Put simply, I’ve been incredibly busy - with my band, with my business, with an unexpected but rather cheering influx of freelance web work, with everything. And, unfortunately, the game slipped to the bottom of the list - I’ve barely touched it in weeks.

But! I’m feeling pretty on top of things at the moment - I’ve still got one more site to finish (a games blog that I think y’all will be interested in - more on that later, though) and a pair of hotpants to sew for my next gig, but apart from that my time is my own again. I’ll be taking a pretty structured approach to the next phase of the game (adding the graphics to the demo), which means that I should be able to blog about it a bit more reliably. And with actual pictures of the game too!

Watch this space, folks.

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Categories: Clouds Beyond Clouds

Use micro SMG with ill-fated motorcyclist

Posted by Kerry on June 15, 2008 | Permalink

When I first roughed this game out, I had a few key puzzles in mind. As time went on, I fleshed them out (or realised that they were rubbish and scrapped them) and I’m happy with the results - I think I have a couple of really nice set pieces in there. The smaller puzzles - the meat and bones of an adventure game, really - proved to be much more of a challenge.

My first draft of the plot featured an awful lot of trawling around, delivering A to B and the like. I realised that there was just too much walking between screens and tightened that side of things up - now the puzzles tend to be fairly near their solutions, avoiding the godawful drudgery of those games that make you walk back five miles because you forgot to pick up a newspaper. However, that still left the problem of sameyness - there are only so many people who can want items that are conveniently two screens away before your lovingly constructed world starts to feel like a particularly tiresome exercise in box-ticking.

As I’ve been focusing mainly on the functionality at the moment, I decided to leave the puzzles for a while and return to them when I was feeling more inspired. Readers, that time has come.

The inspiration for sorting this out came, strangely, not from an adventure game but from GTA IV. I’ve been playing this quite a bit recently, and one of the things that has impressed me most is the way it gets so much mileage (arf!) out of a fairly simple game mechanic. Although a lot of the missions - particularly the side missions - are basically very similar, the game remains fresh and fun throughout. This is partly due to the superb main narrative, but also due to the imaginative use of mini-narratives within each mission - the changes in mood and motivation are expertly handled, and create a genuinely different feeling from one mission to the next.

With this in mind, I’ve taken a fresh look at the placeholder puzzles I’ve got left to fix, and I’m confident that with a bolder use of mood, motivation and character, I can do something rather good with them and lift them above despised hoop-jumpery that plagues this genre. Or, failing that, just lock every single door in the game and make the key holders ask you riddles*.

* I promise you I’m kidding.

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Categories: Clouds Beyond Clouds

Of course there’s an ice cream van out in the pouring rain. This is Yorkshire.

Posted by Kerry on May 27, 2008 | Permalink

It’s drizzling and I’m in West Yorkshire. You’d think this would put me in the perfect mood to do a bit of work on the game, but I’m actually here to visit relatives (and besides, I suspect my mum’s laptop would explode if I tried to install Flash on it). So I guess I’ll just have to soak up the atmosphere for now, and hope that it transfers to the bits of game art I have lined up for next week.

Speaking of which, the demo is getting there - it’s all placeholder images for now so it doesn’t look like much, but I’ve fixed most of the bugs I’ve found so far and I’m a lot happier with the plot and puzzles that I’ve included. I expect to have it lookable-at in the not-too-distant future. Exciting stuff, non?

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Categories: Clouds Beyond Clouds

Fame, check. Now for the riches…

Posted by Kerry on April 25, 2008 | Permalink

There’s an interview with me in the Guardian games blog today. Hurrah!

I can’t tell you how excited I was to get an email from Aleks Krotoski - or Aleks from Bits, if (like me) you spent far too much time watching late night telly about ten years ago.

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Categories: Clouds Beyond Clouds

High-concept art

Posted by Kerry on April 24, 2008 | Permalink

As children, the Bronte sisters and their brother Branwell created fictional kingdoms with fabulous names like Angria and Gondal, filling notebook after notebook with descriptions of these imaginary worlds. The idea of these making books like this, obsessively filled with tiny writing, drawings and maps, has always appealed to me. When I read the gorgeous Dame Darcy illustrated edition of Jane Eyre, I thought immediately of those books and the idea for the game’s visual style clicked. I wanted it to look like children’s drawings, paper dolls and toy theatres - the imagery of the imagination.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories: Clouds Beyond Clouds

What it’s all about

Posted by Kerry on April 13, 2008 | Permalink

Bronte sisters Time for a quick introduction to my current project, Clouds Beyond Clouds. The game is a point and click adventure based on the lives and works of the Brontë sisters. Set in a fictional West Yorkshire village, it’s a dark literary mystery in which fiction and history are blurred.

The game is narrative-driven, being both a game about literature and a mystery story in itself, and is designed to reward exploration and create an immersive atmosphere. Roughly translated, this means that there’s lots to look at and you can’t die.

I’m building the game using Flash and Lassie Adventure Studio, a Flash-based development tool for building adventure games. I’ll talk more about this in future posts, but for now suffice it to say that I’m very pleased with it and would happily recommend it to anyone who knows which end of Flash is which.

Naturally, I’ll be talking a lot about this project over the coming weeks. I’ll be uploading some concept art and screenshots over the next couple of weeks, and plan to deliver a playable, browser-based demo in the near future. Watch this space - or, even better, sign up for email updates (in the left-hand column, there) and I’ll let you know as soon as there’s any exciting news.

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Categories: Clouds Beyond Clouds