February 28
Articles
I know, I know, I said regularly but look at the size of that first post! Surely, that should have covered a healthy three posts. More or less. Or maybe not. Anyway…
My first post raised a few questions. First of all, yes, you get to visit the Victorian house in three different stages. Immediately, some people seemed to have thought this meant that time travel (or something else) is involved. Well no, I hope I’m not dissapointing anybody but this only means the house can be explored in three different settings of weather/daytime. My bad for using the word “stage”. Those three settings are: normal daylight, daylight with rain and night. At first we were going to actually render the whole house three times with a few variations, but we quickly realized that was out of the question. So what we decided to do is alter the same rendered version of the house via real-time FX. I’ve already figured out how to differenciate two of these settings no, I won’t tell you how we’re going to do that as it’s going to be surprise (but I can tell you confidentially that you’ll be actually seeing some beautifully animated raining falling outside every single window in the house). I still have to decide how to variate the remaning setting, which is nighttime (probably a blue-ish tint and fog outside the windows?).
If there’s anything you don’t understand, please raise your hand.
As an afterthought, and this came to mind because is a subject that someone brought a few days ago, it could have been an interesting idea visiting the house in different eras and maybe taking part of the story as different characters, so that you may experience the whole thing from different points of view and in no particular order. Obviously, this would have made for a whole different game.
Secondly, some of you might get the wrong idea from our “joyful” mood. I mean, I remember someone once suggested that Scratches could be a huge and devilish joke (ie: something alone the lines of the ending in Signs). But in all serioussnes here, there won’t be any humour in Scratches (except for some easter eggs). There will be some comic relief during early conversations and comments from the protagonist, but that’ll be far and between. This will be a serious game maybe even with some disturbing subjects.
And thirdly, yes, Gumbo is my friend. He doesn’t talk too much and smells like hell, but makes for a good company nonetheless. I treasure the moments I spend peeling the skin off his face. That’s what good pals are for!
Anyway, there has been a lot of work done since my first post, but mostly mechanic and boring stuff you probably don’t want to know about (the exciting things I mentioned are just about to happen). One remarkable thing is that the gamma control has been implemented. Yes, those of you with dim monitors can rest assured you’ll be able to find your way inside the creepy house. This will actually work as a real gamma correction, not merely brightening up the whole scene. No, the dark, intentional corners will remain that way while gamma is enabled. Not sure yet how many levels we’ll be supporting though we certainly don’t want you people feel safe and cozy while moving around this place.
I guess that’s all for now. Stay tuned. Next update will be posted sooner that’s a promise.
Greetings my good fellows!
We’re gathered here in this fine day to celebrate the launch of our developer’s journal. We hope it will shed some light on our upcoming horror game and ease the waiting.
If you don’t know what a developer’s journal is, think of it some sort of logbook were developers (hence being appropriately entitled “developer’s journal” <
But we want to make a difference! We want you to truly learn the inner workings of Scratches and keep you updated on the status of the project. So we won’t post stuff such as “today I finally found how to remove the dreaded deadlock that was causing an infinite loop and overflowing the heap buffer”. I mean, it’d be great if someone actually does read this. Besides, if I posted something like that some smarty-pants programmer would probably show up and point that deadlocks and infinite loops have nothing to do with each other.
Anyways…
I guess a brief update on the current status is in order. If you have been following Scratches, you should know it takes place inside a manor – the Blackwood manor. Besides the imposing Victorian mansion, which is obviously the place where most of the ‘action’ takes place, we have several buildings scattered around in the garden. Well, all of these buildings (except for the crypt area which is 95% finished and updated to meet the new look of the game) are currently in a ‘walkable’ status – what we mean by this is that all you can do is move around them and enjoy the views. The remaining thing to do for these buildings is to create the interactive content, such as descriptions and puzzles, which might sound like it’s a lot of work but, in reality, the hardest and most time-consuming part of our whole production is reaching the glorious ‘walkable’ status.
But the real deal is the creepy house, which has a big portion of it also ‘walkable’ and a few 100% interactive rooms – and we were just about to render several others this week (more about this on the next post). Thankfully, all the hard work and extra time invested on the SCream engine is proving to be fruitful, as ‘building’ a room and the interactive content within it is now a breeze. Speaking of the engine, it already supports most of the things we need to finish Scratches. I still need to implement the save/load system, but I guess if I can’t make it we can always add a password system – you know, the password the game gives you once the end-level boss is killed… haha, got you!
Besides all this, I’m also wrapping up the dialogues right now, taking advantage of an inspiring rainy day, and tweaking some of the FX we need to have while inside the house (you actually get to visit the place in three different stages). All of the above in very general terms of course, but there are many more updates on the way. This diary couldn’t have started in a better moment, as this is when the really interesting part begins!
What next… (taps spacebar)
You probably would like to meet the team:
That’s me on the left (I’ve seen better days) and Alejandro Graziani on the right, after a sleepless night of work and in bad need for a shave. You may ask yourself if we’ve gone out of our minds for posting these obviously crude pictures, but we really want to show you what goes behind the scenes in the true life of a sacrificed game developer.
He he, by the way, I was just kidding, that’s Gumbo on the left he always enjoys messing around with my stuff. I’ll have to lock him back in the dungeons.
This is the real me:
But my skin tanning isn’t as good as Gumbo‘s, which I envy a lot.
So that’s all for now. Stay tuned as we’re about to start doing exciting things such as voice recordings (with some familiar names in the industry), stress and performance testings, adding support for the chilling ambient effects Cellar of Rats is working on and sacrificing virgins as we enter in the final lap of the Scratches production cycle.
One more thing: I can’t tell you exactly how often this journal will be updated. I’d say a couple times a week – so don’t expect this being updated on a daily basis! Also, as some of you might realize, English isn’t our mother-tongue and this probably won’t be proof-readed. So there might be some horrible, even insulting spelling mistakes. Please, bear with us. I hope you understate what I moan.
Cheerio!
