Day (and a bit) in the Life of…me
I thought it might be a good idea to start giving a bit of insight into the process of creating Albert & Otto. I’ve always wanted to document it in some form. This blog seems a fit platform for delving behind the scenes. Perhaps more fit than any other. I have in the past tried documenting the process on film but I always seemed to end up with imagery of myself hunched over a laptop, which if I am honest is where most of the work takes place but it’s such a misrepresentation of what is actually going on, to me there is something magical about this process as its an amalgamation of art and history and fun and business and psychology and I would like to try and capture it for you. It’s either that or I just love talking about myself and what I do.
Without further adieu lets dive into the pretentiously titled a “Day (and a bit) in the life of…me” a la Anne Franks “Dear Kitty”, sans the Nazis of course.
TWELVE:SOMETHING
It’s something past midnight, at least it looks like it gazing out the window, most TV’s are off and the streets have thinned out to the point that only an occasional couple or homeless man would walk past. I’ve disabled my clock so there is no way to tell really, it could even be before midnight. That is kind of the point though, not knowing what it says on the clock helps me focus, so much of our life is centered around time and throughout the day i find myself gazing at the clock every damn second and its never showing the time i want to see, its either too late or too early. Its distracting, it does nothing but give anxiety.
I like late nights, things get quite-ish and it gives me a sense that it is just me and my work in this world and that dawn is far away enough that it feels like there is an infinite amount of time at my disposal. I don’t know what it is and it may have to do with our chemistry but it makes me feel that anything is possible.
It’s a little difficult to achieve this in the-city-that-never-sleeps because, well it doesn’t ever really get quite. The city does actually sleep but not in the way you’d think, it sleeps the way a shark does, one part of it is taking a nap while the other one swims and they take turns.
I am at an interesting point in the whole process of creating Albert & Otto, well, the project is always at an interesting point but what i mean is that it is currently going through a transitional period. Things up till now have been done off the cuff waterfall style, which worked great and helped shape the game naturally into what it is but if its going to have any chance of a Christmas release things need to get structured, the project needs to become more predictable and each little bit of it needs to be accounted for and given a delivery date. Let’s call it the Nightmare before Christmas, an exceedingly apt reference considering Burton’s influence on Albert & Otto’s style. Because its like trying to build a tower of wet soaps, organizing thoughts and ideas into a document with charts and tables and dates is never not a challenge.
Nevertheless after weeks of working on Game Design documentation and project flow related paraphernalia I’ve come up with a monstrous Dr. Frankensteins baby that is a product of work flow ideals of a Japanese man ironically called Taichi Ohno and my personal modular system. This system will be used to manage and deliver the best possible Albert & Otto by Christmas. I will perhaps geek out over it in a separate post.
I’ve spent a little too much time working on this system and feel the organizational portion of my brain shriveling up like a raisin. So it is time to do something more free flowing and artistic in nature, in nature. I am revisiting the first chapter of the game and improving how the story of that segment is told through gameplay as well as how the game teaches the player and prepares him for the subsequent chapters, i have some great ideas that i have been jotting down over the past couple of days. So right now I am making a list of goals I want to achieve tomorrow and in the morning I’m heading out to some fresh location to churn this out.
Equipment laid out ready to go in the Go-Bag for tomorow. Thats my old macbook pro, i work on an Asus RoG now, its bulky, its such a bad build quality that it falls apart a little every time i take it out somewhere, so its staying at home until i replace both of these guys with the new razer edge 15″.
TWELVE:SOMETHING SOMETHING
But before all that happens its time for some gaming, I believe I have played a game in some form almost every single day since i was a wee lad. I make times for them regardless of how busy i am. Video games are a very big part of who I am and have affected me more than any other form of entertainment ever could, playing games is also one of the biggest forms of inspiration to a game developer, thats not why I play them but its great that this whole other aspect to gaming opens up when you are a developer, I find myself playing with a notebook in my lap sometimes to jot down and analyze what it was that made me experience that particular feeling when doing this particular thing.
Tonight it’s Mario Galaxy 2. The best platformer ever created according to some, I’m inclined to agree a bit with that. I never got around to playing it when it first came out and now I’m on a quest to collect 120 stars, I don’t know how I feel like about going for all 242 of them, it might turn into an extremely frustrating endeavor but lets cross that bridge when we get there.
OW NINE HUNDRED
Taking the dog for a walk, because he needs to poo on the street, bless him.
TEN-THIRTY
I am starting at the starbucks down the road, things are very different here, In South Africa I’d either be sitting at my desk at home or head over to the office to work. I don’t have an office here and the apartment gets a little cramped, especially that i haven’t put in a desk yet and I’m working on the dining room table. So more often than not i find myself heading out for a breath of fresh perspective. I’m going to answer a few emails and get some admin done, then head to the park, the ground should be dry but its not a good enough day for it to be crammed with people. Let’s see how that goes.
*I didn’t take a picture inside, it felt hipsterish to do so.
ELEVEN
I was very lucky to find this spot, its beautiful and almost too much for my intent, I just want to sit here and do absolutely nothing now. I brought some snacks with me and promptly proceeded to make a mess on my shirt, I made a note *Bring a napkin next time
After I settled in a bit I made surprisingly quick work of it all (the task i set out to do, not the snacks, although that too) and finished what id consider a full days work in just under 4 hours. It was getting hot and crowded so i headed out to get lunch.
THREETHIRTY
Decided to eat lunch on the roof and take the dog for a roof pee this time. He was more interested in the food I had than going to pee, so after about 30 minutes of me saying “no…go pee, go pee, go pee, no…go pee” went back down to the apartment to finish the work.
SEVEN
I just realized that I cannot show the work i did today to anyone, its all spoiler material. I even took pictures of everything. It’s all rather anticlimactic now I’m afraid.
There is a small part I can share on here however.
I wanted to teach the player early on in the game about the restrictions they had around jumping, what they could and couldn’t do, as well as teach them a bit more about how the large crates work. It is important to establish this early on so that when they receive better jumping powers they will realize the potential in them and will feel richer for having received them, a great sense of accomplishment with a excitement for the new possibilities. For me this is the thought process at the core of every step i take in the development, what is the player feeling and what is he learning from any given situation.
On the left is the sketch I made in the park and on the right the more detailed blueprint made with all the correct measurements, I like to keep things open for creative input at every stage, so the bed that the player is supposed to spring on in the sketch later became a springy branch allowing for the same mechanic but looking less out of place.
EIGHT
There is this closet in the apartment that isn’t being used so the idea is to make it into an office, or cloffice if you will, a Harry Pottarian work station, I was going to gut it and throw a desk inside, but there were some structural obstacles so I sat down to work out a plan of how I was going to work around the issues and still have a snazzy little work place.
Here is the horrible sketch, ill put the real picture when its done.
NINE
Game of Thrones and Silicon Valley back to back, nuff said.
SOMETHING PAST TWELVE…AGAIN
Game time again, Super Meat Boy has always gotten the better of me, and thats what keeps me coming back to it. I hate it, it crushes my soul but then it keeps me coming back and back for more, I like that Edmund and Tommy didn’t give a sh*t about the player and how hard they would find it when they created SMB. I try to emulate that myself, a lot of games are scared of being too difficult and in the process suffer a lot and loose the interest of players.
It’s too late for twitch reflexes, I should really slot this game into an earlier time in my day, perhaps i will make more headway.
