It should be immediately and painfully obvious to anybody checking up on this blog that I have not adhered to my aforementioned weekend posting schedule, this being the case for a bit over a month now. I don’t really have any excuses, aside from those I’ve already summarized in Volume I of this “series”: it’s difficult to work on Atma all throughout the week, only to have to follow that work up with even more work, in the form of assembling and publishing a blog post. This was true back when I posted it the first time, and it’s even more true now that I’ve begun writing substantial portions of content for the game. Yes, you heard me correctly; I’ve recently been writing out dialogue and planning quest lines and fleshing out the details of the elemental skill system and about a million other things that are necessary for Atma to become a reality.
In a sense, this has been quite a humbling experience for me. I knew going into Atma’s development that it was going to be a ton of work, and that the process would move slowly and painfully at times, but it wasn’t until I started breaking each component of the game down into the actual work involved that I could tell how far in over my head I was. No, I’m not giving up on making Atma. I’m not even scaling back on it, ultimately. The process will take quite a bit longer than I anticipated, but I have every intention of making this game everything I planned for it to be.
Back to the writing business, I’ll try to post on a somewhat more regular basis, but at this juncture, I’ll avoid holding myself to a schedule; I have a feeling I can rely on myself to post a bit more often if doing so doesn’t feel so much like “work”.
My next few posts are likely to be teasers for the primary quest lines in Atma (i.e., the quests that your character initially undertakes in order to learn skills for each of the elements). I say “teasers” in that I’ll be sharing a brief description of the involved characters, and the general plot for each quest, but will attempt not to give too much away regarding the direction each quest ultimately takes — after all, I don’t want all the surprises (I don’t think any of the quests I’ve designed thus far are actually completely straightforward, come to think of it) spoiled when people are finally able to play through the quests for themselves.
A. Horner