Progress Update #1

Overview

Hello there, everyone! Development on When the Stones Spoke is still going well! 

I have been posting more frequent progress updates on Potato Interactive's Twitter account, and this dev log is a compilation of some of these posts and some of my thoughts and feelings about where the project is currently at and where it will be going. I'm still not comfortable reinstating a 'release date' because my previous two attempts greatly underestimated how big this game deserved to be.

The Inn

The Inn is a major part of the early game — Ellis visits his friend, Oscar, and also learns that a rail bridge leading to the next town collapsed earlier that day. A lot of the progress I've made on the game in the last month has been related to the 3D modeling and refining the visual style of the game's textures and lighting. I ended up going for a 'cartoony but semi-realistically lit' style that utilizes texturing techniques like normal maps and metallic/specular PBR texturing for a low-poly style. I'm not sure of many other games that do this style!

Character Portraits

I've also done a lot of work with character portraits and dialog scripting. When the Stones Spokes has a lot of subtle dialog cues, so I decided it was important to show the characters expressing emotions while they are speaking. This should allow me to better convey the subtext of what anyone is saying — which is needed for situations where characters are reacting to or Ellis is explaining the fact that he is a trans man, something (from my experience anyway)  that people have a lot of different reactions. A nice side-effect of having portraits is that they will aid players in associating characters and their names.

The Mountains

I also ended up giving myself a crash course in environment design and 3d map-making! The mountainous areas that appear in later in the game required me to push even harder on some of the lessons I learned while making the Mines to an outdoor area — mainly that measurements and planning are really important to save you time and that the 3d assets you make should facilitate a lot of different purposes For example, the screenshot above is using the same rock model for everything you see up there!

In Conclusion

I'm really excited to be working on this game, and even though it's taking a long time, I'm consistently learning new things about my development skills, and I can see that the extra time is ultimately going to lead to a seminal work of mine. That might sound a little hyperbolic, but I truly believe that it has so much to say and present that I'll be using lessons from it for the rest of my development career even in the likely event  that the game doesn't succeed financially.

See you next update, everyone!