After Journey's End: Gay Serendipity - Devlog 013

With the release of HITM3, there has been a few places, that trough questions, lead me to think about what I've been doing. One of these occasions was being part of the podcast Kritiqal Care by Nathalie. It's titled "Xiri's low-poly empanadas and gay serendipity". I had to look for the meaning of serendipity as it was a word I haven't heard before. It means an unplanned fortunate discovery, finding something valuable that you were not looking for. HITME, a game about a boy looking for someone to beat him but instead finding some love, couldn't have found a more concrete word to describe itself. Kritiqal's discord has an anime church, a book/cinema club and even weekly meetings in Street Fighter: 3rd Strike, so if you're into discord, this one seems really fun to be a part of.

There's this word, Postmortem, that englobes a writing, reflection you do after the release of your game. I don't want to kill my game to talk about it, it maybe useful to kill your past as Suda51 would say to move forward but please let my game live in peace. Melos Han-Tani, thoughtfully, found a more fitting words for this post-release writings, After Journey's End. Recently he released a collection of writings featuring the game design from many different independent developers. I'm participating in the Volume 2 with HITM3 talking about Thinking, Filming & Editing a Cutscene and how video editing is similar to my game design. Editing is about all what you have in front of you and how by listening to it, you may find it's place. I'm not that well versed in Unity or Blender, the two programs used to make HITM3, so it's always been about survival with the tools I have and some serendipity. 

The only ideas I had while developing HITM3 were two, one was the vague thought that I wanted to see how our HITME family were taking care of each other now after 4-5 years of meeting. The other was that this time around, the story would be told trough the soundtrack of the musicians I knew living in Santiago de Chile . Any other decision I felt would be me, trying to retro actively fit some reasoning to something that most likely I stumbled myself into.  

One thing I was really adamant though, was how to portray who was talking in HITM3. I didn't want to have a portrait along the dialogue to identify who was the speaker. I didn't want to deal with how this portrait would relate to the general low poly graphics of the game. This duality can be tricky and finding the balance, difficult.  If the portrait is really different from the general graphics, it can clash with the world but if it's too similar, why would you want to repeat the same information two times on the screen?  Personally, I like how Final Fantasy VIII handles this by placing the text boxes near the person who's talking (without portrait) and having that person be animated.  In HITM3, I quite liked how the text is at the bottom, Renpy-style, like in a visual novel. Animating each other sentence would have been a big endeavour so I had to think another way from Final Fantasy VIII. First I tried to display the character talking by putting an onomatopoeia mark on them. The mark was easy to miss in some scenes, too depending on the angle of it, also, there wasn't any other onomatopoeia in the game. Next, I tried what would end being the final decision, highlight the character who's talking by having a pink outline around them. There's a free asset in the unity store that creates the outline for you and you only need to turn it on and off depending who's talking. Easy and I think it conveyed the speaker pretty directly without being too intrusive. 

The latest Volumen of After Journey's End is out now, and if you are interested in game design, I would strongly recommend to check both of the volumes that are now available. They feature the most exciting developers, ones that give me hope in gaming and reading about their choices trough their words is a real big luxury.

This next September, between the 27 - 29th,  I'll be attending as a participant to my first video game fair in Barcelona, the IndieDevDay. Any advice of what I should expect? I don't really known much but let's hope for some serendipity.

Hope your summer or winter has treated you well. 

Big hugs, 

Xiri