'Splody

Things are supposed to go all 'splody in game development, right?

So I totally forgot my wife was having knee surgery this week.  Add a five-year old and a full time job to the mix, and....well.  I haven't worked on it for 3 days.  And the due date is...um...tomorrow?  Well then.

Fortunately, I kept the scope of my game really small.  So writing the text is the hardest part.  There are no big puzzles or complex inventories to keep track of in the game.  Texture can make its way through those systems with a lot of pushing, but the engine is really about letting the words flow.  

My game is based on the early life of science popularizer Carl Sagan, without trying to be completely biographical.   I'm cribbing pretty heavily from Wikipedia to get inspiration.  Then I tweak the content to make it more approachable for a contemporary audience.  Dr. Sagan was four during the 1939 World's Fair, and I just don't have time to try to get that atmosphere right and tell the story I want to.  So I'm going with what I know, hand-waving the differences, and hopefully staying true enough to the realities.

The game's interactions are based around cognitive development in young children: how to learn about the world as you encounter it.   So the controls are based around different ways of thinking: there's wondering, reasoning, imagining, doubting, and so on.  As they player goes on, they pick up new action words that reflect more sophisticated ways of thinking.  That means the story's narrative language grows more complex as you play.