#was nice to sort of meander around drawing wise if that makes sense haha

[salamispots]

initial idea was whoooo spooky it's a cabinet of yarn and one of the drawers is actually worms/organs/mystery noodles but it kinda ended up its own thing haha

[clocktower-fifty]

[3] Week 2 - Lots of Flowcharts

Wandering onto Week 2, starting to wonder if I’m getting in over my head, but we’re just going to have to wait and see!

On a personal note, I’ve had acquaintances hounding me all week to play Among Us with them... Guys I can’t make video games if I keep playing them :< Very fun, but very socially draining. I’ve also bought the Into the Spiderverse Art Book today, it makes me super pumped to work on a story idea I’ve had for a long time, but nooo, I gotta work on this game >:( So many fun distractions.

But you guys are here for Clock Tower 50, so here we go.

At the beginning of the week, I’ve taken that paper I made last week and put it all down on a Google Sheets file. Then, I’ve started ordering the rooms until I’ve made...

...This thing! The general blueprints of where each room is in the Clock Tower. I’ve made this using diagrams.net. I was a little apprehensive using this program, since I’ve tried it once to make a flowchart for a university computer science project and got frustrated, but I needed a quick and easy flowchart program and this one is free + online. It ended up being very simple to use this time around, so that’s nice!

As you can see, these rooms don’t make any sense space-wise, but we’re ignoring logic here. Each colour is a different floor, with the highest level on top in yellow and the lowest level at the bottom in green. Each rectangle is a room, there’s fifty rooms in total, hence Clock Tower Fifty :)

The game’s main “gameplay mechanic” is choosing which door to go through, and depending on their choices the story will shift ever so slightly.

A day or so after that, I drew some quick character mockups instead of paying attention to my Physics lecture:

(Ignore the weird turtle creature at the top left, that’s for one of my dream games which I can’t work on until I get more experience.)

Daphne is one of the teenagers (originally named Sofia in the previous post), and Reese is the player (originally named Charlie). I’ve also changed Gabbi’s name to Jasmine, which was actually her original name when I first thought up the plot (Tony [Reese], Skott [Samuel], Jasmine [Jasmine], Gabe [Travis], and Laura [Daphne]). Don’t worry at this stage I will stop changing the names. (At least in my notes until I redesign everyone.)

Speaking of designs, I really like Reese’s design that I doodled in my sketchbook. I like Daphne’s hair as well, but I feel like her design will probably see more work.

Anyway, in the previous post I forgot to share that pilot / piece of dialogue when I was first thinking up of the game. This was the draft for how the game was supposed to start...

...but I made that on September 1st, so I’m definitely not keeping most of this dialogue. (Travis/Gabe is also extremely out of character here.) We’ll see when I get there.

Alright enough meandering. From that flowchart/blueprints of the tower above I tried using the program Twine to plot out each choice the player can make.

The player starts off choosing between two doors. They have the choice of going through either door alone with the four other teenagers through the other door (2 choices), or they can go through either door with one person (8 more choices), or they can go through either door with two people (12 more choices), or they can go through either door with three.............

Let’s just say about an hour in I knew going through with that idea would be too insane, even for me. I was tired trying to plot out all the choices after the first door. So, I deleted that flowchart.

Time to downsize.

The first choice is made in the Observatory. The two choices are either the Aquarium room or the Space room. I decided to make the choices blend in together a bit more-- it doesn’t matter how you split up, but some split up scenarios would cause a different story. In this example, Samuel prefers the Space room and Jasmine prefers the Aquarium room. If you choose for them to be alone in the room they DON’T want, they get angry and that’d change the story. Daphne would not want to be alone period, and there’s also a branch if you choose for everyone to stick together, not splitting up. Five choices, that’s not so bad, I was thinking...

...Until it lead to this mess. If you look at the blueprint above, you can encounter the group you split off from if you choose correctly. That was on purpose, I like forced character interactions. However that leads to this problem-- if a character was split off from everyone in the previous room, what happens if they encounter the rest of the group again in the next next room? Depending on your choices, this can lead to all sorts of interpretations, and oof. There’s just so many storylines from there.

I attempted to shorten it by making bad endings (there’s a bad ending on the square with the red side), but looking at everything I know it’d take forever to complete this game. I do not have forever, I have dream games I want to make eventually. (Side note, I actually really like that bad ending, but I don’t know if I’d ever use it... If I never use it, I’ll probably tell you guys what that ending was supposed to be when the game is finished.)

Okay okay, back to the drawing board. 

It pains me to do this, but in order for this project to be doable, the player cannot choose which room their friends go to. They can only choose their own, or alternatively insist on everyone sticking together.

Okay I know this doesn’t look any better from afar, but trust me this is much more doable than the two previous attempts. Not only have I limited the choices drastically, but depending on the choices some paths would end up the same way.

While I personally hate doing that (what’s the point of choices if some choices would lead to the same ending??), I’m trying to keep to one rule-- each time you make a choice there will always be at least two paths. You cannot enter a room and have your choice be useless, i.e. no matter which door you choose it’s the same ending. This same ending must be conscious in a way.

As you can see from above, I’m not done with this flowchart. I’ve only done 12 rows out of the planned 26. (I would say I’m almost halfway there, but each row gets more and more complicated so I would say it’s more like I’m a quarter there, haha.)

I’m also debating on going with the bad ending thing, to cut off potential paths, but we’ll see.

Finally, to end this devlog, I’m trying out Todoist. I’ve never used that website before, but I think ending devlogs with a brief outline of my current workflow would be a cool idea? I put in some temporary dates of when I’m planning to finish certain tasks, but right away I can see that I’ll probably not make my planned January 18 release date, haha.

Next week, I should have the rough maps on RPG Maker, as well as finished the flowchart above.

Until next time!

- Marisol Cast