I’ve been in a bit of a crisis regarding Phenomenon 32. Even though at times I’ve been really satisified with it, now I felt that it was just too simplistic, and that it ought to be split up into two different games. I played around with Construct, creating a little demo that is about as far away from the current version of Phenomenon 32 as humanly possible. But I wasn’t satisfied with that, either, and got stuck in something of a cycle. A cycle of frustration, that is.
Today I spent some time working on the original version, and finally made some good progress. It’s still much more work than I’d like it to be – going back and re-doing everything in so much more detail has expanded the game’s content quite a bit. Which is good, I guess, but I want to finish this damn thing and get back to my film and novel. If I was better at Construct and had a good pixel artist… (Verena is a great artist, but doesn’t have a huge amount of experience at this type of graphics. She did some tests, which were quite good, but I also don’t want to burden her with this, though she has more than enough enthusiasm for it.) But, as I said, I’m not particularly great at using Construct, though I’m still better at that than at any other game maker.
Today we shall be continuing our pen-and-paper role-playing campaign. This is something that I enjoy a lot, and am fairly good at; the players are wonderful and their characters extremely eccentric. I’m not going to say anything about the story, because I’m pretty certain it will be a novel someday, but I should really post about the game mechanics and my approach to game mastering. It’s one topic where I actually feel confident that I have something useful to contribute.
