Manor zooming prototype (Patreon)

Here’s something you guys might be interested in. This little video shows a prototype I made before I put together the team for Lord Goblin.

Pretty rough, I know, but still kind of cool and enough to demonstrate the vision for the game! And here's what it ultimately became:

Not bad, huh? Nice to see a plan turn to a reality.

How the prototype was made

I made this in Visual Novel Maker, which I use to develop Pervert Action: Timelapse, using generic characters (included with VN Maker) and some art I pulled off Google, just as a test model to see if my idea would work, as well as to demonstrate the concept to the artists.

Fortunately when I went Googling for "castle cross-section" or "mediaeval manor cross-section" there was a load of really evocative art I was able to use for this. By the way, since I wasn't monetising any of this and it was just for a test, it was okay to use random images off Google - we wouldn't do something like that for the game.

This was a turning point

This prototype proved to be really useful in development, because:

a) I was able to show this to the team to help them know what we’d need to do to make it work, and

b) having this video helped people see the potential of the project, so that helped me recruit talented people for the team.

In fact, I think when I made this prototype - which just took an hour or two one Sunday morning as a bit of a fun experiment - that was the moment that Lord Goblin started to become a reality.

Making it a reality

I'm really proud of what we ultimately produced and I'll talk more about the actual art in the next dev diary, but the other component of this is the programming. You see, while I knew how to make it in VN Maker, Hulusay and I had to work together to figure out the best way to make it function in Unity.

We were finding it tricky enough, I'll admit, that we had to kind of set this part to the side while we got everything else working. The zooming was pretty much the last piece of the puzzle we got in place before the first Patreon release.

Ultimately even though Hulusay has done the vast majority of the programming on this, I also had to muck in and manually edit the animations because I was the one who knew how to achieve the effect, and it took a lot of fiddly, manual tweaking. I gave myself a migraine doing it over several days, but I think it was more than worth it in the end.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!