This gets a little personal at one point, and I cringe when I re-read it, and didn’t really want to upload any of this, but I see it as a product of its time, and maybe in 10 years, I’ll rediscover this and it’ll be an interesting little read. Check out my game Bishop Chapter to see what I’m talking about below. Don’t @ me.

REFLECTIVE EVALUATION

Introduction.

It was a strange academic year, not just for me, but for everyone. Years of well-ingrained systems of working were challenged as a result of the ongoing global situations of 2020 and 2021. And like most, I was also personally affected during the pandemic. With systems that thrive on face-to-face contact going remote, there was always going to be some stutters along the way. And it was quickly evident that the group project we’d conceived of in the beginnings of this module was never going to work; not like it would have in 2019; not like it could have if working in isolation was all we had to worry about.

Moving to Individual.

I made the move away from the group project pretty late into the game and I immediately struggled with coming up with an idea that could work with what little time I had left – it would have been a month, maybe two. Having a part-time day job was also something I had to factor in. The idea struck me while I was showering one day and I got to work immediately on some concept sketching. The more ideas I noted down, the more hooked on the idea I got. Not long after this, the idea for my personal project was pretty well formed in my mind. And I wanted to do it right – to as best of a standard as I could.

When the deadline was extended the first time, I breathed a sigh of relief, and got to brainstorming on some more ideas now that I had the time to implement some substantial content. Working on it was tough, however, and a lot of the time, I was thinking rather than making. I’d just moved houses and now had to take a bus to and from work every day, and I was already pretty deep into a podcast about Ancient Egyptian history, but now I had the time and the excuse to listen to a whole lot of it. My game changed shape.

Production.

When it came to designing the game, I had a clear idea of how I wanted it to look, and the aesthetic of the in-game map. But the main issue around this time was that I had no idea when the deadline was – all I knew was that it would be after the assessment period taking place a month or two later. So, as clean as I wanted production to be, it was impossible to schedule with any accuracy. I did, however, keep a spreadsheet development log, and adjusted it as I needed to either remove certain tasks or add more, depending on what new information I received in regard to the deadline. I liked the idea of having a clean ‘best practice’ production pipeline going on for this project. But, due to aforementioned changes in how our well-ingrained working systems have been affected, this was not to be. I kept the schedule going for a time, and I referenced and detailed it a lot within my journal videos, but something had to give. I stopped using it, after a pattern of repeated failure to meet goals, due mostly to overestimating what free time I’d have to meet them.

But working rogue was always more my style in solo projects. My game was still changing every day, and so I had to accept that planning a schedule for it defeated what it was. I had to be content with my methods of production simply following the lines of “whatever time I have outside of my job”.

The Design.

Utilising some helpful online tutorials and forums, I set up a gorgeous post-processing module within the game that made everything look just how I’d pictured it. While building something complex like that, piece by piece, in Unreal Engine’s Blueprint system, it’s difficult not to learn a thing or two about how it works. Technically, I managed to accomplish something very unique in getting my game to look like my artwork. Being based on a comic series I produce in my free time, I’d only ever half-considered that my game could look anything like it. But, as I built the system shown in the tutorial, and combined with my existing knowledge of the engine, I was able to tweak just the right nodes, and modify just the right numbers to make it my own.

The cel shading now uses a tri-tonal system, where I’ve set the white, the black and the grey. The rendered outlines are styled according to how much I think they match my 2D linework. Going from Unreal’s default shaders and aesthetic, it was always quite jarring over the next few weeks to load up the game and once more be presented with how great everything was looking. The Egyptian architecture, the suburban street running down the middle of the map, the blocks of warehouses and flat buildings; it all came together before I knew it, and it made getting hooked on the game very easy.

Soon after this, I went from casually working on the game for a few hours a night in between some socialising with housemates and friends, to cancelling plans and outright refusing to make them, in favour of working on Bishop Chapter. I sketched things on small bits of paper while I was in work during the day, and noted down random ideas that struck me, to look into later when I got home. I’d brainstorm potential puzzles while in the shower, and repeat them over and over so that I could remember and note them down when I got out. I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and have to write down or draw an idea. Some would see this as concerning, but it’s just how I am when I sink my teeth into an idea. I personally really enjoy the process, and I love being obsessed with a project.

Some may not call it ‘best practice’ exactly, but it’s my own brand, and it yields results.

Clearer Picture.

Still without a deadline, it felt a lot like walking through the dark. I was working to include six puzzles in the game, never knowing if I’d really have time to make them all. If I had to cut one out, then I’d have to redesign one of the gateway consoles in the game to have one less podium. If I had to cut out two, then it didn’t really feel much like a puzzle game any more, as the map was way too huge for four puzzles. If I had even less time than that, then I’d really start to worry.

I told myself that it was all still about the mechanics. This was a technical project for me from the outset – it wasn’t meant to look that pretty, which is why I left the majority of the game untextured. It also wasn’t meant to be a fully polished, shippable game – I was always aiming for a test build; a tech demo. My focus was on the puzzles, their mechanics, and programming a short and sweet little journey that had a beginning – waking up in a cell and breaking free – and an end – gathering all the trophies to open the gate and escape the compound. It wasn’t a complex story by any means, but it was nice having some narrative threads to contextualise the puzzles. It made the whole thing feel more grounded, and so, the notion that I’d have to lose at least one really bothered me.

Luckily, the deadline announcement came, and I looked at it optimistically – plenty of time to finish my six puzzles and even spend some time making them look nicer. And yet, corners still had to be cut so that I could meet that deadline – a show of just how over-ambitious my project was. I still think I designed the map to be too large, I think some of the puzzles were too complex, and I think I spent too much time working on things that ultimately didn’t fit into my personal brief. An example being the texturing of the opening Anubis room, which took up almost two weeks of development.

Rhythm.

In the beginning of the project, my workflow was scattered. Ironically, these were the weeks and months that I was working to a schedule. But when I scrapped the schedule, I took on a new schedule; one dictated by my day job. In other words, I’d work on Bishop Chapter whenever I wasn’t in work. That line of thinking carried me through the more challenging months where the meat of production lay. I’d get home from work, make some food, and get to work. When the time of night divided by the time I’d set my alarm equaled sheer horror, I’d get myself to bed. Apart from work, I didn’t go anywhere. Apart from my colleagues and housemates, I didn’t see anyone. I hadn’t been home to the family since Christmas due to catching Covid, followed by a nasty flu.

The production time I lost to illness really irked me, but it ironically worked out even better for me, because I had ten days off work that I spent entirely on Bishop Chapter. No morning alarm meant no reason to stop. That was my schedule, that was my rhythm.

In the past, I’ve worked on a few public game jams – the ones that are set over two or three days. During those days, I usually let myself get so little sleep, I feel absolutely dire in the moment, with only the project spurring me on. Time vanishes and, very quickly, so does the tiredness. It’s an unhealthy burst of energy that spawns a neat little project to slot into the portfolio. And after sleeping for a whole day, I usually look back on the experience with pride and fondness, and look forward to the next one.

I don’t yet know how I’ll feel after Bishop Chapter, but I’ll get there in a few days’ time. This burst of sleep neglect, social ignorance, and constant screen exposure is likely to do some damage. Nothing that forty-eight hours of sleep won’t fix…

But it’s my rhythm. And it’s a far cry from anything resembling the intended definition of ‘best practice’.

Closing Thoughts.

I wish I’d had more time to draw some concept art for Bishop Chapter. I started off pretty strong with the Egyptian art, and the moodboards, and the puzzle room concepts, but the days I’d planned to spend on concept art in the original schedule just kept getting pushed back because the modelling and the texturing was taking so long to tick off the list.

Eventually, too much time had passed and I had to move onto implementing the puzzles, or else the game would have just existed on paper as a full and detailed design document, and nothing more. I think that choice was the best one to make at the time, and it allowed me to spend a lot of time getting to know the puzzles. A lot of them changed and their core mechanics morphed as I made them. Working to a schedule might have done more harm than good in these cases.

Through all this, I’ve come to realise that my best practice is my own. The way I work has always been the same, even before the global pandemic, and it’s not likely to change while the world is the way that it is. Yes – production methods that are well-ingrained in us have been impacted. Yes – group projects just aren’t the same done through a screen. Yes – lacking a concrete deadline or a goal is just a by-product of the situation. The greatest challenge of this project has been adapting to all of this. But being able to fall back on my own personal best practice is what’s conjured Bishop Chapter into being.

And after I sleep for a year I’m sure I’d do it all over again.

Word count: 2,000

 

POST-MORTEM

Introduction.

They say you should never write anything with a particular theme in mind. Just write it and the theme will present itself, even if you may not see it at first. Either way, any half-decent piece of writing will deal with at least one theme. In the modern era, this old rule can also apply to film and even video-games now.

Games speak a visual language most of the time, but that doesn’t mean their themes and ideas can’t be read just as well as a book’s.

What Went Well and What Didn’t.

I loved documenting this project in video form. I’ve done so many projects with long, gruelling text-based journals, I wanted to shake this one up a little. And I was spending so much time in the engine, it was impossible to screenshot and comment on development at every stage – breakdown videos where I just talked about my process and experience were a lot more personal and effective, I found.

This also tied in well with my marketing for the game. The Instagram account I started for Bishop Chapter was quite popular. Or, at least more than I’d expected. I received a fair few personal messages and comments, and even got to talking with one or two other indie developers about the game. The YouTube channel fell as flat as I’d thought it would, but that was the one side of it that I kept purely for posterity. It’s a great forum for collecting the videos and presenting them in a neat way, while still retaining the personality of the game itself.

I shared a lot more of the in-between stuff on Instagram, utilising the story feature fairly frequently. Every Instagram story is archived on the profile under the Stories icon (for reference). I received, on average, around ten likes per post – oftentimes more than this. I experimented with hashtags and I got a modest amount of attention from fellow developers. So that aspect of it went very well.

The music of Bishop Chapter also worked out very well in the finished game. Both friends of mine who I’ve collaborated with before, David and Martin provided me with very different-feeling tracks, and it was very enjoyable to rope in some external people to work on the game. David’s main theme melody that he re-used as a motif in all of the tracks he made for me gave the game a real sense of identity and continuity, and Martin’s melodic hooks in the heavier tracks were on loop in my head for days and days thanks to constant testing in puzzles where they repeat endlessly!

I regret that I was unable to properly test the game with real people and implement feedback. I had a similar issue with my previous game, which was a 2D side-scroller. I just couldn’t find people who would test it. Or, rather, those I could find didn’t have the right hardware to run the game. I couldn’t have anyone over to play it due to restrictions and the testing phase just didn’t really materialise in any way. I wish it had, so that I could have talked about that as part of my development process, but I also think that I spent enough time with the game, I was able to locate and fix a lot of the issues myself.

I was also a little apprehensive to show the game to anyone I knew personally at first, because I felt quite a personal connection with it. It was a long time before I made it known to my friends that the Bishop Chapter Instagram account had anything to do with me. There’s a pretty big reason for that which now makes a lot of sense to me.

Looking Back.

I was working on the final puzzle in Bishop Chapter when I realised my game was about death.

I was thinking, and it just struck me. It felt so obvious, because the first puzzle of the game was inspired by and named after the literal guardian of the afterlife, based on the scales he’d use to weigh a deceased person’s heart to decide whether they can pass on into the afterlife. I brushed it off as a cool idea, then proceeded to brainstorm the other puzzles in the game, trying to tie them into Egyptian mythology in the same ways. I even joked about the subtext of the Anubis puzzle in the Game Design Document, and how it could be interpreted as such. At the time I’d written that, the notion still hadn’t dawned on me.

When I play my game to test it, it gives me a weird eerie feeling, every time. I put that down to how I based the wide open areas and the monochromatic plain walls on the concept of Liminal Spaces to evoke that uneasy feeling from the player, but there was something more that I couldn’t put my finger on. A few weeks ago, it finally struck me.

On Death.

Alone in this open, empty compound, with an ominous blood-red sky, wandering around at a snail’s pace, with just a torch to light the vast amount of shadows, reading creepy disembodied notes, unearthing evidence of former human activity, and generally just finding more and more emptiness as you go… It’s such a creepy vibe to me. I know it’s all down to how the game is unpopulated, and the only assets around are those pertaining to puzzles, and that I could make the map feel a lot more homely given enough time. But, all the same, it got me thinking.

The puzzle that follows Anubis is Nun – the lake puzzle. It delves into the mythology surrounding the Egyptian creation myth – eight primordial beings who created Atum, the life giver, who went on to create other deities and eventually humanity itself. This was a time where there really was nothing. Nobody existed. Just the endless dark waters of Nun. It’s a very unsettling, death-like vibe.

Medjed is the maze puzzle that sees the player lost in the most liminal space section of the game. Again, it makes me feel very uneasy when I play it. One could read into it as a metaphor for trying to find your way through life, or maybe through the afterlife. The red eyes watching you could represent judgement. Stealing the overseer’s statues is a sin, and if you’re caught, you’re punished.

Benben is the rotating column puzzle that sees the player navigating spinning platform rings, trying to gather statuettes and slot them into the correct boxes in order to stop the rings from speeding up even more; in order to return to a normal, manageable pace – perhaps a metaphor for life’s many challenges, or the trials of one’s former life?

Alright, I’m reaching. Maybe it’s not about death exactly. But what struck me was the idea that I could read into every puzzle in the game and dig up some kind of metaphor about death, or an aspect of it, and it wouldn’t be too far from plausible to think it was intentional if this were any other game. Perhaps that says more about me and my current state of mind than anything else.

Don’t let that statement worry you…

Background.

Ever since my father passed away during the pandemic in 2020, I’ve thought a lot about death. It’s strange how that happens. I’ve thought about it before, of course, as we all do at one point or another, but, without sounding too macabre, and without meaning to make readers of this uncomfortable by any means, I’ve thought particularly hard about death since that event. I feel comfortable opening up about that here, as I don’t think it’s something exclusive to me.

But that’s one of the reasons I think maybe there are some subconsciously intentional themes of it in this game – this is the first project I’ve worked on properly since my dad passed, and maybe there is some part of me that’s channeling that a little. I’m not sure how else to put it, but I think it’s a very relevant thing to bring up for this project, because perhaps it really is the core of the idea. I’m just trying to be honest and true to the idea of a post-mortem.

I do find it quite interesting to consider, however. 

Praise the Sun.

Realising this, I made a few changes to my plans for the final puzzle of the game, Khonsu – the gate puzzle. This puzzle was teased to the player since the beginning of the game. A set of gates looming tall over the player and clearly illustrating the objective of the game – escape through here!

But I added something that’s fairly subtle in the grand scheme of things, and I can’t help but think it’s a perfect fit, and ties the death theme together quite well… Allow me to explain.

So, the sun is a constant presence in the game – it’s huge, and it’s bright, and the rest of the game generally deals in light and darkness for its entire duration. The player is even given a torch – their own personal light source for when things get dark – a soul, perhaps? Is the torch representative of spiritual energy? Perhaps it was confiscated when they were trapped inside the cell, and reclaiming it was a step towards moving on to the afterlife – in the sense that if you want it, you have to take it.

The sun was also very central to the ancient Egyptians – they had various sun deities at different points and the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten even believed his father was the sun, which prompted him to break away from the tried-and-true gods, choosing instead to worship the Aten – the sun disk – as his one true god. This was believed to be the first case of monotheism in history, as the pharaoh also forced the people of Egypt to convert to Atenism for a time. When he died, his name was scrubbed from most records, his sun city was destroyed, his treasures and possessions were crammed into his son Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the people went back to the old gods, essentially shunning Aten forever.

My fascination with the history of Akhenaten is what prompted the creation of an Aten puzzle. I came up with the name first, before deciding how it would work, but the obvious path was to make it about light. My point in saying all of this is to illustrate that there was a clear subconscious recurring theme I’d put into the game revolving around the sun, and light. Not just in the one puzzle.

Moving On.

So, to circle back to what subtle feature I added as a result of my realisation that my game might be about death – it was a sun. Right at the end of the game, when the gates are opened and the final puzzle is complete, it triggers a sun to spawn at the edge of the map. When the player gets low enough on the ground to see the sun, the actual real sun in the sky is blocked by mountains and so this sun seems to be the only sun – however it wasn’t there until the player triggered the gate to open.

As the player walks towards the sun, and the credits roll, and the calm music plays, it becomes clear that the sun isn’t a sun – it’s a sphere of light, hovering over the ground just up ahead. The game forces the player to walk towards it, and when they get close enough, the game is told to fade to black. The credits continue rolling and that’s the end of the game.

When I first sat down and playtested this, I was hit with a wave of emotion upon reaching the ending, and I can’t explain it apart from bringing it back around to the notion that you play as someone in between life and death. After winning favour from Anubis and gaining freedom from the cell, the player finds a torch – their light. After this, they are presented with a series of trials that can be analysed as being linked to different aspects of life and death. Upon completion of each puzzle, the player is granted “escape” from the compound, where they walk towards a large bright sphere and fade to black – moving on into the afterlife.

So, perhaps it has a lot to do with my state of mind in recent months. Or perhaps you see these connections too. But any strange feelings I’ve had while playtesting Bishop Chapter now make sense to me. And I think I’ve tacked on a perfect ending; or at least better than the original ending of simply escaping the compound and fading to black.

But, much like with all creative works, players can interpret Bishop Chapter however they wish. This is simply the meaning it holds for me. And I find comfort in knowing that most of it was subconscious. Comfort is nice.

In Summary.

I thoroughly enjoyed my experience working on Bishop Chapter. It evolved a lot during its development, but I’m proud of the direction it ultimately took, as it now holds some personal meaning for me. It also feels a little bit like a release of pent up creative energy. I suppose I’ve had a lot on my mind, and seeing as how I live day-to-day with my mind, I ended up putting a lot of it in this game. It shouldn’t surprise me in the way it does.

I’m thankful for the extended period of time I was given to work on this, but much like the main character of the game, I’m ready to move on. The time I’ve spent alone and in my own head when working on this has been long enough. But, all the same, I’ll likely archive this away into the portfolio with some mixed feelings. 

Now that I’ve vocalised all of my thoughts around the game’s ties with death and my own personal loss, I think that makes it all the more real, and I’ll always think of it whenever I see it sitting in my portfolio.

Word count: 2,360