i think knowing the design goals of a project early on is important. although i prefer to think of it in terms of priorities rather than design goals; goals, technically, don't limit you from shooting for the stars in every single aspect of your game design, even though that kind of omnidirectional success is a rarity and it think being focused and prioritizing is more practical. "priorities" more embrace the realities that most games can't excel in all areas. i hope that distinction made sense, i'm feeling a tiny bit addled.

all that said, here are the project priorities of Bridgewater, which isn't striving to be all things to all people or to be perfect in every way, that, in my past experience, is a losing battle.

1) Tell a specific story, deliver a specific mood and ethos.

in other words, be a faithful adaptation of the source material. "specific" here admittedly implies obscure. this is a game that is not about the stuff that most games are about, either superficially or deep down. superficially, this game is about suburban teenage car thieves in 1980s New Jersey and astral projection, neither of which is especially popular subject matter for video gams. deep down, this game embraces an aggressively unapologetic punk ethos (punk as a philosophy having, as i think i've mentioned, nothing to do with hairstyles or three-chord rock songs, and more to do with roots in anarchy and anti-authoritarian rebellion) while the vast majority of games are, well, studiously apolitical entertainment. note that while the beliefs and ethos embraced here aren't ones i agree with or live by, they are ones i admire.

2) Provide an experience that is aesthetically arresting and allows the player to become immersed in an auditory and visual experience.

most of my games don't focus on looking great. this one does. overall, graphics are not my particular forte but i'm fighting hard against that this time around. i'm trying to get every individual piece of lighting, graphical set piece, character graphic, and piece of music/sound effect exactly right. this level of attention to detail and aesthetic fidelity is making the game's development time extremely lengthy and at times painstakingly boring, but it's important to me that this one be eye catching right off the bat. i think it looks pretty decent at this relatively early stage, but it should look and sound even better when it's done.

this is really closely related to priority 1, because i very much want to capture the look, feel, and sound of 1980s Bridgewater, NJ as perfectly as i can.

3) Fun and deep "astral combat" gameplay centered around stealing and learning enemy abilities.

full disclosure: i am looking to tap into the "skill stealing" game mechanics that made A Blurred Line so addictive and fun, updated and upgraded with the considerable power of the modern vx ace/yanfly engine to go even deeper. subsequent blog posts will definitely tackle the game mechanics with considerably more in depth analysis. all that stuff is still in the early stages of development.

4) Reach a large audience without compromising any of the above.

this is subject matter that has probably a limited audience; it's a game based on a musical by an underground punk/kletzmer band. i'm hoping the production values will counteract that.

5) Facilitate an open source release, creating an influx of high-quality modern graphics for VX/Ace.

besides a few minor edits, the tileset graphics i'm using for Bridgewater are not my own. they are, however, a substantially larger, more diverse, and more robust set of modern graphics than i've seen in any vx/ace project or available online in tileset form (i'm taking a lot of random tile bits meant for parallaxing and building some pretty comprehensive tilesets out of them). i'm hoping people will pick them apart at will, and i'd love to see them inspire a rash of high quality modern vx/ace games. of course proper credit will be given to actual authors: that's always a high priority for me.

if i had to single out one or five things that is not a priority on this project, i'd go with the following:

a) releasing by a specific date. this will be done when it is done. i'd have liked to win (or even participate in) the awesome halloween contest, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
b) get every little technical detail exactly right. i hate bugs and typos more than the next guy, but every little pixel of every little map is just not going to be perfect here. the project is too ambitious and there's too much else to focus on. some minor tileset and passability and mapping errors are going to come through here, and i'm okay with that. perfectionism aside, i don't want to become like that one game designer, with fifteen different drafts of the same screenshot of the same pixeled crystal.
c) this isn't meant to be "epic" and i don't expect to post a ton of hours of gameplay. quality, not quantity, is the idea.
d) overall, the interactivity level won't be terribly high. this isn't an RM movie by any means, but i wouldn't be surprised to find a cutscene: gameplay ratio similar to recent metal gear games. that said, most noninteractivity will be backloaded, rather than frontloaded. that's due to the structure of the story i'm telling, not just the fact that i know people hate it when a game doesn't give you control right away at the beginning (although i do know that).
e) i'm not going for 'everything custom'. there will be some custom art assets (see the logo for an early preview) but 100% is not a priority compared to the priorities listed above. there's lots of great resources out there, and i'm excited to have scraped them together in one place.

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ok guys that's my blog post, thanks for reading it.