Production Begins!

Taking a month-long break from a project is a great way to make you proceed with it in a different direction. Coming back to Early in the Mourning in late January—after being away from it for nearly six weeks—made our whole team realize how many things we were still dissatisfied with. The mechanics felt uninspired and the abilities we had developed for Ember felt too detached from her character and from the tone of the narrative itself. It felt like we were making our mechanics based off movesets from indie titles we liked, rather than designing them according to the needs of our actual game. We had also over-scoped—big time. We realized there was no way we could reach the narrative depth we wanted or create multiple boss-like encounters in the timeframe we had.

Honestly, it was a difficult couple of weeks. There were some arguments and everyone was pretty disgruntled. Since many of us are graduating in a few months, it seemed like it was casting a shadow over our final semester. It was very similar to the debates we’d had at the beginning of our fall semester—when we started pre-production. We were suddenly back to the question of what we wanted the game to be, what the main story should be about, and whether or not we should scrap everything from Early in the Mourning altogether. Though our team had decreased from 17 members to 15, we still had competing visions and very little time to sort through them all to reach compromises. The first two weeks contained so many changes that every day it seemed like we were working towards a different goal. A good way to illustrate this craziness would be a presentation we needed to give on our updated game pitch, storyline, and mechanics. The morning of the presentation, some members of the team wanted to say that we would include puzzles in our gameplay while others were against this move, saying that we had nothing in our prototype to show we could even design puzzles. We ended up being honest during our presentation, saying that both combat and puzzles were being considered, but that we only had combat prototypes.

We scrapped a lot of our work from pre-production, which was disheartening (even though everyone had half-expected it to happen). We found ourselves going through all our files to figure out what was still relevant and what was officially “dead.”

What we were left with was a completely revamped storyline and a new style of gameplay. Ember was no longer the spirit of a lost girl, but was an actual fire spirit that had appeared in the world before. The role of minor characters was highly simplified—Ember could still talk with them, but there would no longer be gameplay missions to accelerate their character development. On the flip side, we brainstormed more creative abilities for Ember, and feel that we have been able to tie them into the narrative. And finally, we changed the title of the game to Ember—which we felt was sweet and simple. More developments will appear over time and things are still changing—even though we only have about three months left. Though our new demo is not going to be as extensive as we originally thought, we still have a lot of work to do.