After five months working on the game, Pageturner 3 is finally here!
In the last game in the Pageturner series, Benedict takes on a challenging case at the request of Police Chief Arctica French. But all is not as it seems.
I'm glad to finally finish the game, which was announced back in Nov 04, 2017 with Games Update 8.4. In that update, I said it would be released "Sometime in 2018 for sure". Ha ha. Hahahaha. Anyway, almost exactly three years later, it's done. I can finally close the book on that series — and on Scratch.
Yes, this will be my last Scratch game ever. While there are certain parts of working with Scratch's engine that are great and make it easy to set up all sorts of styles of gameplay, it's also laggy, really not good for games with tons of dialogue, and my own coding skills are... not the greatest.
It's an awesome way for kids to get started to learn how to code, but for a game developer in their twenties? Yeah, it's probably time to move on.
Though I should note that I will be releasing three more projects on my Scratch page before I stop posting forever there — two more Games Updates & the Catalyst Wake release announcement.
Pageturner 3 will also probably need some adjusting after its release — I've play-tested it all the way through quite a few times, but no doubt there will be some issues people run into, which I will try to fix. I'm also going to release a video walkthrough for it soon, so look for that!
So, despite meeting my goal of finishing it by the end of October this year, the progress on Pageturner 3 was not as consistent as Methods — I definitely did not work as hard on it, though it was going pretty smoothly for a while. However, I mostly attribute this to the frustrations I had with Scratch's engine. Even though it could be very difficult to motivate myself to write the Methods chapters, at least implementing the dialogue was not as annoying as pulling teeth, and once it was all set up, it wasn't laggy, and I knew I could count on the simple code actually working.
Both Scratch and Unity run pretty slow on my computer, but at least with Unity the tool I'm using, (Adventure Creator), is built for narrative-focused games and basically everything I want to do with it is super easy to implement.
Even with some setbacks, I consider this second run of my new marathon-based development style a success. I'm sorry for making so many progress posts and flooding people's inboxes, especially with the "Intensive" daily posts, but it really did help motivate me to do something — even if it wasn't much — every day for those weeks, and I'll probably keep doing it that way for future projects.
Some important lessons I learned were:
- Playing the game helps build motivation to work on it
- Only working a little at a time is fine, progress is progress
- Choose your battles. If you really don't feel like doing something, cut it from the project or scale it back.
Towards the end of the project, I made some cuts. I decided not to include several node games I'd planned early on. I made the "secrets" in the game much, much simpler. I deleted several options from the options menu, like instructions (they were redundant since the instructions are in the project notes), concept art (I didn't really have any), and bios (again, redundant).
You were going to be able to talk with a police captain character in the break room, the same way you can talk to "Scammy" — but it was unnecessary.
The casefile had an additional tab that kept track of evidence you found — it wasn't really necessary either.
Most of the stuff I didn't feel like working on turned out to be redundant or didn't add anything, so no wonder I didn't feel like implementing it!
The reason I say "Choose your battles" is because sometimes there WILL be something that you absolutely have to push yourself to do, that is necessary and can't be cut from the project. Those were the node and interrogation games for me this time. I was eventually able to push myself to completing them, though I procrastinated forever on it. I'm glad I was able to include them in the game.
So what am I working on next? Well, I can't say, it's a secret for now — but it's very cool, I assure you! I'm hoping to finish this secret project by the end of November, and then it will at last be time to return to The Evolving World.
Until next time,
— LockedOn.
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