Arbiter - Monthly Recap - July 2024
Greetings Tarnished!
Finally got to start the Elden Ring DLC after narrowly escaping PC Hell last month, and it's been a lot of fun! I hadn't even thought about the performance gains with games, but I gotta say loading into ER within 3-5s feels really fucking good after being so used to it taking like 30. We truly are the master race!
What's better is that ER has also been an absolute godsend for references, so it's been super inspiring to slowly work my way through and just take everything in. You know what else I've been taking in? The Spear of the Impaler. On loop. For like 3 hours. And you know what? He's right. Mother truly shouldn't have lordship sanctioned such a disgraceful being as myself. I was not worthy. Still fun though.
Spreading the Gospel
I spent the majority of the month doing something a bit different! Now that I have a pretty good workflow for how I want to realize the game's levels, I'm gearing up to do a big concept art push with a much stronger sense of direction. Part of this process will include bringing on my art lead in a more involved role, which means sharing my overall vision for the project.
The thing is, I haven't really ever sat down and put together a digestible document containing all of the important information about the game. I've had a separate GDD and script for a while now, but they haven't really been updated to reflect my current vision (and they're a little more obtuse than I'd like). I've also made liberal use of OneNote over the years, which is really great for keeping an organized set of notes for the game, but aren't really ideal for sharing with collaborators. So, this month I set out to fix that by finally writing what I'm calling the Arbiter Bible.
This document is essentially a simple breakdown of every component of the game, including mechanics, characters, story, audio, demographics, marketing strategy, etc. In taking this stuff a bit more seriously lately, I found I really needed a simple, digestible way of helping collaborators lock into what I'm trying to achieve. Again, this is ideally something you'd do much earlier in a project, but here we are. Better late than never!
With that though, I unfortunately don't have much to show this month. I wrapped up remaking my textures in Substance pretty quickly before jumping into the bible, so that's been my major focus as of late. What's been great about writing this though is how it's really organized my thoughts for the project and given me a lot of clarity about how everything connects. I've solved tons of lingering problems that have sat in the back of my mind for years, as well as tossed the ones that just weren't working. I had an idea of how it would all look together before, but it's a different level of clarity when you concisely write it all down.
My hope here is to fully bring in my art lead so they know everything I'm thinking, and work together to really flesh out the game's aesthetic. We're also going to be touching up some character and enemy designs with the same goal in mind, but we'll be doing that after wrapping up the first level. In the meantime, I still have to finish the script and outline some of the levels and UI, but I should be done within the next couple weeks.
Ramping Up
Really sorry about the lack of visual progress this month, but I appreciate everyone's patience in the meantime. I'm hoping that once all the details are finalized we can just start COOKING the rest of these levels, as the lack of a truly cohesive outline with proper concept art for everything has definitely cost me way too much time over the years. It's time to lock in!
Anyways, thanks again for your support everyone! Establishing some faster workflows and finalizing these details has got me feeling really great about the project lately, and this will be the first time I've ever fully shared my vision with anyone else before. It's a little nerve-wracking, but honestly I couldn't be more excited. In the meantime, it's back to the writer's room!
Cheers,
Jordy