Pre-production

As I mentioned before, I started collecting data for the game many, many years ago. During the years I read quite a lot about different sciences, religions, myths and also art and culture. I always tried to look for something strange or twisted. Whenever I saw something that could become a part of my game, I wrote it down in my precious spreadsheet. In the beginning I also classified the links, as beloning to the fields of mathematics, cryptography, mystery or whatever.

In the spring 2011 I got a Digidemo funding for concept design of the game. This basically made it possible to use a couple of man-months just for the game/puzzle design and material collecting. But it also set a deadline for the design process. AVEK (the institution behind Digidemo) demanded to have a report about the usage of the money and results of the design process in the beginning of November 2011. Half a year.

Since I had only collected materials, but had not thought too much about the structure of the game or the design of the puzzles, I had to start thinking about those things too. I used quite a lot of time organizing the data, trying to find some kind of patterns. I also played quite a lot of different puzzle games, just for inspiration.

Around August 2011 I finally had found a decent structure for the game. With the structure I mean the flow of the puzzles, grouping of themes and gameplay mechanics etc. The game will include 19 puzzles of three different areas: Science & Technology, Art & Culture and Myth & Religion. These themes form a three-fold spiral, with three entrance points and a superfantastic all-in-all-puzzle in the middle. There are also six puzzles in-between the different paths, e.g. about science and myths, or art and science.

Well, I had a structure, but had no real design for the puzzles. During September and October I had to design them too. I had made a couple of riddles about an year earlier, just to test the difficulty levels and to tease some people I knew being interested in the game. But there were only three of them, and only one was actually solved by the test persons. Beside that, they were actually riddles, as they were implemented in only HTML and JPG. The answer for the riddles was one word. This is actually one of the mechanics I am going to use in the game anyway. It worked well in Timehunt, Torment and First Door, so why wouldn't it work in After Now Archeology. But I also want to add some activities, so there will be more interactive parts in the game, and I also try to add some interactivity for the basic riddles too.

The puzzle design phase was somewhat exhausting. Trying to mix and mash and combine and separate some 200 thematic sources to 19 puzzles, designing the interactions and all. All who have done any creative work know the "zone" and flow. You just fill your head with the ideas and try to combine them the best possible way. I may have been really annoying and distand during the phase, sorry for that. But this kind of work can not be done lightly or with left hand.

In the beginning of November, I had somewhat working idea for most of the puzzles. There still are a couple, which I do not have the actual gameplay designed and a couple, where the gameplay can be really sucky. But now I have something to start the implementation with. I have a better monitor (fullHD) in order, got an Intuos4 for testing purposes, and I've started refreshing my 1337 Flash skills, so I can actually start implementing the stuff.