It’s been some time since we’ve post­ed any­thing on our blog, a symp­tom of hav­ing too much to do and too lit­tle time. How­ev­er, we rec­og­nize that run­ning com­plete­ly silent leaves the com­mu­ni­ty a bit in-the-dark about what we’re spend­ing time doing. Doing that in gen­er­al isn’t good for our morale, because we real­ly like let­ting peo­ple in on what we’re work­ing with. To that end, I’m writ­ing this series of arti­cles that explain what our work­flow process is and specif­i­cal­ly how we get con­tent into the game. This will be an ongo­ing series as time per­mits, but we will make an effort to keep them short and sweet with lots of pictures!

For the first arti­cle in this series I want to talk about how we start the long road of cre­at­ing con­tent for Delver’s Drop be they ene­mies, char­ac­ters, objects, items, what­ev­er. All these things start in ideas sheets, and these sheets live in an orga­nized doc­u­ment struc­ture… most­ly. This post will defy the descrip­tion of this series I *just* gave in that there aren’t a ton of pic­tures sadly.

As you can see from this snap­shot, all of our plan­ning (and lat­er, game data) is stored and man­aged in Google Dri­ve. We use Dri­ve to han­dle *every­thing* that we work with, from Delver’s Drop con­tent to Kick­starter backer ful­fil­ment to con­tract work and oth­er ran­dom game ideas. Dri­ve is at time tricky to deal with, par­tic­u­lar­ly since it has no fun­da­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­ture; the fold­er tree I see when logged into my Google account may be dif­fer­ent from Baker’s or Coby’s fold­er struc­ture depend­ing on how each of us has arranged and col­or-cod­ed it. Like­wise, there is the neb­u­lous “My Dri­ve” area that is a catchall for all doc­u­ments that I have access to. Regard­less, the auto­mat­ic revi­sion his­to­ry, rel­a­tive ease of shar­ing, and col­lab­o­ra­tive edit­ing have proven to be invaluable.

DD Content Design — It All Starts Here

This fold­er is the core of where we store our ideas. Each sheet tends to have an “own­er” in the sense that there is some­one who has cre­at­ed it and tends to shep­herd mod­i­fi­ca­tions to it, but most doc­u­ments are edit­ed col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly. We use this fold­er to store our stubbed in ideas for spe­cif­ic con­tent, as well as gen­er­al doc­u­men­ta­tion for use in-game. For exam­ple, here’s a screen­shot of the spread­sheet we ref­er­ence when set­ting the heights of var­i­ous objects in-game (you can expand for a more detailed view):

This is very impor­tant for nor­mal­iza­tion, to make sure every­thing is using the same base­line. We also have sheets for the var­i­ous AI behav­iors, room com­po­si­tions, weapon data, etc. These sheets may mir­ror our actu­al game data sheets to a degree, but all the con­tent in them is stubbed in based on var­i­ous goals. Let’s take the ene­mies sheet for example:

We take pass­es at this sheet adding ideas, putting in tem­po­rary names, but most impor­tant­ly try­ing to define where a par­tic­u­lar ene­my fits in the land­scape of Delver’s Drop. Do we need more ele­men­tal crea­tures? Are we too light on ene­mies for Zone 2, or maybe too heavy in Zone 5? What role does this ene­my serve — quick harass­er, sneaky gotcha, dam­age-resis­tance brute, heavy hit­ter, or annoy­ing lit­tle pain? Names and descrip­tions are merged togeth­er or split apart as need­ed and then final­ized so that the art pipeline can start and we can begin set­ting up the AI and plan­ning for their use in room designs.

This same process is fol­lowed for var­i­ous oth­er pieces of the game. Traps are cre­at­ed with an eye toward how they can be used in a puz­zle set­up or to define the move­ment design in a par­tic­u­lar room… and of course in con­sid­er­a­tion of how much the play­er will tear their hair out. Objects each serve a pur­pose apart from sim­ple dec­o­ra­tion, unless of course their pur­pose *is* to be dec­o­ra­tive. Pots and bar­rels of var­i­ous visu­al types serve as light con­tain­ers with lit­tle loot but are fun to break. Crates are mid­line con­tain­ers with coinage and pos­si­ble some items. Chests of var­i­ous types exists for increas­ing­ly bet­ter amounts of loot.

That’s it for now! Next time up, we’ll cov­er the art pipeline.