Spehs revision: years 1 and 2 [part 2]

This is a continuation post from the previous, [part 1].

The summer 2016 was a relaxing one for me. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot to work on. But it didn’t have the same kind of weight that Spehs put me under. I got to have a good laugh for a while and make a bunch of new friends in Singapore.

In projects like these, its crucial to maintain one’s mental balance. Luckily there are still friends and family members around to see every now and then. Notable for the story, SikSakJiiPee is one of them. To him I am able to talk about Spehs since he is genuinely interested in the project (as long as I don’t ramble on about it for too long, which is usually the case). Even though Juuso had done a couple of songs for Spehs in the past, we were missing a dedicated musician for our project. SikSakJiiPee was willing to lend us a hand at creating the soundtrack at some point when the game would have progressed further into development. To our surprise, in the middle of our student exchange in Singapore I received a message from SikSakJiiPee presenting us a song made by a friend of his, who happened to be a musician by profession. In his message SikSakJiiPee said that his friend (by the name of onrk) had somehow felt inspired by the game’s prototype after seeing it. Along with it came an offer from onrk to get involved with the project. We were not many and his presence was greatly appreciated as onrk joined the project on the summer 2016.

Apparently, onrk had recently started to take interest in experiementing with the synthesizer. Furthermore, he had some common interests with us. The whole space setting seemed to offer him a suitable environment for experiementing with sound. As the first batch of songs came to me, I was excited! I consider myself a fan of soundtrack music, so getting my hands on a folder full of songs that were to present the game that I was making felt downright incredible. Initially there was an idea of doing some sort of layered, dynamically adapting music. But after hearing the first songs we gave up the idea and encouraged onrk to work on the traditional track based soundtrack like he had done until this point. Ever since then the songs have become somewhat influential as I try to draw some inspiration into my own work from them. I believe that audiovisual work can greatly benefit from a two-way interaction like this – a batch of songs is created based on the concept of the game, after which the game development can use the musical input to produce more content for the game, and the cycle goes on.

Putting music aside, the return from Singapore at the end of August marked the day of Spehs going back into production on the coding side of things. Knowing the teacher from last spring, we were allowed to work on the project on the weekly project day once more, even though it was a course for a customer project. Technically, me and Juuso acted as both the customer and the developer for the product. What I’m trying to say is that it’s nice how our school can help us out in a situation like this.

Until now, the objects appearing in the game were entirely randomly generated on the spot, without any relevance to the (non-existent) environment surrounding the player. And another thing was that when an object slipped out of the despawn range, it would disappear permanently. These two major drawbacks were to be addressed during the course of autumn 2016. My job became to be dividing the world into chunks, and saving those chunks on disk for later use, should the player ever visit a same place more than once (which was more than likely). Juuso took the job of generating the massive environment of Spehs. So far this has proven to be nothing but a challenge, as the pure size of the game’s universe is so ridiculously big. We are hoping to come up with a solution in the near future as otherwise we will have to reconsider some aspects of the game.

Present time, November 2016, chunks seem to work as intended and I have began to work on various other tasks. I go from one area of gameplay to another to keep my recent memory up to date with the relevant  codebase. Slowly, we are moving towards the point of trying to reach out for some publicity. But until then, we will have to keep on working hard and have our hopes up. Setbacks and walls can – and have been countered many times by just taking a break. Realistically the only obstacle on our way now is the time. But with enough support, even limited time is just another wall to climb. My hopes for Spehs is to reach a state of satisfactory. That state may not be a perfect, complete game – but it should be something that someone could genuinely enjoy. The game should differentiate itself from others so similar to it and offer the players an unique experience.