It’s been a while since I tried to get back into game development. For a fairly long while I was focused on learning Machine Learning. I worked through quite a few tutorials learning the basics of tensorflow and jupytr notebooks. Messed around with some basic ideas but couldn’t come up with anything that would really catch my imagination.

Then a few months back a friend reached out to me to help a student work on a game development project. The student had come up with a story that they wanted to convert into an interactive game. Since I hadn’t worked with interactive story telling before I started exploring the area.

I started off with some fond memories of the old Lucas Arts interactive adventure games made in the 90s (Grim Fandango, Curse of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle). Those games used a Lucas Arts proprietary engine called SCUMM. Scumm itself is closed source but it has inspired other tools over the years. For most of my development career I’ve used Unity3D, and while looking for visual novel tools I cam across one called Fungus which is a unity3d plugin for creating visual novels.

Fungus is free and opensource with an active community that helps keeps it up to date. The documentation and tutorial videos are out of date now but It was still possible to use those as a reference to learn how to use the tool.

I was able to get some basic prototypes working with the Fungus tool, testing out the functionality and checking if it provided the flexibility to create the story we wanted. That it did with flying colors.

The student had written the original story using a tool called twinery. It’s an online tool for creating branching stories and visual novels. It’s excellent for quick prototyping and very easy to get into. There is additional functionality hidden under the hood but that assumes some basic understanding of programming concepts.

The original plan was for our student to outline the main story using twinery, which I would convert to Fungus. We’s also add some more gamey elements to the overall story such as simple puzzles or combat. We also added an artist to help out with creating custom art for the game.

Before we started working on the game in earnest our writer wanted to really flesh out the story and incorporate a more compelling morality aspect into it. This they realized would take them some time as they also had normal classwork obligations.

The team as a whole decided to shelf the project until our writer fleshed out the story and decided if a visual novel was truly the best way to move forward.

For me it provided an incentive to reinvestigate game development. Besides looking for the specific tools for writing visual novels, just reacquainting myself with Unity and looking up tutorials on youtube helped me engage with the community and come up with other interesting ideas to work on.

So despite this particular project not panning out it proved a stepping stone to help jump to other interesting projects. Hopefully I’ll be sharing some of my work on those in coming posts.