yames

Call for more Questions for February Question And Answer Stream + State Of The Yames 2024 video coming soon + Plastic Spouse Interrogation behind the scenes

Published: January 31st 2024, 8:49:00 pm

So to start off, the N*nt*ndo Direct style opening is of course just some cheeky fun on my part and I’m preparing in parallel a video that does not have this stuff, in case the original video gets taken down by copyright strikes and/or I am litigated against!

You may have seen me talking some in the discord about a “State Of The Yames” video which would outline my plans for this year but also work as a sort of advertisement/informer of my work on Patreon and also tease that these games will eventually be released publicly into an anthology. The video will also contain teases of/plans for DOB as well. My plans for this year are to tie up a lot of the loose ends I have with smaller projects (releasing them to you and also eventually publicly as an anthology collection) and also do significant work on Discover Our Bodies, enough work that a demo or vertical slice of the game can be released. If you’ve been an attentive Patreon post reader there will likely be no surprises in the video, however it is a nice reminder of what is coming this year, sooner and later.

Turning to actual game development, I’ve been working at finishing Plastic Spouse Interrogation and it’s very close to being done however I’m still cleaning up/polishing it a bit. As I’ve mentioned before I’ve reworked the game’s control system to make certain player abilities/functions more apparent, but I’ve also added in a few new secrets and things to discover that make sense with the new control system. I promise the wait will be worth it I think it’s turning out very cool...

To delve a little more behind the scenes I wanted to talk about some of the tools I’ve been using. There’s an extension called Chatterbox (developed by toolmaker Juju Adams) for Gamemaker that I’ve started using a lot more recently and it’s made organizing/editing dialogue a lot less painful. I can have text and dialogue loaded up in an external editor and pretty easily call-up whatever I need whenever I need it. Older games I made basically had one object containing all the text, or sometimes worse, had hardcoded dialogue/text/item descriptions.

 I’m definitely not perfect as a developer but I’ve also shaved off a lot of pretty rough edges from the much earlier days with the help of tools like this, they are a lot more robust and easy to work with than any solutions I tend to throw together myself.

Plastic Spouse Interrogation is pretty dialogue driven, your interrogators are constantly discussing you and your situation and occasionally asking you questions both in order to get information from you but also just out of their own curiosity. It’s nice to have a solution that allows for more flexibility in editing this dialogue.

Blender is a much more popular and well-known tool and you probably have heard about it! But it’s really changed my workflow. Even though I still do a lot of stuff with 2D and image compositing and collage, Blender has allowed me a lot more coherence to my photo collage stuff just by letting me place all the elements into a space and providing them a common lightsource that I then can render out into 2D for more editing/collaging. As each project comes along I think I find more and more uses for Blender. It’s cool! Also, obviously, when it comes to portraying stuff it'd be hard to make photo collages of, it's also pretty good!

Finally, I want to put out another call for questions for a question and answer stream next month. Not sure of the date but I will make a post when I plan to go live. If you have a question, please send a message on Patreon or on Discord or write below in the comments of this post.

 If you would like to send your question anonymously, please use this google forms link: https://forms.gle/CiAowFLpsKfz3NoA6 

As always I am infinitely grateful for your support and interest in my stuff. This has been a great month of game production for me and I’m super excited for this coming year.

Yours In Games and Gratefulness,

Yames