Memories is Done!!!!

My photo altered with BeFunky. 🙂

Of Pieces and Memories (the official name of the game I’ve been referring to as Memories) is now available on itch.io!

I’ve been playtesting it all week.  By about Thursday I noticed that I was getting really fiddly with the game (I’d make a change, play through one more time, then change it back).  That was the point that I knew I was pretty much done, that this game is the best I can make it right now.  Since most of the playtesting this week was devoted solely to checking all the dialogue options, I had a little more playtesting to do after I reached that point, but by Friday I was done.

From there, I had the unexpected problem of developing a page for the game on itch.io.  I’ve never released a game on the platform before, and so hadn’t really thought about this part of the release.  The biggest problem was that the page needed a cover picture and I had no idea what to use.  I considered using the title page of the game, but that has art I got from the RPG Maker store (which I wasn’t sure if I could use as a cover picture).  In the end, I decided to use one of my photos, which I altered using BeFunky to make it a bit more cartoonish-looking (and to add the game’s title).  A bunch of purple flowers play a role in the game, so I thought this photo was fitting. 🙂

Now that it’s done, I’m going to take the weekend off to celebrate (I’m opening a special wine I’ve been saving).  I also won’t be posting a #WriteTuesday post this week; instead I’m going to write a postmortem for Of Pieces of Memories, which will look at what went right and what went wrong as I developed the game. 🙂

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#WriteTuesday – Playtesting!

I’m almost done Memories!

After doing my best to find voices for my characters (Wulfric and a few others are still giving me some trouble, but I *hope* I’ve done well enough with them), I started doing some final playtesting before I plan on releasing the game on itch.io. I thought the playtesting would just be a few playthroughs to mainly check all the dialogue as a complete whole (thanks to implementing different dialogue choices within the game, it does mean I’ll have to do at least 4 different playthroughs for dialogue alone).  But I ended up finding quite a few little bugs, as well as a few bigger ones, that need to be fixed.  So I’ve been making my way through all of that (with a break to finish reading Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder trilogy).  Playtesting will be continuing this week (along with some more editing work by the looks of things).

Oh, I’m also really excited to finally have a proper name for Memories!  I think I’m going to call it Of Pieces and Memories.  When I gave it to my friend to try, I’d tentatively called it Hearts and Memories, but that didn’t sound right to me, even though it is, at it’s very essence, what the game is about.  I considered several lines of dialogue as possible titles (like “Just trust your heart,” which resonates with me every time I read it during a playthrough), but nothing seemed right.  Then over the weekend, I realized that a lot of the dialogue revolves around pieces of hearts, which is how I decided on the title.  I ran it by my friend, too, and he approved as well. 🙂

How about you? How’s everything going? Stay safe! 🙂

#WriteTuesday – Memories Feedback Acquired!

My friend playtested Memories over the weekend!  Overall he liked it (he called it a “nice, heartful story”). 🙂  He found a few mechanical things I needed to fix, like how locked doors would open, display the text “the door is locked” then close (he helped me fix that!) and how the ending was a bit weird because after the credits it said “Game Over;” together we figured out that you could send the game back to the Title instead of using the Game Over command, so I’ve implemented that instead.

He also said he really liked how you get more and more dialogue options with NPCs as you unlock more emotions, so I’m super glad I got some of that implemented before he playtested!

So since then, I’ve been working on implementing more of those dialogue choices.  I think I’ve got pretty much everything in place now (there are still a few places where there isn’t a dialogue choice, but I don’t really think they’re needed).

Over the weekend I also noticed a problem with my naming scheme for all the characters.  Here are their names again:

When I designed this, I tried to have people who were related to each other have names with the same starting letter.  I thought I did a good job of this, but I just noticed that the wizard name (Edric) starts with an E, just like my mother daughter combo of Eireen and Ena! 😦  Unfortunately, these names are kind of ingrained in my head now; I took a look last night and couldn’t find anything else that worked for any of them.  So in the end I decided to leave them as is.  Whoops!

So now that the dialogue choices are all in place, I need to actually go back and make sure the dialogue works for each character (and that each character actually has their own voice).  Once that’s done, I think Memories just needs a better name then it’s pretty much finished! 😲

So how’s your week been?  🙂