It’s the end of my first month of working on Beyond the Chiron Gate, which is when I said I’d take a step back from it, think about the big picture, and maybe take a short break. Here’s where I am at the moment:
So far I’ve built code for several of the core systems, but the way they’re plugged into one another is a buggy mess that could only very generously be called a game.
The structure of the user interface is in place, complete with multiple views the player can tab between. There’s a system for generating random crew members, and a crew select screen that lets you pick out four of them to crew your ship. There’s another select screen for choosing who out of your crew goes on landing parties. There’s a dialogue system where the game automatically puts crew members’ speech in boxes and colours them according to who is speaking, and a stat check system where tests can pass or fail based on crew members’ stats. The game generates a universe consisting of several star systems with randomly-generated planets. You can fly between planets in a single system, and doing so causes time to pass and supplies to deplete. You can send landing parties to planets to make scans or collect samples, and these samples go in your ship’s cargo hold and are worth different amounts of data. (Data currently doesn’t do anything, but eventually it’ll be the game’s way of keeping score and the currency with which you upgrade your ship.) There’s a system for triggering random events when travelling between planets and when sending landing parties.
I’m getting more practised at the kind of coding I’m doing for this game. Unlike my previous games, which were written almost entirely in SugarCube macros with very small amounts of JavaScript when I wanted an effect SugarCube couldn’t easily do, for BtCG I’m writing as much of the behind-the-scenes code as I can in JavaScript and only using SugarCube for code that’s got to display text to the player. This is going to be easier to work with for complex code, and more efficient when it’s executed.
Perhaps most importantly, while I’ve been working on the prototype I’ve also been working on the design document, and I’ve got a much clearer idea of how the game is going to work then I had when I started.
As for February, I’m going to take a short break from BtCG in order to get my thoughts in order, and then come back to it with a better plan. During that time I’m going to write a game for the Movie Game Jam being run on itch.io, which is about writing a game inspired by a movie scene of your choice. I’ve never done a game jam before, and they’ve never really appealed to me, but as soon as I saw this one I had an idea for a scene I could use, so I’m going to attempt it. I’m going to try to write a game based on one of my favourite movie scenes, the scene from Contact in which Ellie first hears the signal. You’ll be monitoring an array of radio telescopes when you hear a signal, and you’ve suddenly got to align all the dishes in order to get as much of the signal as you can before it stops. My working title for the game is The Signal, although I’ll change that if I think of a better one.
The game jam runs from tomorrow to February 12, so that’s when I’ll be releasing the game if I succeed in making it at all. After that I’ll be getting back to Beyond the Chiron Gate.