EOA1A2 Devlog #1 - Prototypes and false starts (Patreon)

Hey gang, how are we feeling? I kind of want to write a dev retrospective for END OF ACT 1 ACT 2, just because I think it'd be interesting. So let's start with some of the earliest stuff, some false starts and prototype ideas that didn't make it very far.

First off is THE PIXEL ART ERA.

There's not a lot to cover here. The first GIF I ever took of what would become EOA1A2 was in pixel art. You can see it here.

There's a lot of stuff already in place here - pieces like the couch, the fridge which bears the same exchange between Rose and her mom, lovingly recreated for modern audiences. This version of the game would have played a lot more like Openbound, that is to say: much worse. Having physics-driven controls would have made me an insane person at the time. Not that the solution I had picked up was *better* - it is, in fact, deeply flawed. But it also very vaguely resembles the same way that walkarounds like Act 4 and YOU THERE. BOY. worked.

Part of the reason I went with sprite mode in the end was the change to the mouse-driven control scheme, with different levels of zoom. Pixel art looks like shit if you're resizing it improperly, and it bothers me more than it should. I literally will not play Stardew Valley because of this. I think having a one-handed control scheme is actually pretty good for accessibility, too. It kind of harkens back to those old King's Quest games, which you know are a huge influence on Homestuck.

(And then I broke that input scheme with the DDR inputs. C'est la vie.)

This was one of the first things I made with Godot. The first published thing would be Fallstar, a few weeks later. Jane's got a different outfit here too. She's going through a darkness arc here. I still really like this color choice for her, but the lighter shirt won out in the end.

Speaking of showing off some of the flop ideas, here's some more of the pixel art I made before I decided against it.

And uh, this, I guess.

The second doomed idea was, once I had decided on a better input scheme and graphical style, how I was going to handle the game's decisions. I had played a little bit of NORCO recently, and have been seeing screenshots of Disco Elysium, a game I have seeded 50:1 but not played, and I considered this.

This is where the EOA1A2 project files finally solidify - you could go through the files of the game and still find the remnants of this design idea in the code if you wanted to.

This kind of vertical panel game log is something I had done for a game a long time ago, in another lifetime... and I really adore it. I think game logs like this are really good for flavor and context, it's basically just a place you can jam text into for free.

Problems arose when it came to decide which went into the side panel and which got its own screen. There's tests for entire conversations happening in that panel, but the opportunity to do capital-T Talksprites was too tempting, and then it just kind of didn't get used for anything other than incidental dialogue, and I went with something much more traditional here.

It's something I'm still kind of thinking about, vis a vis how I would make it work. Something to try, try again. There will likely not be more walkarounds on this scale until the very end of the comic, but I would like to continue making these kinds of games. Maybe it'll pop up in a future game panel, in a context more suited for it. That's not me hinting at anything in the future, I genuinely don't know if it will.

Up next is. Minute-to-minute design, maybe? There's some fun stuff going on there I'd like to get into. If there's something in specific *you'd* like to see, let me know, I'd love to talk about it here.