From joe’s bsky @joewintergreen.com on Bluesky
It's very cool at work right now that we employ two level designers, and as a result, every day new cool maps or updates to existing maps come into the game. It has always seemed to me that this is how that should work and yet it rarely is
I wanted to write a bit about the past few months working on Paula and figured why not make a topic about those good moments?
It was just a year ago that I’ve finally started involving other people in Paula. And working on that project in the past few months with my wonderful friends and team members has been an incredibly satisfying and fulfilling experience.
Having shipped a few things this year helped a lot too. I feel way more confident making plans and I’ve gotten decent practice in managing scope. We even finally dogfooded a bunch of the systems in the game, like Dialogue and I/O.
I wanna give a shout out to the three people that have been helping out on level design: silentw, roberta and Mattklirp. They made three levels for the demo and it’s been incredible watching them happen in real time. This allowed me to truly focus on making the game itself feel good while also providing a decent source engine I/O scripting framework and helping when issues come up.
small sidenote: when i first played Matt’s current iteration of the map, I completely missed a spot in the level. Considering how we’ve been wanting to do a bit of that metroidvania level design, it was pretty neat to find an area I didn’t know about before!
Me, silent and roberta have already gotten the chance to collaborate on BOLD: Networked Newt Action earlier this year. The team synergy we had on that project was unreal and I’m truly grateful for that experience. So I’m really happy they’re contributing to Paula too!
Papyesh, someone who used to frequent the same polish rayman fan game forum as I did in 2009 has made a floating platform and gunblade models. He even indulged in my idea to do a specular workflow a bit differently than vanilla unreal. and now we have meshes that look really cool!
And also, we finally did some things with narrative! Lithish has written his very first piece of dialogue script and I sure am never going to forget how truly satisfying it felt to actually have the characters talk with each other and have clear and distinct personality traits. Not to mention I finally added the ability for actors to navigate in dialogue sequences. That was pretty good, and it’s already letting us do more complex things!
Also can I just say that Lithish absolutely fuckin rules as a narrative designer. We’re so on the same wavelength when it comes to our narrative inspirations, that I feel incredibly comfortable just letting him cook.
After doing a lot of narrative and gameplay exploration in the past year, it is feeling so good to finally get a tangible snippet of how a mid-game Paula adventure would be. It’s incredible being able to see how it all is coming together.
and honestly
collaborating with my wonderful friends made me yearn for a good game studio working experience. This past year has also taught me a lot about what it means to direct a game. A lot of the self-doubt that was in my head is now gone. And now I’m in this phase where I am truly feeling confident about being able to bring this project over the finish line, given adequate budget and time.
Finally,
I really am truly grateful for every single one of my friends that’s been helping me out, that I am motivated to try get us jobs. the publishing market may look pretty dire, but we’re still gonna try! gotta fire those shots, yknow.
Anyways, that’s all I wanted to say. What started as a short response, turned into wanting to express the gratitude towards the folks that stuck with me. I love my friends, for real.