PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
I'm Figglewatts, I make games - I'm probably most well known for 'LSD: Revamped' which is a fan remake of the cult-classic PS1 game 'LSD: Dream Emulator'. I'm currently working on my first commercial game project 'Vignettes: The Dream City'. I also run 'LSDJAM' on http://itch.io every year in October, where people have a few months to make a game based on dreams or dreaming to celebrate the release anniversary of 'LSD: Dream Emulator'. Last year we had over 200 entries! There's some really great stuff that's made there so I highly recommend people check out some of the games. A few are being turned into commercial projects now, too!
TELL US ABOUT VIGNETTES.
'Vignettes: The Dream City' started as an entry to LSDJAM 2023, but quickly ballooned into something I wanted to release commercially on Steam. The goal of LSDJAM is to make games based on dreams, and a lot of my dreams tend to involve just walking around and exploring lonely, mysterious spaces that are commonly mashups of places I'm familiar with in real life. I wanted to see if I could replicate that experience of that kind of unguided exploration in a game.
Something I'm interested in is how game design has trended towards making games appealing to a very broad range of people, by adding a lot of tutorialisation and onboarding, and making the game world generally quite hospitable to the player. When I started making Vignettes I was playing things like 'Fear & Hunger' and 'King's Field', and of course thinking about 'LSD: Dream Emulator' - all games which kind of just throw the player into a sometimes inhospitable world and let them figure things out by themselves. I love that.
I didn't want to make a game for a really broad range of people, I wanted to make Vignettes for a small group of weirdo freaks that would love it. I'm trying to make something where the player has to figure out almost everything for themselves, including basic game mechanics like combat and the best way to navigate through the spaces. I think a dream world is the perfect place to embody concepts like that, as when you dream you have no idea what the hell is happening, but you can figure it out through some kind of weird dream logic.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
I released a demo for the initial draft of the game in February, for the end of LSDJAM (it's playable on http://itch.io), development was relatively smooth.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
I'm using Godot 4, and it's my first game in Godot - I had been using Unity for almost 10 years before that, but I'm switching all future projects to Godot now because I've fallen in love with it, and I'm not happy with the direction Unity is going as a company (I feel like I can no longer rely on them). At the moment development of Vignettes is on the backburner while I work on a side project, but I will be returning in full force very soon to polish a proper demo to release on Steam shortly before the full release. I expect this will be ready in a handful of months!
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
My biggest development hurdle has been wrangling all the ideas for the game into a cohesive whole. The nature of Vignettes as a narrative and an experience is very abstract and surreal, and is presented to the player as little breadcrumbs that will hopefully form a bigger picture as people play the game. There are a number of layers to the game with different meanings and interpretations (all of which can be 'true' at once), from the surface level all the way down to some deeper levels of the narrative that players may have to make their own leaps of faith to figure out.
It's very easy for this all to spiral out of control and become meaningless, so keeping it all together and not too nonsensical has been, and continues to be, a challenge!
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
If you have an idea for something, get out there and start making it. Share your work. Find people who are interested in and supportive of your work. This will happen eventually if you keep sharing it. Keep working even if you're not excited about the project any more. You're going to come into it really passionate and full of life, but there will be points during development where you think what you're making is rubbish, and you don't see the point in continuing. It's so important to push through that - obviously don't do anything to your detriment, but eventually your excitement will come back and it will be easy again. It's a part of the process, and it's cyclical. Having people you can share your work with and get feedback from, or even just people to bounce ideas off of is incredibly crucial - they can get you out of the deepest pits of creative despair when working on something.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
If you want to get started making something, you have an idea, and you can shoehorn it into being obliquely about dreams or dreaming (which is very easy!) - LSDJAM will be back in October 2024 and is a great excuse to make something. It's super chilled out and relaxed with basically no rules, so it's a great place to let your creativity run wild and make that thing you've wanted to make for ages. Or to try something new, or to learn something new. Go crazy! Everyone should make a game.
-Figglewatts
❤️
Vignettes: The Dream City on Steam
