Patient 9 Entry 3

It's been a while since my last post. I've had a bit of a hiccup in production, and I wound up getting in a weird little personal rut. I find this odd, since I am still coming off a very strong tournament performance in Magic: the Gathering, coming in 19^th at Grand Prix Toronto at the beginning of December (my tournament report (here's the link) was even published on a big website!). You'd think that success in one field would motivate me in another, but that sadly doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm taking personal steps to create a productive and consistent routine. I'll go into more depth in the next few entries; for now, this is where Patient 9 is at . . .

- I've got basic walking and dialogue behaviors working for the player. They're sadly extremely buggy and unpolished. I'm looking to get my programmer friend to build on the.

- A loose story has been planned out. I should research into getting some type of spreadsheet program to help deal with all the branching paths in the game. I can only imagine how hard this process was for a game like Mass Effect 3 (speaking of which, I should try to get my hands on their tools – people are very forthcoming if you just ask them).

- Most of the mechanics and the character growth are planned. The following still needs to be done:

- A bit of research into the basic archetypes of mental conditions I want to touch on (e.g. Sociopath, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychopath (VERY similar to sociopath in a lot of regards), etc.).

- Ensure that decisions made by the player add a noticeable change to the game play. For example, if you pick a homicidal killer background you’ll have access to a murder knife (that the other backgrounds don't have access too), and will be capable of going toe-to-toe with other enemies in the asylum.

- Started talking to two buddies of mine asking for their help; one is a programmer and the other a musician. Things are going slow but hopefully they'll end up coming to the dark side in order to help me finish this game. If things go well they might even write a little piece on their experiences working on Patient 9.

- Graphic assets are coming along as I continue to work on a friend’s game (producing tiles for him).

In the next few days I'll be burning the midnight oil to complete as much of the story and mechanics as I can. Things always change when you start laying down the foundation of a game. The next blog post will be at the beginning of the week, and despite having a few tournaments in the next few days I'm feeling really good about the next week. In the future I'm hoping to pump out about 2 or 3 entries per week. I plan to start ranging my topics into areas such as tutorial articles or design matters.