precise without giving too much informations on the storyline.
First, it’s to make the players having to make choices without noticing it. A good example would be to make an hallway with 3 ending. One would be right ahead, and there would be a passageway somewhere in the middle. It force the player to decide to continue or to explore it. You can see one of these idea in the video i uploaded a while ago where i jump to a window. This is an example of extreme choice that lead to easter eggs. but will also contribute to the storyline.

Wow, what about the storyline? how will you manage to work on it if there is so many different choices?
This is a good question, it is hard to answer without spoiling much. Since you will be bombarded of big and little choices to make durring the story, I came with an idea. You make your own story by exploring the facility.
The way I was thinking to put it up is to throw a lot of informations about the facility in pattern that lead the players having their own though on what is really going on and everything will be up to debate. Since a lot of people may experience a different gameplay, I will give a lot of different information to different places of the story. I will give enough information for everyone to have a clear Idea of what is going on but not enough so you may want to keep searching.
I also want to aim for different perspective and different users. I mean, not everyone like only playing a puzzle based game. Some people may want action, adventure or even horror?
This is why I decided to work very hard on choices. The first choice you will make in the game is going to lead you to a specific difficulty level and a specific genre.You may wonder how I can manage that right?
Well, by combining the unconscious choices and the level design, I can estimate what the player is thinking. ( for this, I will require a lot of playtesting to create some stats ) And from then I will create an entire story based on the choices.
At the start of the game, you will have at least 6 choices. both of them leading to 6 different stories, which all of them will lead to at least 5-10 ending.
The most important thing to know about Abyss is that the story is about what the player is doing. So it is somewhat interactive and the principal goal of the player is to survive the combine invasion and the madness of the Aperture Science labs.

Impressive! What are these choices? What are the main difference between all these stories?
Well, I don’t want to say too much about them. I am still working on the idea and a lot may change.
Basically, the first choice you make will be the selection of the genre of gameplay you are looking at. Right now, I was thinking about 3 genre. First will be the Puzzle genre. The second will be the adventure/horror genre and the third will be the action/humour genre.
I want both of the Genre to be totally different and make a nice contrast with the story that come with em.
The Puzzle story will be similar to what we see in Portal and Portal 2, the player will lost his way inside the Facility and will have to pass a lot of test chambers and make many puzzles to survive or not?
The Adventure/Horror story will be a very more dark way to introduce Aperture Science labs. I will focus the story on all the madness they have been doing and try to creep out the players using the level design and great soundtracks.
The Action/Humour story will be a funny way to introduce Aperture labs, I want to focus my work on different gags and entertain the players with great level design and animations.
The second choice will be a difficulty level, The players will make once again a unconscious decision that will lead their path to the story using hard or easy puzzles. Of course, even if you didn’t go to the puzzle story, it wouldn’t be portal without exercising your brain. :P

How can you be sure the player chose what they really wanted to play? why not making an In game menu with these choices?
Making an Ingame menu for chosing different storyline or difficulty level is not Original and Unique, I never seen anything like this before and this is why I want to do it.To be sure the player really intended their way, and didn’t come in out of the random, I will be making a lot of playtesting with different people to try out and make some stats. I will then change the maps according to the stats and the feedbaks of the players.
The way i see it is that the average player who enjoy a more “puzzle/think outside the box” should be the one who are messing with everything in the map to try access different areas or even try to break the game itself. ( I am one of those ) So, to chose the puzzle storyline, the players will have to solve some sort of puzzle only to access the area in the map that lead to the puzzle storyline.
Same go with the other one, The horror/creep will be accessible easily but it will be a very dark place where you would probably only access if you feel like going in dark places.The difficulty level will use a similar process, you will have to make a choice between two thing, the easy one is almost straight in your face and the hard one simply require some thinking to access. Once again, using playtesting I will design it the best way as possible.

Wow, It seems to be a very big project. How will you manage to finish it all? Please, don’t make fake promises...
Yes indeed, it is a big project. I will take all the time and all the effort I have to finish this project. This is mainly why i wanted to make the kickstarter. But at the time i didn’t have finished my ideas of the story.
If it take 6 years to complete, so it be. I do not want to ship you a rushed project or even a half finished one. I will work on it as long as it need until it is perfect.
What I want to promise is to create playtesting sessions for different level design and different maps will be accessible for download.
It will be impossible without your help, your support and your feedback. I will not be able to finish it all by myself, ( at least not right now ) this is why I will need you guys. I am open to any help from you guys.

Thank you!