0.8 Retrospective and Quest Poll

0.8 was always intended to be a small release.

Instead, it ended up being the largest one I've issued to date. The main purpose of the release was to introduce 2 new characters and add a couple of features to the game - transmogrification and character view. When it was finally complete, I'd introduced one of the new characters and none of the features! Despite that, I'd probably call 0.8 my favorite release so far. I don't love everything about it, but I like mostly all of it, and there are some parts I'm really fond of.

The reason everything else took a back seat is that the Bunny quests ended up becoming the main focus of the release. Originally, I'd intended them to be quasi-filler: they were supposed to be fetch or FedEx-type quests related to the Bunnies in some way. After doing some longer-term thinking about the plot, though, I decided the Bunnies were going to assume a more prominent role in it overall. I thus wanted to make the quests a bit longer, more interesting, and memorable. I settled on the idea of making each Bunny quest a little vignette, a small side story that was (hopefully!) interesting in its own right.

The Quests

Val's quest was the last one I worked on (aside from Ana's), and it was by far my favorite. Her quest also took the longest time to develop - the only one that came close was Shiri's quest, and that's only because of the plugin work it required. Rose's flashbacks took forever to work out to my satisfaction, and I actually made a few extra segments that I cut in the interest of brevity. And, of course, there was tons of writing. But I think it was worth it; I think even the gameplay was interesting. During the course of that quest, the player had a little mystery to solve, with all sorts of false leads, people and places to check out, a number of different end states depending on what you did, and a climactic conclusion! The whole quest got me thinking about the possibilities of 'mystery solving' as a mode of gameplay. I don't know for sure if I'll use it again in the future, but it does seem to play to my strengths as a developer. I'll definitely keep in mind the lessons I learned from that experience.

Cory's quest also took a while to develop, and it didn't turn out exactly like I wanted. I'd wanted it to be a little bittersweet, a bit melancholy but without crossing the line into being a total downer. I think I achieved that to some extent, but I didn't find it as emotionally compelling as I'd wanted. I still liked it, I just didn't like it as much as I'd hoped I would.

I had fun with Jovi's quest, mostly because of the whole 'sheep interrogation' bit (you did talk to the sheep when you were looking for clues, didn't you?) It was a bit silly, but I thought it was fun. Ren's quest was one of the earlier ones I made, and it stayed closest to the 'FedEx quest' idea. I liked it overall, even if I did think a few parts were too long.

I was also mostly pleased with Shiri's quest. The biggest disappointment I had about it was that I'd spent most of the non-writing time making the actual portal mechanic rather than designing the level. I think I could have done a lot more interesting things with portals, but I decided to move on to the next quest rather than spend more time coming up with new level design ideas. I guess I was also thinking that, while basic, the levels I made served as an adequate introduction to the portal mechanic. I can always get more creative in future portal levels  - just in case it might come up again ;) 

Programming

I learned some lessons in programming, too. The first was that you should build systems to address the needs you have rather than needs you think you might have in the future. If you're of a slightly abstract bent - and if you're programming, you probably are - there's a great temptation to try to solve a given problem in a very general way. By doing so, you didn't just solve a single problem, but a whole class of problems you might encounter in the future. The problem with this approach is that you don't actually know what you'll need in the future, and what you need at that time might be very different than what you think you'll need now. I'm not the first to learn this lesson. Programmers refer to this as YAGNI - or You Ain't Gonna Need It - and it's a lesson I should have heeded before I over-engineered my portal mechanic. I now understand that if I really wanted to implement it in a general way - and I'll have to do so eventually - I should have done it differently. I should have done it more in line with the principles of object-oriented programming (OOP), which are something else I learned about during this release.

The hide and seek minigame in Cory's quest is repeatable, and as I was writing the code for it, it occurred to me that it would be convenient if, under the hood, each instance of the game were a separate object. Each one could carry around its own variables, contain any functions/methods I needed to call during the course of the game, etc. That way, what happened in one game wouldn't affect the others; when one was done, I could just chuck it and start a new one. This may seem obvious to those of you who do a lot of programming in something like Java, which forces you to code in this sort of way, but it isn't how I've coded TPE up to this point. It's mostly been a series of functions stuck together with duct tape and RPGM events. I thought I was quite clever for figuring this out until I realized it's just one of the pillars of OOP. Still, it's better to learn late than never! To be clear, it isn't always practical to implement things this way in RMMV; the engine handles a lot of things that are difficult to do well on your own (like getting timing for certain things down), so there may still be a 'duct tape' quality to what I create in the future, but I think my code will have better architecture going forward (as opposed to the 'no architecture' most of it currently has.)

A Look Ahead

Finally, I while developing 0.8, it became clear to me that The Proteus Effect has a pretty fundamental quirk from a game design perspective. I originally started thinking about it as a 'problem' because it created a lot of problems for me in this development cycle, but I've since come to see it as a bit of an opportunity as well. This really deserves its own post, though, so keep an eye out for it! My next post, which I plan to have out later this weekend, will be all about 0.9.

And now that you know what I think, what do you think?

Poll question: what was your favorite quest in 0.8?

 Thank you for the support, and please let me know your thoughts in the comments!