After finishing up the jam version of my SNES adventure game Borderline last week, I went travelling for the weekend to visit some friends, have some drinks and play some board games. I’ve come back refreshed and I now have a week off work that I’m going to be using to finish up some personal projects. So first things first is my post jam version of Borderline.

I’ve had a good session today with 3 key improvements:

30 SECOND TIMER

It’s good that I’m not in the Comp or Jam and just the Extra category, because the most obvious thing when I finished the games was that the 10 second timer was too short for the game I built. I like the idea of being forced to switch between these two worlds on a regular interval, however adventure games are a slower more considered type of experience. 10 seconds was too short to engage with it without being constantly stressed and frustrated. I’ve switched it to 30 seconds and if that still doesn’t work I may even settle on 60 seconds. I’m sad to throw out the theme but the quality of the game is the most important thing.

PROPER WORDWRAP

It’s not that complicated to do proper word wrap, however I was having so many problems with text handling during the jam I had to finish without it. So I was glad to go back and sort that today, so all of the dialogue is now much more readable. This has introduced a new small bug with weird extra characters appearing at the bottom of the screen, so I’ll need to address that tomorrow.

CHARACTER PORTRAITS

The biggest thing I didn’t have time for during the jam was character portraits during the dialogue sequences. This makes it easier to understand who’s talking, but I also think it makes the story text feel more engaging. This took a fair bit of time since I needed to make the face avatars and there was a lot of messing palettes to get them to show up correctly.

I’m going to do one more session tomorrow, I’ve got a wish list of additional things I want to try and get done to improve the experience. At the end of tomorrow wherever I’m at, I’m going to call that the finished release version. I’ve also found a nice HTML5 SNES emulator so I might try and get web version running too.