Dreams of Gold — Early Postmortem

Context

Every person and every project has different motivations. Sometimes the motivation is education, learning through doing. Other times, there's a financial incentive. Still again, there is competition. For this person and this project however, the motivation was entirely personal. I'd like to say I was striving for self-actualization here, but frankly it's more self-indulgence.

You see, back in 2017 or thereabouts I began a one-to-one-and-a-half year project. That project, Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex is, unfortunately, still Coming Soon. It's a different discussion  as to why, but there's nothing more optimistic than a developer starting into an empty text project. In that time frame I finished one other game, a very short jam game. It's nothing special, but you can find it on my itch profile if you're so inclined. I found myself needing to finish a game. I could not justify taking any time away from DGR in the interim however, so I just plugged along.

Early this year, there was a severe illness and later death in my immediate family. That has resulted in a lot of changes in my circumstances. Some good, most bad. The long and the short of it, is that I have made very little progress since late February. I am mostly settled into new ways of being now and found myself able to start doing some dev work again. I resolved to make a small, narrative game. At about the same time I also finally got around to Disco Elysium, the influence of which will probably be quite obvious.

In one of those supremely serendipitous moments in life, right as I was beginning to put the idea for Dreams of Gold together, I saw a random reddit post advertising a new game jam. There was no theme, just narrative games. Great! Even better, it allowed works made previously, so the week or so of work I had already put it would not disqualify me. So, here I am, with a game entered into the Narrative Design Jam.

Dream of Gold

Dreams of Gold is ultimately a game about finding the way out. This is accomplished through an increasingly incoherent slaughter of the memory of J.R.R. Tolkien. It's a familiar way to get there and back again, after all. It's true that the end does leverage a lazy and overused trope, but participatory media makes even banality more palatable.

The game follows a nameless Halfling player character and some Dwarven adventurers as they seek to retrieve a treasure and restore honor. Gameplay is standard choice-based narrative, with a simple D6 system for stat checks. There are three stats which get modified by the thoughts you acquire along the way. Much of the narrative follows traditional branching narrative, but I don't ever see myself making a game without at least some recourse to floating modules. For a good treatment on that and related topics, I cannot recommend Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games enough.

To say much more would spoil the whole thing. It's certainly a bit of a problem when the central gimmick of your game is a spoiler. The same difficulty affected Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. I now more understand the pain of the A Sharp team more acutely. Luckily for me, I never really expected anything to come of Dreams of Gold.

Production

Just like my previous jam game, I decided to reach for what I knew tech-wise. That, of course, was the engine I used for DGR, but massively stripped down. It didn't support the Disco Elysium style rolls, so that had to be  hacked together. Everything else in the game on  the other hand was already there. In terms of engineering, there was little to do.

Music and sound, like all jam games, tend to involve raids into the creative commons. So it was for Dreams of Gold as well. I did manage to make one sound effect personally in Bfxr though, so that's something.

The interesting thing, though, is art. As most people in this space are no doubt keenly aware, recent advances in AI have opened a lot of new possibilities. Art was always my Achilles Heel; the sort of games I want to make rarely justify the art budget, so they never get beyond prototypes on my hard drive. For some perspective, the art in DGR is a lot better than the art in Dreams of Gold, but in terms of quantity, it's fairly close. It took month and I spent thousands of dollars for DGR. There's more I want, too, but the money just isn't there. Now, I got a very good deal on the art. It should have cost more than twice what it did. Moreover, mid-4-figures is really nothing in terms of game budget. However to me, it's a very large number. My desktop, and main machine, was built in 2010. I was planning on using revenue from the game to fix that, but here we are. For Dreams of Gold, I paid the lads at Artbreeder $9 for 100 credits (my 2010 computer definitely cannot run Stable Diffusion). I used about 20 of them. Again, bespoke art is much better in every way. But this game will never make me anything, let alone cover the price of 30 high res background images.

To quote myself from a recent local talk about "How to Make Games At Home for Cheap," there are significant legal and moral issues involving AI art. I don't really want to wade into that other than to say that there are absolutely no plans to put AI art into DGR. For a jam game, why not. Even the absolute worst case isn't that bad, since I'm basically judgement proof. There are some benefits to having nothing in this world.

Like every jam game, corners had to be cut. About three scenes that were planned were not executed. I even telegraphed the goblin mountain, only to solve that with a bit of Deus Ex Machina. Though that selfsame Deus happened to be useful for the overarching story, but, again, spoilers innit? Additionally some polish went unapplied: a simple options menu with a volume slider, in particular. The text has been spell-checked, but also barely proofread. There are no doubt a number of problems given that there are just over 30, 000 words. I'm planning to make a tiny patch to address some of the more glaring faults, but the goblins will never be realized.

Reception

It remains to be seen how the game is received. I sent it to a bunch of friends and posted it to my ghost-town of a Twitter. I might flog it a little more. However, at present, basically no one has downloaded it. That's rather apropos given some of the themes here.

Naturally I'd love it if a million people played it or whatever. That wasn't really the goal here, though. You know I once made another game for personal reasons, decades ago. It has never been played by another person besides myself, though I think two humans saw me doing work on it. It never will be played, either. It's not even part of my backup, so it's one disaster away from fading into the æther. I'm not so sure it's even possible to compile anymore, anyway. Dreams of Gold is already infinitely more popular, so I'll take that!

I'm frankly happy with how things have gone. I'm doing dev work again. I finished something. And, with any luck, I managed to quarantine some more negative feelings into this game, rather than allowing them to spill overmuch into DGR.

Future

As mentioned, I will issues a small patch. I've already begun work on that, actually. I had intended to get it out this weekend, but it may be a bit longer. After that, unless in some unlikely scenario it should happen to light the world on fire, I am going to call it finished. The game did what it was supposed to do, and I'm pleased, on the whole. DGR needs to be finished as well though, and the sooner the better. We all know how it ends of course, but I have little choice but to pursue my own foolish dream of gold.