Operation Tempest – Devlog #3

My name is Jacob and I’m here to give a final update before we complete the prototype for Operation: Tempest. In the last devlog I talked about the future of the game. I’m happy to report that we’re on track to have a prototype up and running sometime before the end of the month! We have been working hard on a lot of stuff behind the scenes, as much of the design for the beginning elements of the game have already been completed. The work that remains for the prototype is making those designs a reality.

Once this is complete, we have a list of people who we are going to have playtest the beginning levels in order to obtain feedback and make changes to some of the core gameplay elements. The final presentation and aesthetics of the game are far from being finished, but making sure the game is engaging and playable is our first priority. We are very excited to be able to show off what that is going to look like, but you’re going to have to wait a bit longer for that.

So far on this blog you’ve heard exclusively from me, but now I’d like to introduce Patrick, one half of our studio’s art+programming team.

Hello hello! I’m Patrick, and I’d like to use this space in our devlog to introduce myself, talk a bit about how we organize the project, and lastly to discuss Operation:Tempest within the context of games today, and also how I feel about it.

I’m a computer science student who also studies design and art history, with a particular focus towards their intersection. No surprise, I also love games and they’re a big reason for how I arrived at studying computers+art. I learned my first programming language in order to make bots in an MMO, and I learned circuitry and computer architecture so I could make cool redstone structures in Minecraft. But this isn’t a personal blog, so I’ll leave it at that and tell you a bit about how we organize our work.

We meet twice a week and do our best to maintain a Gantt-style chart, which details the time spans certain tasks are estimated to take and also which tasks are dependent on which. We also do twice weekly meetings wherein we cover what we’ve accomplished, obstacles we’ve encountered, and what goals we have for the next meeting. We also take that time to adjust course if necessary.

As the school year has started back up both Billy and I are back in the same place. We’ve scheduled times to pair program three times a week, which has accelerated development and bolstered communication. Of course all the obligations implicit with college are also in effect, and so finding a manageable balance and finding out what we can expect of ourselves is a learning process that we’re still going through.

I think videogames are an interesting medium, insofar as their interdisciplinary nature and relative youth to other artistic mediums means there is a lot of space to explore and experiment in. From ludic and art (visual, music, writing) theory we have an expansive space that betrays the everyday connotation of the term videogame. Every year sees immense growth in niche indie titles (unfortunately, in market-terms, to the point of oversaturation).

And as someone who definitely prefers the weirder side of games, I admit that I sometimes find it hard to find the motivation to work on Operation: Tempest. It borrows and develops off of very traditional game mechanics. Moreover, the ruleset for the game’s core mechanics is, at this point, figured out and written in our design document. One could take that ruleset and play it as a board game—so why make it a videogame?

One thing I try to keep in mind is that we’re still pre-prototype and the design document is not immutable once drawn. Even if the game is now rooted to the original mechanics (which I don’t think it is) there is still plenty of room to play when it comes to the narrative and visual aspects of the game. Meaning, that I think the game has a lot of potential and reason for not being a board game, even if that’s the case right now.

What keeps me excited about Operation: Tempest is the open-ended aspects of where the art may go, or how the narrative mid-layer will be integrated and reshape other layers of the game. To think of games as objects is to dismiss the polyphony or harmony of their disparate or cohesive parts: art, writing, sound, systems, and yes mechanics, but also what the player will bring to them.

I personally don’t agree with the idea that any game element not rooted in mechanics is decorative or superfluous. That argument, which recently gained traction in popular games discourse is the same Greenburgian nonsense that led art down a one-way street to the deadend that is Minimalism. That’s my hot take, at least; I’m sure a games scholar might argue with a bit more nuance, but I really don’t think games only boil down to mechanics.

All art history rants aside, it isn’t just the opportunities for reshaping and sculpting the game as we go are what keep me interested—what really motivates me is that I’m making the game with people I care about. Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings, and we’ll have another update out when our first prototype is built.