Dev Log 2 - Art Build

As the temperature swiftly changes from humid summer nights to cool fall evenings, it is time for another dev long about Eighteen Hours. Following a handful of playtests on my prototype (thank you to my classmates and ESPECIALLY thank you to my roommates, who had to endure far more iterations of said prototype), I’ve settled on an HTML style for 18H that I’m satisfied with. There is room for me to play around with it more, but the core is there, and that’s what’s most important. 

Truth be told, I struggled getting further into this project initially. That core concept carried me through the initial exciting steps of creation and then… inspiration stagnated. For a while I wasn’t sure where to go. I had ideas, yes, but they felt… predictable. Lame. My concept for the main character felt simultaneously interesting and bland at the same time. Writer’s block: the best thing you want to experience while working on a 10-week game. Given that this next build needed to be an art one, I decided I needed to visualize things. Writing things on paper is all well and good, but actually seeing it is so much better. To me, at least. 

It took a while to get something I liked (of course, using my drawing tool of choice: Procreate, whom I’ve used since I was… 14? Wow, time flies). Again, everything felt stale for a while. Who is this person? I kept asking myself. Why should we care about her journey? 

I ended up throwing out basically all of my plans for this character. There were a lot of ideas that I won’t get into here that just didn’t feel interesting enough to me. I started focusing solely on clothing for this main character. It feels like basically every zombie movie in the US takes place in the Pacific Northwest (by the way, why is that?), so what if we place this story somewhere warmer? What would be an interesting outfit for a person living out in, say, the bayou?

And finally I found her: Eighteen Hour’s protagonist. 

It took lots of futzing around, but I’m quite satisfied with her design. This is our main character. She needs to be interesting. I could go into all the decisions I made about her design, but this isn’t the place for that right now. Currently, I’m focused on designing all the other characters the protagonist will encounter. Small children, medics, her mother’s dead body… so many fun people! 

The eventual portraits of these characters will allow this game to come alive. Twine games are text based, they’re not meant to have images. But it’s a major plus if they do. So that’s what I’m working on at the moment.

All in all, everything is going great. There is still a lot to do, but I’m having a fun time. Currently, I’m aiming to have the prologue of the story finished by Wednesday, including music, writing, character portraits, and the codex system. We’ll see if that actually happens… but whatever the case, we continue!