Keepsake Wrap Report

Finally, another challenge we decided to take on was to address the difficulty level of adventure games. We found that people got stuck many times when playing them, either because they missed a door, or some background element or puzzle was just too complicated. This can sometimes cause frustration, and the players usually either stop playing or look on the Internet for a walkthrough, many of which are poorly conceived or hard to follow. Our approach was to give a clear in-game walkthrough to guide the player through every step of the story and locations as well as to give hints, and ultimately, even solve the puzzle itself. This gave us control over the quality of the walkthrough, and the feature was made available through a help button inside the interface so as not to spoil the game for people wanting to solve it on their own.

The best decision we made regarding development was to use freely available open source software. This allowed us to get to a prototype quickly, and saved us an enormous amount of money.

We knew from the start that we were going for a hybrid 2D/3D engine. To tackle this in a timely fashion, we relied on quite a lot of open source material. We used the Crystal Space open source 3D engine, which was already advanced when we started and had quite a lot of ongoing development. Backgrounds and animations were essentially textures and animated textures on planes, while the characters were fully 3D. We used Ogg Vorbis for music compression and Ogg Theora for video compression, which were also open source material. Despite all the open source material, we still had quite a lot of development to accommodate the specifics of the game. Nevertheless, we were very satisfied with our experience using open source material, and it allowed us to put more focus on the game itself rather than on the technology.

Development Timeline

The project began roughly two and a half years ago, and we initially aimed for a two-year development schedule. As it turned out, it took a good six months more than we had anticipated. The reasons for the slip were mainly that once the game got running, we had to tweak several puzzles and locations as well as a variety of gameplay elements. When making a game and aiming for quality content, it's very hard to know beforehand what will work exactly as planned, and if something doesn't work, you can't get around either fixing it or removing it altogether. Even though we were largely self-financed, we had experience in game development and knew that slips were all too common and so we had already made provisions for this kind of situation.

Changes and Enhancements

The initial game concept called for a livelier, more dynamic and interactive world, which is something we removed pretty early on because of time constraints. Other than small tweaks to various game elements, we ended up being very close to our initial design in terms of what the game feels like and how the world looks.

One of the only large changes was with optional conversations. Initially, they were supposed to happen at pre-scripted locations, but this turned out to cause pacing issues where parts of the game still had too much talk and others not enough. We ended up making them happen more randomly, depending on the context and at defined intervals to sort of "fill the void" better when traveling.

Major Challenges

Keepsake presented several challenges throughout its development. The biggest was that we were only four people making a title that had to compete with the quality of pretty much any other adventure game out there. We made a very conscious effort to not overshoot or aim for the moon in terms of amount of features. This way, we could keep our whole focus on the essentials, and try to do them well. Another big help in making sure we could produce the title with the quality we wanted was that our financial provisions allowed us a good buffer time-wise so that we would never have to push a poor game out the door.

Another challenge, which was unforeseen, was dealing with multiple publishers. Since we didn't opt to put all of our eggs in the same basket and go for a single worldwide publishing deal, we had to deal with every publisher on QA, localization and other issues. This caused quite a lot of management overhead on an already small team. In the end, to keep everything on schedule, we decided to outsource some tasks we had planned to do internally.

Finally, Keepsake featured a significant amount of text in the conversations, upwards of 30 thousand words. This made localization more costly and longer to complete, which put a lot of pressure on us to meet our final deadline since this happens at the very end of production. A few sleepless nights were pretty much all we could do to meet this challenge successfully, and in the end, we are proud of the depth it adds to the game.

Best Decisions

The best decision we made regarding development was to use freely available open source software. This allowed us to get to a prototype quickly, and saved us an enormous amount of money. Although open source software is sometimes somewhat "rough around the edges", our programmer had no problem making up for various flaws.

Another great decision we made was the incorporation of an in-game walkthrough and hint system. Because our game featured both the classical adventure style of gameplay and puzzles, the possibility to skip parts where you got stuck proved to be invaluable.