Log entry: day 13
I sat down to play the demo from the very beginning and sent twenty-one notes. Almost all of them grew from one root: the game kept playing out its schedule on top of what you'd already done.
The most annoying one was right at the start: "I sat down to play from the onboarding, from the very beginning, sat at the desk and nothing happened. Know why? It was break time! As the creator I get it, but for a player who doesn't know, it's confusing and awkward." Now the day doesn't start until the kid sits at a desk for the first time.
I also asked: "what happens if I take the register and throw it somewhere far off the desk?" Now the teacher picks the register up herself after two seconds and tells you off. And if you carry the register out of the classroom, her attention goes straight to the max.
In the evening the flight engineer made a Mac build: I was going to let a friend play.
Log entry: day 14
The busiest day of the week, 28 commits.
I wanted the janitor to push a mop through the water and wring it out into a bucket, like a real one. Since the morning that's exactly what he does: he cleans a flooded restroom in two and a half minutes, in four trips. True, at first he scraped the mop across his own face four and a half times a second, and people came over to see what the noise was.
Then I asked to take the movement apart. I wrote: "what worries me most is how smooth the movement is, the NPCs' and mine." We took Untitled Goose Game as the model, and its shopkeeper with the broom. The flight engineer redid the walking: people move along a smooth thread, not a broken line from point to point. Between tasks the body keeps itself busy with something. Bodies got mass: at a run the turn is wider, and with a chair in your hands everything is heavier.
And then I wrote: "wouldn't that make things easier for us? Right now it feels like we're writing a lot by hand, it's a crazy amount of work. Imagine, I'll have deputy heads and teachers and the students too. They all need lots of poses." A week earlier the flight engineer had written that a skeleton was something we "don't have and won't have". By one in the afternoon the characters had moved to a real skeleton, 13 bones. We decided not to take other people's ready-made animations: on our square body they look like someone else's.
In the afternoon I noticed: "right now the toilet flood disappears by itself. Didn't even see the janitor come." More on that below, in the mistake of the week.
In the evening there were five more rounds on the step. One clock for every movement of the body, the step comes down onto its support, the torso leans, the foot rolls from heel to toe.
Log entry: day 15
Poses now live in a file. You turn a pose around in the editor window, and it's already in the game. The first pose: the janitor leaning on the handle.
Each of the fifteen looks got its own walk. The cat sneaks in short, quick steps, the janitor waddles heavily. You know a character by the walk before you make out the face.
The hair started swinging by itself. It turned out Godot has more than twenty ready-made modifiers for bones, and we hadn't plugged in a single one. I wrote: "so why were we writing it by hand, we have a whole engine for this."
Paintings appeared in the classrooms, Malevich's "Black Square" among them, and teaching charts painted right on the wall. At first the lines were thick and black. I asked for them "in the tone of the walls, but darker, neat".
Room by room
Small things broke in funny ways too. In the pen cup on the teacher's desk one pen was called "Marker", but there's only one marker in the school, the one the story needs, and the check counts it by name. Eight classrooms gave nine markers. The pen was renamed "Felt-tip". The bin got eight walls and a bottom so trash would fall into it, and a kick started pushing it eight times in a row, once for each wall: the bin flew halfway across the room. And the hanging sign first turned to face the wall, so it looked as if not a single one had been built.
In the evening I asked for the yard: "a great big, huge, gigantic tree, low poly".
Log entry: day 16
In the morning I looked at the tree, said the oak was a total mess and stopped the flight engineer. I sent it references: an oak, a grove and even a birch. Then came five attempts: a poplar, a mushroom on a stump, twigs, boxes, rounded slabs. Along the way I wrote: "no, the leaves aren't right, need to simplify more, so it's rectangular shapes." The oak grew to eighteen meters and at the same time got three times cheaper.
On my reference the oak was red. The flight engineer decided the picture was about the shape: red oak is a species, and in summer it's green. I agreed.
Then I looked at it all together and wrote: "it came out stylish and in one rhythm, a design code with the characters and the game. We've got distinctive features now: simplicity and roundness on the cuboids." That became a rule: the first version of anything is made of rounded boxes.
The pose book grew from one to eight. The step came alive: the knee softens the impact, and no two steps in a row are the same. The body breathes.
In the afternoon I asked how to put the game in a browser. It didn't work: the web build ran out of memory, the school is too big. Instead the flight engineer built a Mac installer, signed and checked by Apple. 69.5 megabytes, "you can hand it to anyone".
Log entry: day 17
I sent my own renders of the poses, and the flight engineer found a sign error on the waist bone. All this time our runner had been leaning backward. The check asked for a number, not for which way.
I looked at the poses and wrote: "it's all crooked and wonky, unnatural. You should look yourself and compare it with what I sent you." Soon the flight engineer admitted it had been sending numbers without opening a single frame. Now we check poses with our eyes.
I asked whether we really couldn't download a ready-made skeleton and put our parts on it. The flight engineer downloaded a pack of 64 animations. The pack turned out to be for fighting, and we took one number from it: how far the knee bends as the leg swings forward.
In the evening I wrote: "we need to animate it, I want to watch it as animation. So the figure stands like that and moves a little, like in cartoons or like in Mortal Kombat: the fighters don't just stand there for nothing." Breathing appeared, the squat got deeper, and the book grew to 25 poses.
Every body now has its own breathing phase. The flight engineer wrote down why: forty people breathing in unison would read as a cult. And the first breathing was so faint that the measurement saw the movement, but the eye on the video didn't.
Log entry: day 18
Clouds over people's heads instead of speech. 48 drawn symbols for 117 lines. A little over a week later it'll turn out that symbols without words make no sense, but for now I like them.
Sometimes there are three clouds over heads at once, and that's on purpose. The chorus of witnesses says three lines in a row, "Wha? Wha-wha-wha! Where'd he go?", and one cloud for all of them would kill the joke.
Then I wrote: "this fringe or artifact on all the models really bugs me. Remove it. What is this leftover? Even the cat has it." The base fringe was removed from every body. The goth, it turned out, had two.
The same digging found that the handle of the janitor's broom was being cut like a sleeve, and a copy of it stuck out like a stick along his shoulder. And the cat's tail hung from the waist but grew out lower down, so it swung along a big arc.
And about the light: "What on earth is this, the ceiling looks like it's glowing." The spotlight from the window shone at too wide an angle. It was narrowed by more than half.
I also asked why we lay out the school all over again every time. The flight engineer measured it: at every launch the school takes 19 seconds to assemble, that's 50,857 nodes. The fix comes next week.
On the morning of September 3 the kid on the test stand learned to jump: crouched, pushed off, landed.
The body on the test stand
Log entry: day 19
In the morning: "the bench has an even shadow, and the character's is like a ragged line of little cubes. Don't make it so complicated…" The rule: whoever has a drawn shadow doesn't cast a real one. In the evening the shadows were ragged again, and I wrote "Whyyyyyy".
The squat was still breaking knees. It turned out the knee sat at a third of the leg instead of in the middle. The yard got a ring of paths, a pond with a footbridge, a gazebo and lamp posts.
The yard in four days
The first pond was dug as a bowl going down, and there was nothing in the frame: the bridge stands there, but there's no water under it. The yard floor is one solid slab, and the bowl went under it along with the water. The pond became a saucer on top of the lawn. And the string lights sag along a catenary, not a parabola: the flight engineer insisted the difference shows at the ends.
In the evening a check went around the whole school and took a frame in every place: classrooms, toilets, doors, windows. The whole school in twelve seconds.
And one honest line from me: "I don't understand how the animation works, or working with the skeleton and the clothes." The flight engineer dug in and found that the body's sizes had two sources of truth.
Thursday and Friday went by without commits. Everything done in those days will go into the main branch as one commit on September 7: 431 files.
Where it came from
Untitled Goose Game: the shopkeeper with the broom, symbol clouds, walks. Dieter Rams and Scandinavian style, like IKEA, for the furnishings. The Lebedev guide: hopscotch and Twister on the floor, one chalk wall per classroom. Malevich. Mortal Kombat and cartoons for an idle that stays alive. Manga, for sharp shadows: "We're keeping this kind of Manga style with sharp shadows."
The week in numbers
- 70commits
- 13bones in the skeleton
- 1 → 32poses in the book in four days
- 4.5times a second the janitor scraped the mop across his face
- 69.5 MBthe first Mac installer
- 431files in one commit