OCTOBER 2023

This post was originally published on www.talesfromhazelwoodpost.com

Well, the clocks have changed and the nights are suddenly getting colder and colder... What the heck, when did that happen?! Oh well, I suppose this is my perfect excuse to stay in and work on Tales from Hazelwood Post. But it does mean I have Halloween on the mind. Pumpkin, anyone?

This month development "really" began in this little post office. Here's everything that has happened:

Setting the Scene

UI isn't one of my core skills, but I knew the central environment for this game, the post office, needed to be:

• A cosy, warm and inviting place
• A low-stress environment, with everything easy to hand
• Contain a lot of information - the map, the address book, the letters
• Reflect the passing of time, both seasonally and daily

I enlisted the help of friend, and fellow Astra Grant recipient Murray Somerwolff for his expertise and a second opinion on how to make this and here's what we came up with 👇

Building Hazelwood

The next thing to do was to put the world's most rudimentary version of this into Godot...
...Yes, Godot! * gasp *

The choice has been made, and I'm excited by it!To help with the programming, I enlisted my collaborator on the prototype, and younger brother Silas (known as Silabear online). We're both new to Godot, but together the task of "learning absolutely everything" doesn't seem too great.

Towards the latter half of October, Silas came up from London to Edinburgh to stay with me and we spent an intense week together coding the game. Featuring chaotic Github commits such as:

Our goal over the week was to get Tales from Hazelwood Post working in it's most basic form, so we could keep iterating on top of it.

Bringing Hazelwood to Life

Once this was done, I went ahead and commissioned some background art for the game from the fantastic Stevie Choo.

At this point, the UI changed a little. I condensed the whole playing area back down into the one screen, and finalised exactly what tools needed to be visible on the screen at any given time. Once Stevie had all the details, now it was time to bring the whole scene to life!

Here are some of the stages we went through:

But how does Tales from Hazelwood Work?

I've spent all this time talking about the visual and coding developments we made in October... What of the actual game itself? Well, in October we went through two different iterations of the game, which changed some pretty key details about the game. I categorise them as:

Version One A version of the game where you receive letters each day and can choose to deliver them, not deliver them, and get them wrong. The following day you have a chance to try again.

Version Two A version of the game where you cannot 'finish' a day until each letter has been delivered correctly, allowing us to finetune exactly what each day looks like and what happens on each day.

Both these versions exist in some format in spreadsheets, game design documents, and indeed in the coding. But at some point Version One seemed like it was an unruly beast. Since this puzzle relies on the player having knowledge (and not having knowledge) at different parts in the game, how could I guarantee (for example) the player would know where "Winston Holloway" lives, if I've allowed them to not deliver his letter on days 1 - 4?It was a conundrum only Version Two seemed to solve.

So, for now at least, each day in Tales From Hazelwood Post is 'fixed' in time with a specific requirement to complete it. In this way I can control how, and how quickly a narrative unfolds. For this, I'm finding spreadsheets easy to use. See below.

The Clock App

No, this isn't a cool thing in the game... I'm talking about Tiktok.

Last but not least, this month I decided to try out ✨ marketing ✨, and by that I mean posting Tiktoks about the game (and other general puzzle things) daily.

The sort of Tiktoks I'll be posting are faster, short-form snippets of pretty much everything I'm typing out here. But if you're a more visual person, you might want to follow and keep up with updates in real time.

<section> @mairispaceship shout out to the real hero of my cozy puzzle game, which is the massive placeholder Google Sheets map ✨️ #gamedev #gamedesigner #cozygames ♬ fish in the pool・花屋敷 - ヘクとパスカル </section>

For now, that's all for October!

I'm so excited to see what November brings. But until then, I hope you've had a lovely spooky season !