Devlog: week 6
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Hi everyone :D
This week was pretty quiet — no screenshots, animations, or 3D work, because I was feeling a bit under the weather. Nothing serious, but I temporarily lacked energy — both physical and mental :D
So instead of active development, I spent a lot of time thinking, tinkering with the script, and reading stuff about game marketing.
So instead of active development, I spent a lot of time thinking, tinkering with the script, and reading stuff about game marketing.
Here’s what I can say so far:
- Promoting games is hard (and scary)
- Promoting adventure games is even harder
- But adventure games do have their own audience, and it’s not nearly as small as I thought
Besides that, I looked into what people like in adventure games. Ideally, I’ll do my own research on this later, but from a first glance at why people play this genre:
- Beautiful visuals (super important, especially nowadays)
- A strong, interesting story, well-developed dialogues and setting
- Balanced puzzles, so it’s neither too obvious nor frustratingly hard
One Reddit user described it in that order, but judging by Steam reviews of various adventure games, and my own experience as a fan, it’s pretty accurate. When you watch a trailer, the visuals grab you first. Then, if the trailer is good, the story piques your interest.
When you actually start playing, first you're hit by visuals. Then you gradually get immersed in what’s happening, and the puzzles either complement/enhance it… or distract, if they’re poorly designed.
After finishing the game, the story becomes the main thing - the feeling it leaves you with - while visuals and puzzles leave an aftertaste that adds to the overall impression of the story.
Here I feel a bit nervous again, because while I’m confident in visuals, the story is a new, unexplored path for me, and it seems even trickier than puzzles, which I at least have a recipe for. I think :D
At the same time, I’m thinking about story variability:
- I want to make a few different endings (not too many, like 3–4)
- I want the game itself to be playable in multiple ways — like in Still Life or Bad Dream
That means I’ll need to do more than just write a script and scatter puzzles across locations. I’ll need a diagram (two?) that maps all dialogue branches, possible outcomes, and different routes through the game.
For now, I’m just writing the script, and I feel like the best approach is to first fully write one path (the “canon” path, basically), and then layer the branches on top of it.
That’s what I was thinking this week :D
See you next time~
devlog
dreamwalker
