As I mentioned in my previous devlog about shifting priorities, I am still going to develop a game, albeit of a smaller scope than an adventure in a life size and reasonably accurate recreation of an ancient city. That’s not a project that a single person can do in his spare time while hopefully working at another job for income while it progresses.
This year’s game project is code-named Jorrit (a name which makes a lot of sense if you have picked up my book covering my gamemaster’s conloang, Amoth). It was inspired mainly by two things. The first is love for multiple worlds stories, everything from the Myst games by Cyan, my editorial work on the tabletop roleplaying game Everway by Jonathan Tweet while I was at Rubicon Games, and Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber. Heck, even the Stargate franchise scratches that itch, albeit in a technological way.
The other inspiration was something I whipped up for a family member who was going through cancer treatment. This person loves the outdoors, but didn’t know if treatment would make getting outside difficult for whatever reason–energy, time, being attached to a machine, or whatever. I took a bunch of game asset sample scenes, added a first person player controller to each, and a menu. I called it “Walkabout.” At the click of a button, there were many different types of outdoor areas my relative could explore from the computer if that’s all that could be managed.
Together, these ideas informed Jorrit. Roughly speaking, it’s a very-light-fantasy environment exploration and walking simulator-style game, focusing more on answering “What is this place like? What can be discovered here?” kinds of questions rather than achieving quests or amassing wealth.
I’m working on ways it could have some pseudo-random elements to increase replayability, and I hope to figure out a way that this can work with customized environments that might work like adding mods, or dropping some sort of environment files into a special folder. I’m still not quite sure how that will work exactly, but that’s the “development” part of game development.
Anyway, that’s the idea. The images here are just some blank environments I slapped together to test the first mechanics of movement, transitioning from one ‘world’ to the next, and so forth.
I’ll post more as it, well, develops!