INCOHERENCE Retrospective

We’re fully in Fall, and as the days get colder and the festivities begin, I’m happy to have reached such a milestone with the release of INCOHERENCE. Since last October, Vine Moss Games as released 10 narrative games, nine of those releasing this year alone! It has been an ambitious yet grueling experience so far, especially considering how difficult September’s VM Game turned out to be. Despite the challenges faced, I’m always excited to share a bit of my thoughts on my development experiences. This retrospective will include three rights and three wrongs on developing Incoherence, and while I have a lot that I could say regarding this project, I will try to prioritize discussing the most impactful points that I can learn from for the rest of the year.

3 RIGHTS

Experimental Color Pencil Style

As I started brainstorming for this game, I wanted to strike a balance between a rough, hand-drawn aesthetic and a vivid color scheme. Coincidentally, I found a digital brush pack made by Fatima Mandouh https://fatimamandouh.gumroad.com/ that fit what I was looking for! This brush pack is meant to imitate colored pencils in usage and looks, and I was more than happy to try out a different toolset to make the visuals for the game. In the end, I created four characters, a train animation, and several backgrounds using this set, embracing strange character decisions and odder color combinations compared to past games. Our collaborating artist Estelle provided the location sketches with the same brush pack to help elevate the visual scenes, and the art assets culminated in a distinct visual style that feels bold, rough, and constrained. We could have easily spent more time on the art assets, given how enjoyable they were to create, but the experimentation didn’t stop at art.

Cryptogram Puzzles!

INCOHERENCE is the most interactive VM Game to date, and only the second puzzle game made this year, after Seconds Between Summer. This gameplay mechanic was by far Vine Moss Games’ most ambitious feature, as it involved three core task: creating a navigable grid a player can move a marker across, numbers that are arranged on the grid in a specific shape that can be replaced by a player inputting any letter, and an answer phrase that is hidden by those numbers that can be checked after a player’s input. These tasks each had their own challenges, to say the least. The functional grid had to be created at the beginning of the scene’s runtime and tested repeatedly to ensure the marker wasn’t moving off the journal, or that the marker was accurately matching the visual grid lines drawn on the journal asset. For placing numbers on the grid in a specific position, I had to essentially create and follow a coordinate grid in engine that I then had to recreate in Procreate. Translating a sketch into pixels on a coordinate grid then inputting those coordinates into code was a tedious process, though it turned out much better than I could have anticipated. Developing each answer phrase puzzle was a meticulous process that requires several sheets of notebook paper to get right.

To get three phases within each of the three puzzles was a challenge, but it was very worth the effort. Working on a gameplay mechanic of this scale, especially within a monthly timeframe, could have gone much worse than it did. I’m very proud to have created a puzzler like this, and I’m excited to see people play it live to get their reactions and hopefully good feedback to take with me into the future.

Committed to Change

If I remember only one thing from this development cycle, I want to remember INCOHERENCE as a game determined to be different. This year has been about challenging myself and challenging my preconceived notions on what a narrative game is and what it isn’t. I tackled that question for two theme sets and two vignette breaks, and I wanted to take a completely different approach for this last theme set. I’m so happy with the games I’ve made, so much so, that I don’t want to just make more games that are similar to it. I wanted to make an even more interactive experience, going beyond the small interactions of the last theme set (bar Seconds Between Summer) and find different modes for engagement. With a numeric cryptogram puzzler, I found something that was inherently different that came with it’s own set of challenges and learnings. Despite the wrongs of this game and the difficulty in releasing this project, I am more than proud of what came out of September for Vine Moss.

3 WRONGS

Writing Fell Off To The Wayside

Although this was a project that intentionally didn’t have a lot of writing planned for it, I think by treating the dialogue as a task that I can do at the very end of the project, I put myself in a difficult position. For the final few days of development, I had sat at my desk unsure of what to write and frustrated that I didn’t do this at the very beginning of development. This has been a constant challenge this year, and while I have recommitted to getting writing done sooner rather than later, this September proved to be the biggest example of what happens when I don’t write a game’s script first. I’m proud and happy with the short stories I got to share in INCOHERENCE, but I know I had a lot more intended for the game’s narrative than what was released. Time and motivation were factors that significantly changed the game’s end result, and while I have to accept that this constraints and cuts are necessary and part of game development, I know I could have set myself up for a much more manageable final week had I wrote a script much earlier. While I can’t change that for this past game now, I am more motivated than ever to start off October’s game with a complete script and intentional narrative. I’m determined to write; especially write with the motivation to make complicated and convincing characters that make players feel for and resonate with video game characters.

Weeks of Wandering

I spent a significant amount of time the first week working on the game’s art assets, since I felt the most motivated to do it. While I was pleased with what I designed, and was certainly productive in the process, I had fallen extremely behind in the other aspects of development. Wearing all these hats means I have to stay on top of all aspects of development, even when I’m not feeling motivated all the time. While I was in good shape the first two sprints, I soon fell behind and fell behind and into a development rut. I had other work obligations to focus my creativity on throughout the day, but I couldn’t find the energy to make progress on INCOHERENCE during the evening. Whether it was laying in bed and feeling distracted, or sitting at my desk and moving at a snail’s pace, I wasn’t able to maintain good progress during the midpoint of my development timeline.

In the end, I felt like I effectively lost two weeks of progress on my game by underestimating my taskload and feeling burnout catching up to me. I missed my internal release goal, and I decided not to announce a specific release date for this game because I didn’t know how much time development would take. By the end, the first few days of October were spent putting all the game’s pieces together. This was extremely tough to push through, especially when I wanted to move on and work on the next game. This was bound to happen at some point, and I’m fortunate to not have had this kind of experience for any of my other games this year. The wandering I felt may have been unavoidable, though I will go back to the drawing board and create a more specific, predevelopment process to put me in a stronger position by the end of the month.

No Devlogs at the End!

As I struggled to finish this game over the last couple weeks, I couldn’t find the energy to write a third devlog for the game. While this may seem minor, I really value documenting my progress each week on a game - regardless of how much “progress” I end up making. I was disappointed to not prioritize the devlog, even if my game was nowhere near complete.

I need to become more comfortable with writing devlogs that explain my lack of progress on a given week. It doesn’t have to be an entire essay either, just a couple sentences that make note of where I’m at, where I’m going, and what do I need to change about development to get there.

Final Thoughts and What’s On The Horizon

This game’s development was the biggest challenge I’ve faced yet for Vine Moss Games, though it wasn’t fully to do with the project’s scope and ambitions. I had many days where I didn’t want to work on the project - I couldn’t mark off the most simple of tasks without struggling with attention. This was due to a number of factors unrelated to the game itself, particularly when it comes to the financial instability of my work as a game designer. Despite how many internal and external challenges last month, I can still feel more than proud that INCOHERENCE was released. Delivering this game a few days past September was nothing more than an internal frustration. The game is out and playable, and I will be showing it at large game festivals over the next few months. I’m in an extremely fortunate position to make games and share it with a diverse audience that appreciates the distinct nature of these experimental narratives. This experience will shape how I plan for the last two games of the theme set, namely by emphasizing concrete predevelopment plans I can follow later on in the month. I want to create a stronger foundation for these next few games, so that when I have tough development days, I have a strong plan and idea to rely on.

For Vine Moss Games, October is a special month. Developing Night Owls last year was a fulfilling experience that represents so much for the studio and my intentions as a narrative-focused developer. I want to bring some of Night Owls’ energy to this month’s game, remembering the complex narrative I crafted and building off of the horror I experimented with to create something truly unnerving. Time will tell if I succeed in frightening an audience of unsuspecting players, but I’m looking forward to getting back to the genre that started Vine Moss Games.

Thank you so much for reading my reflections on this game’s development, and I hope my honesty in this recap is a useful reminder (for myself especially) that developing a game is a creative miracle that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Mixing hard work, a good plan, and creative energy will put yourself on a good path, but even then it doesn’t always result in a working game within a month. INCOHERENCE looks very different from what I planned, but I’m still happy all the same, and I hope you’ve had the chance to play through it. Be on the lookout for October’s game rollout soon! Until then, take care ~

~Dev