There’s this story concept I’ve been sit­ting on for a while which at some point I decided would make a good point and click adven­ture. So last year I spent my final semester at RMIT work­ing on a demo for it, because I wanted a chance to build a game (of mod­er­ate scope) from scratch.

I knew this wasn’t going to be easy for my level of skill and exper­i­ence. I mean, my last game was a Pong clone with a silly little twist. But as the semester came to an end it became clear that I’ve grossly under­es­tim­ated the scale of this pro­ject — an exper­i­ence which, from what I’ve read, many developers share. Appar­ently it’s one of those things every­one laughs at when they look back, except nervously, because it can still happen.

So in the end what I sub­mit­ted was quite heav­ily edited and not entirely play­able. And by that I mean you can play from start to fin­ish, but there’s a high chance that some bug will break it and force you to restart. Nor­mally this would leave me pretty bummed out, but I was actu­ally sat­is­fied with the exper­i­ence. Obvi­ously I’m not gonna jump back onto the pro­ject straight away just to get my face kicked in again, not until I level up my skills at least, but I learned so much that I felt it was worth it. So although I’m not gonna post the final demo (that would just be silly), here’s a little trailer for it and some devel­op­ment mater­ial, plus a paint­ing to wrap it up. Oh and no, I doubt it’s com­ing in 2012.

Des­pite all that, I must men­tion that I received lots of great help, which I’m extra thank­ful for because I’ve been so used to work­ing alone. Those include my mentor Kate Caw­ley and fel­low lec­tur­ers Jeremy Parker and Matt Riley, for teach­ing me everything about everything. Sound designer Steven Har­ris, for man­aging to inter­pret my con­fus­ingly round­about descrip­tions won­der­fully. Fel­low anim­ator Kevin Chu, for sav­ing my ass. And musi­cian Michael War­ren of Hon­est People, for help­ing a total stranger and mak­ing awe­some music. If you enjoyed the short sample of his song April 22, 2009 in the trailer you should def­in­itely go check out his albums, which I’m a big fan of and still put on loop fre­quently, at honestpeople.bandcamp.com

And that’s pretty much what I cur­rently have, but I look for­ward to writ­ing more about the pro­ject soon. Until then.