This game fills me with so many feelings now while I am going through it. I really put my heart and soul into it and while it’s not a game I would want to publish I am incredibly proud of Aurora Mists and the work I put into it.
Production:
This being a solo project, I set my own timeline which wasn’t an issue for me at all. Working with my mentor and game design professor Kel Bachus, I was able to complete milestones and progress without too many hiccups.
I did end up falling to one of the pitfalls of new game developers and that was scope. I spent lots of time coming up with systems, documenting and perfecting things that never went into my game because I am not a programmer by trade and so I don’t have the speed to get the features into my game that made it worth my while. Learning to rescope was something that quickly came to me and I cut extraneous ideas and content without mercy. Quoting a GDC lecture I once saw on solving game design paradoxes, “Kill your children.” After finding myself completely over scoped on this project I’ve found myself able to reasonably predict what kinds of content and features will cause trouble and what can be cut. Since then, my projects stay in a scope that makes sense. I’ll always push my scope to the outer boundary of what I can do because I think pushing myself is the best way to practice getting faster at my game but I won’t hesitate to readjust if I see myself, or anyone else, struggling.
The relationship system was cut very early on.
Documentation is probably one of my strong suits, although I have miles and miles to go before I’d say they are better or even as good as current industry designers, I do know how to produce documents quickly with details oriented towards the intended audience. Art documents displaying the aesthetic and notable features, feature and mechanic documents that attempt to display the logic that my programmers can translate into code, level design documents for myself and for the entire team, and documents to show as pitches to investors .
I believe I could still be better at organization for my documents. Organization needs improvement in both visual structure and informational organization.
Some of the features I’m really proud of include a branching dialogue system and an inventory system that I wrote from scratch with the help of my friend Harry Chen. Both of which are assets that I’ve used in later projects.
For the dialogue system I used an array coordinate system that would load the dialogue into the text boxes through a step function before displaying it as the user progressed.
My biggest takeaways from this project were definitely getting used to scope on solo projects and being able to work on something completely my own. It is incredibly to be able to step into a world that is uniquely yours.
Aurora Mists was made in Gamemaker Studio 2 and is my intellectual property.