Dev Blog #1 - The Road So Far... and the Road Ahead

Hello Everyone,

With the concept trailer of the Strings being published a few days ago to be displayed by RedTigerPro at the DreamHack Austin, and the following major overhaul of the web site and other media outlets of Strings using the new game concept design, I wanted to take the time to describe to the community the road we have traveled so far and what is next on the development of Strings of Ambivalence. I would like to discuss where the inspiration for the game is coming from and what its major goals are in this light.

A Game Born Out of Passion and Reflection

It was February 2016 when I first started working on the concept of Strings of Ambivalence. With very small amount of programming and game design knowledge, I dared to start coaching an after school club at the school where I am teaching physics and engineering. The name of the club was Game Programming and Design Society (GPADS) and we started working on developing a Game Maker prototype called "Cave Boy" with the interested students attending the sessions. We were programming in Game Maker and following tutorials made by a brilliant young developer. I was completing the lessons a few days ahead of the students to be able to help them where they got stuck.

When we got close to the end of the project, and each student almost completed their own prototype of the game, i asked them to come up with a game concept to continue developing past the last lesson of the Cave Boy project. I wanted them to use the game engine they constructed and apply it to a concept of their own interest: "a game that is not yet made, but would be their most favorite game if it really was made one day". I wanted to model the process for them so I started searching for a game concept that I deeply wanted to see myself playing.

The process took me back to my own childhood when I was playing Commodore 64, Amiga 1200, and early DOS pc games. 80s and 90s were the golden age of the sidescrollers and platformers. I found in myself that I wanted to develop a gameplay concept that pushed the fun, realism, and platforming capabilities of the Myth and Prince of Persia 2, while adding the dynamism, physical rigor, and environmental storytelling qualities of the legendary Another World and Flashback.

On the flip side, I also wanted to infuse my love of the more modern and visually stunning titles such as the Trine series, which would add a layer of physical puzzle solving, developing alternate strategies, and using an arsenal of fantasy skills to try countless solution attempts to a given challenge. Moreover, Trine was the first 2.5D game whose visual appeal was strong enough to convince me that a side-scroller can be built using a 3D engine.

Even though the titles I mentioned above captured most of the locomotion and platforming features of my ideal game, they did not quite address the RPG and dialog features I wanted to integrate into the concept. Into the "visually stunning 2.5D side-scrolling platformer with realistic physics..." concept, I wanted to add the story-rich and decision-heavy atmospheres of my most favorite RPGs such as Might and Magic series, Neverwinter Nights, and Dragon Age series.

Rediscovering the Treasures of the Past

The insights from all these titles helped me depict a vivid picture of the concept of the game as an original title with a unique overall experience. Yet, there was still one important missing feature to achieve a complete concept: An original story for the game. In order to develop the most fitting narrative for this game concept, I returned to my high school years and combined two different stories that I was intensely working on at the time.

The first story was our own AD&D world that I founded with two of my high school friends that we named "Goa". I spent countless hours drawing maps, writing stories, and drafting the history and culture of Goa, and even more hours leading the stories in that world as a Dungeon Master to single players as well as groups. Goa would serve as the physical location, historical background, and main context of the game.

The second story would serve as the "soul" of the game, and would eventually grow into the title of the game. The name of the story was "Non-word Places" and it was about a boy who could focus on the mechanics of his inner world so much that he discovered a connection through his inner world to manipulate the world outside of him.

Building the World and Backstory

During the following one year in which the story concept of the game ripened, Non-word Places merged into the fantasy setting of Goa, and turned into a more consistent narrative resulting in the story of Strings of Ambivalence. I spent the entire summer of 2016 making iterations of the history of Goa in the new concept of the Strings, drawing a very detailed new map of all three continents of Goa, which lead to a substantial background history and culture to nurture any story initiated within that timeline to be rendered with make-believe realism. I also completed a five course Game Design Certification course on Coursera, which helped navigate the process in a more structured manner than I would be able to direct myself.

I eventually decided on the ideal time frame to launch the events of the first game, which was 450 years after the colonials passed through the portal. I drafted the main story line, and 4/6 of the playable characters' individual story lines, concept arts, and ability trees. Having invested so heavily in story design during that summer, I started to realize very quickly that I was neglecting the technical aspects of the game. Someone had to code it into a game after all. At that point, I had built a Game Maker prototype of the game, which was called on "Ambivalence" at the time, where you could play as a the character "Sacrifice" inside the mind of the main character in order to "push" him towards a decision against "Greed" warriors. My students' games also came out to be quite successful, with titles ranging from WWII to medieval warfare to Megaman-inspired platformers, mostly following after my rigorous design process to come up with Ambivalence.

I spent the following year working hard on teaching myself Unity and C#. I took a very popular online Unity development course, and spent every available time on weekends, and little spare time during the week trying to complete the projects within the course. Even though I spent most of my time in the technical realm, I was still making progress about the game's story. I was drawing game-play concept art pieces to help shape the final feel of the game, and fine tuning the story.

Realistic Expectations and the First Downsizing

When I got to the summer of 2017, I came to the realization of how HUGE the game's story had become. As passionate as I was about the story at hand, given the technical insights I gained by almost completing the massive Unity course, I concluded that it would take too many years to complete the current project as a reasonable game. My wife Nazli was on-board with the game development at this time, and we voted to place the current game on shelf, and look for a better point in Goa's historical timeline to make a "smaller" game. We decided to go back to the year zero, when the colonials were first taken through the portal to Goa to mine Mitviri for Alexander the Great's army. The game zone dropped from about 100 square miles, to 15 square miles (just the island of Goa, instead of the three large masses of land) and instead of dealing with 7 large kingdoms, we just had 6 tribes who lived in small adjacent landscapes. We agreed on featuring three playable heroes chosen from 3 of the tribes, and started building a story around them.

During the entire June of 2017, working full time on the game and using another, and more advanced Unity RPG development course, I was able to release a prototype for our then-first-game "Strings of Ambivalence - Pioneers into Darkness". Unfortunately, the course that I was following was for making an isometric ARPG, instead of my prized 2.5D side-scroller concept, and even though I tried to fight to keep my prototype as a side-scroller, I eventually accepted that I was fighting against the course that was guiding me. In the meantime, my wife was taking courses in Blender and Character Artistic Design to help with making the assets for the game.

The first prototype (or the second one after the Game Maker version a year ago) featured one of the three characters being taken through the portal, and immediately facing peril with local Okrosi attacking the portal to shut it down. As much as the prototype was enjoyable as a project in and of itself, I came to two important conclusions when I was ready to return to school by end of July:

Reflecting on Technical Obstacles

First, I really would not be enjoying the game that we were building as long as it was not a side-scrolling game. As much as I appreciated Diablo-style games, and I played hundreds of hours of them (Titan Quest, Torchlight, etc), I envisioned Strings to be successful as a side-scroller.

Second, I came to realize that I was falling victim to the same trap that pushed me away from game development as I was a five year old kid who wanted to make games than anything else in the world: The assumption that making games is all about programming. As much as I very fundamentally enjoyed designing games, the process of programming did not give me too much intrinsic joy. I appreciated the small victories of programming, and how it enabled me to get closer to my dreams, but at the end of the day I was not a "born-programmer". Without insufficient motivation for programming itself, what I learned did not sufficiently stick, and I did not see myself at a position where I could continue developing with pure programming. I started feeling being at a technical deadend, where I could push my way in the same direction to produce a mediocre game, but the rich story and concept at hand really deserved more.

In conjunction to the second realization of my own technical limitations, we also came to terms with accepting how difficult it would be for my wife to design all game assets, characters, and their clothing using hand-drawn art and Blender. As much as she was making tremendous progress in both areas, the requirements of the game we imagined to build was far surpassing our projected growth in the areas we were still developing at.

A Paradigm Shift in Game Development Mentality

With these realizations, we started searching for an alternate solution that would not require us to assemble large studio of experts and try to manage it along with my full time job as a teacher, or that would take us another 10 years of technical growth to be able to make the game we pictured at the quality and beauty that we envisioned it. A path that occurred to me while I was taking the RPG course, which I found more and more feasible as I got more familiar with it was the use of the assets on Unity. Even though I used a free asset here and another free asset there for the isometric game project, it took me until almost mid-August to realize how vast the Assetstore had become. When this realization occurred as a totally viable option, I stopped all game development efforts at that time, and started devoting all of my spare time (schools open in the beginning of August in Arizona...) into researching the Assetstore inside out.

After spending three weeks on Assetstore, creating tabs after tabs of an analysis spreadsheet, and weighing the descriptions, reviews, tutorials, and evaluation versions of various Third Person Controller frameworks, I was entirely convinced that typing up an entire game system from scratch was insanity. There were so many professional locomotion systems on the Assetstore that I was almost in pain for spending one and a half year precious years of development time trying to punch in every line of code.

This paradigm shift also changed the entire face of our game development approach. Instead of spending all of our development time trying to code the basics of the game, we started investing heavily into asset research and mastery. The most critical decision was regarding the third person locomotion system, and I was inspecting more than 15 assets for the third or fourth time when we got to late August to make a decision about which one could reflect the game mechanics we had in mind with the least amount of modification in code. After pain-staking deliberation of all cons and pros, we chose to move forward with Opsive's Third Person Controller, which was the most advanced system we have seen in the market. Even though its level of complexity was daunting, and the learning curve was considerably steeper than any of its competitors, its potential was amazing.

The process for my wife was similar, but the solution for her was not found solely in the Assetstore. The most crucial role she played for the game development was the cloth design, and we have seen in so many ways that using Blender (or any similar modeling software) to that capacity was very inefficient. Our research lead us to Marvelous Designer, which enabled her to design clothing in a much more intuitive and efficient manner. She started taking professional courses to learn how to design various types of clothing. We also started working hard to find a solution to get her designs into equipable clothing in Unity. We ended up deciding to use Morph3D for our character model system. Despite the steep learning curve and many challenges that come with the system, it presented a reasonable pipeline to get MD products into Unity, and allowed very versatile customization of the character models.

Getting Closer to the Dream Prototype

September through the new year was our high-octane work tempo indulging ourselves in the newly found freedom of the amazing tools that we never knew existed. As I devoted myself into deciphering the Third Person Controller in the 2.5D side-scroller realm, Nazli was producing every type of cloth that one could imagine, honing her skills to become capable of designing any fantasy genre clothing that the game would require. TPC was a very powerful framework, and even though I did not have to make much code modification, I spent three months testing and revising every aspect of the engine into reflecting the game mechanics I envisioned. I devoured the tutorials and documentation, and still ended up making more than 200 posts on the forums to adapt it to the special needs of our game.

When I returned to school from the winter break, I had a side-scrolling Strings prototype for my GPADS students to test out for me. The game did not solely have movement mechanics, but also AI through Behavior Designer and combat mechanics, with more than a dozen weapons and spells with distinct animations and stats. Despite the many glitches and rough edges, the prototype in front of me was unbelievably close to the basis of the game I envisioned. Thinking that this would not be possible in years only a few months ago, the progress we made was astonishing. I was very excited to see what the game would look like in context. So we started working towards building a small demo, that would not have anything to do with the story of the second "smaller" iteration of our "Pioneers into Darkness" scenario.

During the next few months I started testing, learning, and trying to master dozens of other assets from Dialogue System to UI, terrain texture shaders, special effects, world shaping tools, main menu systems, horse riding mechanics, camera filters, 3D foliage and trees, PBR castle and dungeon exterior/interior models, realistic water systems, world streamers... The game as it was by the beginning of May featured a playable mini scenario with the complexity level of many AAA games. Despite having dozens of bugs and glitches, it depicted a very believable picture of what we wanted to achieve with Strings.

Second Downsizing and a Refined Goal

With a very realistic game demo at our hands, the time commitment for making every single scene of the game enjoyable, well planned, and polished started shining crystal clear. Even our downsized "smaller" game with its semi-open world and branching 2.5D paths the player could choose from built at AAA quality... started to prove to be 5+ years of work for two part time game developers. However, with the realization of this fact rather than living with the fantasy of accomplishing an inhuman task also came a relief of knowing that our both feet are on the ground. We went back to the design table (actually rather a dry-erase white board...) to find another interesting time period in the history of Goa where we could initiate a story at the scale that we currently found realistic: a release date of Q1 of 2020.

We decided to feature our first game (or the third iteration thereof) at the year 75 after the passage through the portal, as a part of the events leading to the Great Okrosi War. The story will not feature the war itself, but rather the narrative of Freyr, the young son of the Jarl of Af Loven Keep at the northern shore of the Island of Goa. Instead of having an open world or semi-open world 2.5D side-scrolling game (which would be one of the most unique features of the initial game concept) we will adhere to a more linear physical journey, giving us space to focus more on the variation of character choices, both in dialogue and in the physical gameplay, and the resulting impact of those choices in the latter storyline.

A Visual Representation of Our Dream Game

In order to capture the essence of the gameplay and the world the game takes place in, we decided to produce a concept trailer and also feature it in the DreamHack Austin in June 1-3. We completed the production of the trailer within two weeks of very intense work tempo, and released it on May 25th. The trailer aims to give a bite-size taste of the beauty and horrors of the world of Goa, and the immense potential of your main character's impact on the world and on his own path.

On the brink of another summer journey of game development, we have accomplished infusing about 60% of the game mechanics we would like to use in the game, and we have a game-plan on how to bring the other 40% to life. Each and every month from now until the end of January 2020 is currently roughly planned. While the last pieces of functionalities are piecing together, we have shaped the big picture narrative of the third iteration of our story and about to begin writing the detailed narrative of the game.

The Road So Far...

Below is a summary of the features that are currently readily available in the game as of May 30 2018 (this is not a list of what percent of the game is complete, but just the mechanisms ready to complete the rest of the game):

- Locomotion (70%): Side-scrolling adapted traversal mechanics including jumping, ledge grabbing, hanging, pushing, vaulting, climbing over obstacles of various size, hiding/taking cover behind objects, rolling, swimming. Moreover, there is a fully functional side-scrolling mounting system with gallop and jump capabilities.

- Combat (70%): Unique animations, damage systems, and weapons for one and two handed versions of swords, maces, spears, axes, shields, bows, crossbows, slingshots, as well as magic systems of fire spray, fireball, and AOE spells

- AI (50%): Current hostile NPCs can patrol or look around at a location, detect you, drawn their weapon, and attack you based on the range of their weapons. They can run back when they are low on HP, or if they run out of arrows, they can run away to find more ammo. Occasionally, an NPC can fall on their knees and ask for mercy if they are low on HP. Friendly NPCs may roam around and initiate dialogues based on the current state of events.

- Dialogue (70%): NPCs may initiate dialogue or respond to you depending on the state of events. They may provide certain dialogue options based on your choices. They may ask you to complete certain types of quests (like getting your weapon or fighting a certain hostile NPC) and other physical options open up accordingly.

- Environments (50%): We have created a great variety of the environments within the latest game demo and the trailer scenes, using 3D foliage, advanced terrain shaders, PBR interior and exterior structures and models. Most of the work in this area will be using our vast inventory of assets to create the new landscapes, and also acquiring more assets for areas of unique requirements.

- UI(50%): Character healthbar, dialogue and quest windows, as well as fully functional main menu, in-game menu, save/load system is currently established. We will need more UI elements for character alignment and inventory systems.

- Inventory(10%): This is one of the systems where we still have major work to accomplish. We currently have most of the inventory related items and a very basic inventory system. We will establish systems to facilitate the interaction of the UI with the clothing and weapons. We do not intend to introduce any crafting system for this game.

- Progression (10%): Character progression in Strings will take place through character alignment, and the choices that lead to it, rather than a classical combat experience based system. We have a very rough test system in place for this, and this will be one of the greatest challenges of the project in conjunction with the integration into the dialogue and combat systems.

Not Possible Without You

Thank you for your interest and support of the Strings of Ambivalence. This is the game that I would love to sit down and play for an entire summer and then revisit so often to try a different path and a different approach. We have been very passionate and determined in the past two and a half years of our game development journey regardless of the great challenges and obstacles that may show up on any indie game developers' path. One by one we have been able to surmount those obstacles. Our resolution stems from our passion of video games and our ability to cherish the joy of every step of game development, and this is reflected in the love we give to our design and our attention to detail. I believe no other endeavor or profession can provide such a wildly wide variety of areas that have to be mastered to bring together one ultimate product of art.

We are looking forward to see the first game of Strings of Ambivalence come alive, and continue to share and receive feedback from you to make the game the best that it can be.

Oguz (Oz) Guvenc

May 30, 2018