Development
Aevee here—we’ve been pretty quiet recently on account of having to make a video game, but we’re entering the final phases of development and so we wanted to talk a little bit about both the setting, characters, and mechanics of Heaven Will Be Mine, and how we are making the game!
If not for spoiling everything, it would be kind of fun to a devblog about the game’s script, but those changes are too subtle to document:
*Came up with a mecha nomenclature based on planetary geography
*Made some adjustments to Saturn’s brattiness/likability ratios
*Added some language to clarify the metaphorical implications of a certain worldbuilding device
I wrote this up as a joke but these were really things, and this is actually great, and maybe I will publicly write something someday. Well, anyways, I’m not going to do this, so I am going to talk about the other kind of writing I am doing for this game, which is working in the markup language Ink. It’s not coding, but it’s hard, so I consider it to be coding, emotionally.
For We Know The Devil, I just sort of told Pillow Fight what I wanted to happen, and we figured it out together. It was a pretty simple mechanic, but this game is bigger and more complicated, and I wanted to be able to have a grip on how it worked as I was writing it. In the same way that you can have a wonderful idea that doesn’t sound any good on the page, the game’s logic feels kind of like a jumble until I can see it actually work. It also frees up the rest of the team to do more important things, and allows me to play more freely with the logic as I go.
Honestly, it’s kind of a nice break sometimes, because unlike writing, which has vague standards of quality, this stuff either does what I tell it or it doesn’t, so I either feel like a complete genius or an utter idiot, which has a kind of relaxing definitiveness to it. Inkle, the editor for Ink, also lets you see an html version of the script and choices, which lets me see what the logic actually does. This is frequently what I actually want it to do, and then I can decide if it was a good idea or not from there.
Heaven Will Be Mine is not that much more complicated, but it turns out: not much more complicated is still a lot complicated. It’s a really different experience to have control over the logic while I’m working on it—this is not news to probably most designers but as I am still pretty new to development, it’s exciting to me!
