Beyond the Western Deep

Wow, this has been just an incredible inaugural Wintersdawn celebration! We knew that it was going to be unlike anything we’d done going into it, but the response to Wintersdawn in the Deep has been beyond anything we expected. A heartfelt thank you to every one of you who downloaded the game and experienced Quinlan and Dakkan’s very first interactive adventure!

I say first because the response was definitely good enough for us to consider further development of the Wintersdawn in the Deep concept. We’re still in the very early stages of discussing what that might look like and how it might come to pass, but we’re all very excited by the positive reception Wintersdawn got.

THE MAKING OF!

Right, so! Let’s dive into the main attraction this week: the making of this short Wintersdawn-themed adventure.

Step 1: The Germ

The germ of this project began several months ago with a personal project I was tentatively calling “A Short Game.” I was messing around in the Unity game engine in my favorite Unity tool (Adventure Creator) and just throwing random pixel-art assets I’d found together into a short little story. It was fun, but after a solid weekend into it, I thought back to some Western Deep-themed pixel art that Neil Schultz (aka Holt5) had shared with us on our Discord.

I began to think… what if we commissioned Neil to actually make us some game assets? I could whip up a short Western Deep game and we could probably even time it out so we announced it right around the holidays. Fortunately for us, Neil was interested. So, I set to work!

Step 2: Planning

This step tends to be where most video game development projects go off the rails. Planning how much time you need to create assets for a game is one thing–but once you start building out the game itself, even with a tool that handles the trickiest bits for you, there are a thousand things that can go wrong, bugs that crop up, testing that needs to be done, and even after you plan things to the Nth degree, it’s always something you didn’t plan for that gets you in the end.

Fortunately I have some experience developing adventure games, having spent a few years working on the Adera series for Hitpoint and Microsoft back in the early 2010’s. Also, I mean, I grew up on these things. Quest for Glory, Full Throttle, The Dig, Space Quest, all these things were hugely formative to how I go about my work today.

So, if you’re scoping out an adventure game, the first thing you do is write out the story outline. Then you break that outline down into discrete chunks. Then you break all that down into every possible thing that you need to see in the game. Animations, backgrounds, prop artwork, menus, buttons, inventory items, everything.

As you might be able to discern from the above lists if you’ve played the game, some of these things ended up getting tweaked a little bit. Some things were added, like the Patrol Orders to help give players some more context about Quinlan’s predicament. We’d planned for just one “Dakkan talks” animation before realizing he actually needed variations for all four of his pose states (sitting, starting the fire, standing, and toasting).

Fortunately, the scope was small enough where Neil and I could pivot to include these things.

We also avoided simple traps that these sorts of games can fall into that blow out the scope unnecessarily. Having animations for running would be nice… but the game is short enough and the scenes are small enough where we don’t need all those extra animations. VGA adventure games often had omnidirectional character movement sprites to show them walking at an angle, but did we really need to add all those extra animations? Probably not.

If you want to make a game from start to finish in under 3 months, KEEP SCOPE IN CHECK!

Step 3: The Artwork

Neil really went above and beyond the call of duty on Wintersdawn. I distinctly remember that the very same day we finalized our plan to contract Neil, I had first-pass artwork waiting for me to evaluate.

The first order of business was coming up with a style for the characters that would be easy to animate for. Neil presented a first pass layout of Scene 1 along with three different Quinlans of varying pixel densities.

We ended up with something in between the middle and right Quinlans, made him a little taller and thinner to reflect his comic proportions, increased the size of his eyes so he could emote a little more, and made sure to change his outfit out of his “Captain of the Royal Guard” threads back to his old scouting uniform. Though you’ll notice we added a slight hem down the middle where his in-comic clothes are solid green. No mystery here: it looks better if it’s not a solid color running across his entire body!

Neil would read over my design documentation outlining the basic gist of the scene’s requirements, then sketch up a very simple doodle of the layout:

These doodles would then go through a simple iteration process where we talked about flow through the scene, making sure there were interesting things to break them up (like adding a giant tree you can walk behind), and various minor tweaks like moving the broken down wagon so it’s farther away from the muddy patch near the scene entrance.

There were a few challenges we ran into on the art side course, mostly dealing with the importing of assets into Unity. One issue we ran into a few times, particularly with more complex animations, was Unity not being able to break the sprite plates down to layer them evenly.

For example, this sprite sheet represents Quinlan’s “Idle Right” animation. Unity breaks each image out into its own frame, then you can set the animation speed and whatnot. Unfortunately, with this and a few other animations, Unity was getting confused about where one image ended and another began, resulting in minor hiccups in the animation that made Quinlan jitter around like he’d had a few too many cups of coffee!

Ultimately though, we were able to break everything out… except for one single animation that I just didn’t get around to fixing where Quinlan teleports a couple pixels away from his anchor point. It’s not too bad, though–I even used it in the trailer and nobody’s mentioned anything untoward yet. I feel like I got away with an animation crime :)

Step 4: The Implementation

I have a confession to make: I’ve been working in the video game industry as a designer and writer for over 13 years, but I have never made an entire game from beginning to end myself. Not even a little pet project. Lots of demos and false starts, but never anything I’d consider “a game.” Until Wintersdawn.

Now, that’s not to say I was unprepared for the amount of work ahead of me. I’d scoped everything out and had a pretty solid understanding of Adventure Creator through years of simple demos–some of which I’ve even shared on this website in past years!

When you’re working in Unity with the Adventure Creator plugin, this is what the game looks like. To the untrained eye, it might even look like a bunch of intimidating gibberish, but it’s actually somewhat elegant in its simplicity! The white line around the scene? That’s the NavMesh, the thing that tells the game Quinlan can walk somewhere when you click there. The red box to the right? That’s a trigger that tells the game it’s time to go to the next scene. The speaker icons? Sound effects, nothing more!

What about all those things in the list to the left? That looks intimidating. That’s basically a hierarchical list of every object that’s present in the “scene.” It’s not just stuff you see, but potential things too. So, every possible conversation you can have with Dakkan is represented here as a line item. Click on it, and you’ll be taken to an editor that lets you customize the dialogue.

These manifest in the tool mostly as large flowcharts that Adventure Creator colloquially refers to as “Action Lists,” but visual scripting tools like this are used for all sorts of things nowadays, from Mass Effect‘s dialogue trees to scripting how complex AI behaviors work!

The example above is the Action List I run when you use the Patrol Blade item on Dakkan. You can see the very first thing I’m doing is checking against a variable to see if you’ve shown him the sword before. Because the game was planned to be short, I wanted to make sure Dakkan had a wide variety of responses where I could get them, so he usually has a response for when you show him something once vs subsequent times. In the case of something like the Spice Box and Iron Key, he’ll even remember what you showed him first and if you show him the other item, he can recommend using the key on the box. He’ll also get appropriately aggravated if you keep asking him about it after he’s given you the answer!

That’s fairly simple stuff behind the scenes: I create a new local variable (local because it can only happen in this one scene) that starts as “False” but after you show him the object the first time, is set to “True.” Now I can fork a new conversation off that check to have Dakkan say something new the second time you show him stuff.

Things I need to get better at: managing my Action Lists. They, um… they got a little out of control in parts. This is just a snippet of the Action List that runs whenever you enter this scene:

This thing got out of control pretty quickly because there were a couple of different layouts for the scene depending on what you’ve done previously. Did you see the treewalker? Okay, when you enter this scene, it will check to see if you did, then Dakkan will switch his idle animation so now he’s trying to start the fire. Is the fire already going? Okay, cancel that, and make sure the “fire” animation and sound effect are turned on! Did you deal with the treewalker? Okay, add the soup pot and steam animation, along with the trigger that kicks off the final conversation!

SO

MANY

THINGS!

This is barely scratching the surface of course. There are even some things I haven’t been able to solve for yet, like how I can get a Mac build up and running, but the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are weirdly corrupted.

I dunno. Macs are weird.

Step 5: The Audio

For the music and sound effects, we turned to two reliable collaborators: Nolan Markey and Lucas Fehring.

Nolan is the one who helped give Beyond the Western Deep its true voice, teasing out themes for both Kickstarter campaigns that captured the essence of the world and characters. For Wintersdawn, Nolan produced a beautiful iteration of what we’re calling the “main theme” of Beyond the Western Deep, managing to swing us a few minutes with the same orchestra we used for the second Kickstarter, as well as some woodwinds by lauded soloist Kristin Naigus, whose unmistakable mastery of all manner of woodwind instrument you might remember from games like Ori and the Will of Wisps.

Nolan also crafted an ambient exploration track for us, which we thought captured both the fantasy and the menace of a great big forest like the Western Deep. It’s a little peaceful, a little strange, but all Western Deep.

For the audio, we knew that Lucas was a perfect fit right from the get-go. He did the sound effects work on our Kickstarter animation, adding a heft to it that we didn’t even realize we were missing until we saw it all in action.

Lucas absolutely blew us away on this one. We made a simple list of things we thought we’d need audio for, and Lucas just kept delivering more and more and more stuff, including a huge suite of footstep sounds that we didn’t have implemented until just two weeks before we launched the game, because I didn’t think we’d need footsteps! Because I’m dumb sometimes!

It also fell to Lucas to create one of our signature sounds: the TREEWALKER. What does a treewalker sound like? Well, we conferred with Lucas and landed on something somewhere between The Predator’s memorable click and a mole cricket’s chirp–all paired up alongside a bit of sound effects magic. Now our treewalker has a sound, and it’s frankly terrifying.

Step 6: The Launch

We knew that we wanted to offer this to our fans for free, as a gift–but we also wanted folks to be able to chip in money if they wanted (these games DO cost money to make after all). That meant Steam was out of the question, since you can either set a game to be Free or to cost a set amount.

Itch.io, however, allows you to select a “pay what you want” option that gives players the ability to chip in donations if they want, or just download the game for free. It was a perfect fit for a small indie game like ours, and we’re grateful to Itch.io for existing so we could release the game this way!

And of course, Jerome Jacinto’s absolutely sumptuous cover art helped us give the game a warm face that evoked the classic Sierra/LucasArts adventure game boxes of old. It made me positively giddy to see this come together.

Step 7: The Future

This Wintersdawn was a huge experiment for us, and we’re beyond elated to see so many readers enjoying our gift to you all. Remember, if you have a Windows PC, you can play the game right now by heading to this link and downloading the installer: https://westerndeep.itch.io/wintersdawn

For now, I will wish you all a happy Wintersdawn, and look forward to the next one in less than a year’s time.

Next week, it’s back to our regularly scheduled program, with Western Deep: Chapter 4 continuing right where we left off!

Are you interested in game development?

If you saw all this stuff and thought “Hey, that doesn’t sound too bad!” then I highly encourage you to check out the Unity game engine for yourself. The personal edition is absolutely free, and there are official tutorial videos that have you getting your very own tiny games up and running within a matter of hours. It’s crazy!

To download Unity, check out this link: https://unity.com/

I used a special plug-in for Unity called Adventure Creator, which is basically a tool set that sits on top of Unity and makes it very easy to organize and build adventure games like Wintersdawn in the Deep. The video tutorials by its creator are top-notch and got me comfortable enough with the tool to start making games with it. It’s not free (at $80 USD for a license, it’s definitely not an impulse buy for most of us) but I highly recommend looking into it if you’re interested in building adventure games in Unity. To check out Adventure Creator, follow this link here: https://adventurecreator.org/

Other resources for game development that are free but have different feature sets:

GameMaker: https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker An entirely visual, drag-and-drop game development interface that was used to build games like Undertale.

Adventure Game Studio: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ A pretty robust toolkit for making classic point-and-click adventure games. I would have learned how this works if I hadn’t spent so much time learning Adventure Maker’s suite!

There’s a lot of great stuff out there, for sure. When I was growing up, if you wanted to make a video game at home, you needed to learn how to code it all from scratch. Now there are all sorts of wonderful free tools available to help you turn your ideas into reality. Just remember to start small, learn the basics, and let your projects grow with your skill and experience.

See you next week!