A brief introduction
Hi, I'm Anatoly. A guy from Russia who loves programming, games and making 3D art. In October 2019 I decided to combine all that and make a game.
The inception
At the time I was really into point-and-click adventure games. So the natural thing was to make an adventure game with puzzles, pointing and clicking.
Thinking about what the story and setting should be, I recalled a little pixel art piece by Finlal, an artist from Four Quarters team, currently famous for their Loop Hero game. The image of two astronauts with their vehicle sinking in a green pool stuck with me for a while.
So I began throwing together some concepts for characters and environments. This is the very first piece of concept art I have ever made, dated October 21, 2019:
These are Tobert Tabres and Renee Fresnel, the main character duo.
As you can see, I wasn't really an artist in 2019, nor a character designer. So I reached out to my friend Adich for help with all 2D art things.
Here's the first ever concept of Renee made by her:
And here's the finished reference sheet of Renee:
And the early reference sheet of Tobert:
I really wanted to go for a low-poly art style, since it would be simple and quick to make, perfect for a first project.
And so I made the first character models:
Early Tobert was a bit wonky:
I created social media accounts for our little team and named it Dry Cough. Why Dry Cough? Because it's doesn't mean anything. I wanted it to be memorable and silly.
And thus began my journey of creating Blamyvog.
But here's the catch
The game was rigged from the start.
Any sort of creative process consists of two parts: coming up with the thing itself, and implementing it in some form. And lately I realized that I only love the second part. I love sitting in a 3D software and placing polygons, rigging or coding some functionality in a game engine.
Turns out I have big problems with the whole "coming up" thing. I can only have random disjointed ideas, and making something coherent out of them is not that easy. And this is very unfortunate, since the whole game development relies on coming up with interesting things. Especially for a game that's focused on story and puzzles.
But I simply have no other options, so the only way is to brute-force the whole creative process. To iterate and iterate and iterate until I'm somewhat comfortable with the result. This involves writing, character and environment design and puzzles.
As we soon will see, this approach is not really sustainable.
How it went
I started by coming up with the basic plot. Renee and Tobert's rover got stuck in an acid lake, so they need to unstuck it. Plain and simple.
The story and puzzles were made by the tried and true method: take the beginning and the end, add problems in-between, add more problems in-between those problems, and so on, until you have a complete game.
What would be their first action? The most reasonable thing is to call for help. BUT the radio is broken, so they need to repair it. BUT there are no spare parts, so they have to find makeshift replacements. BUT the place with potential resources is locked up. You get the gist.
Then I started making the scenes. Neither I or Adich are environment designers, so I just sketched together some basic concepts on my phone and went from there.
Here's a journey of the research base scene, from a concept art I sketched with my finger on the phone:
To basic 3D:
And to a somewhat finished scene:
Here's another early scene:
And its finished version:
And so I kept on iterating, making models, story, puzzles and other game dev stuff.
And everything was going fine...
Actually it wasn't fine
I had literally no experience in making games. Especially puzzle games. Especially story-focused games.
I was writing dialogs on the spot. I spent little to no time on fleshing out the characters, or the story, or anything whatsoever. Also the fact I wanted the game to be comedy didn't help, as I'm not a comedian. As a result, the dialogs were full of cringy jokes and had no character.
Same thing with the art. I was just placing things on the scene without any thought. I had no idea about composition, or color theory, or even what simply makes a nice environment.
But anyone is smart when thinking retroactively. Back then I was oblivious, so the issues continued snowballing.
Meanwhile I was posting screenshots and videos on social media, and the game gained attention of at least 700 followers on VK and Twitter combined, and probably 100 actual real people. It's a tiny number, but bigger than zero nonetheless.
Nearing the finishing of act one, as I was getting more experienced with this whole "game dev" thingy, I started to understand how deep the hole I dug for myself was. But it was too late, so I could only keep going.
On November 14, 2020, I released act one as a demo, and it sucks ass.
I believe that everything should be archived, but I simply cannot allow myself to leave it available for download. It's not worth it. It's boring and cringy, which is worse than just being bad. So currently it's unlisted from Itch.io.
After the demo's release I continued making the second act.
For example, this is interior of the Spanish Fly, a spaceship sent to help Renee and Tobert, piloted by Olsbry Marcat (on the right) with a soil scientist Eilen Narda (on the left) as the second pilot:
A forest scene:
And a cliffside scene:
But then the unseen happened.
The enthusiasm wore off
I have a very bad habit of starting projects full of interest and enthusiasm, and then simply stopping after an indefinite amount of time. I just stop caring enough or start a new project. And Blamyvog was not safe from this habit. So stop caring I did.
So the development came to a halt in summer of 2021. Also I was busy enrolling into a university, so in September 2021 I began studying computer science. That was the last nail in Blamyvog's coffin.
For some time I continued to only make assets, such as new characters, because they're the most fun to make. For example, here's Dunbar Detter, a security officer at the space station:
The space station's administrator, Soraya Brera:
Famton Servo, CEO of the company that organized the space expeditions:
Reggie Bradhamby, a cargo loader:
Bertha Walsh, a chemist:
Mie Sarine, an engineer:
I went a little overboard with the height difference, no regrets though:
A revamp of the Cockchafer, Renee and Tobert's all terrain vehicle:
And here it's compared to the old one:
And an overhaul to the characters, with new shaders:
And then I simply stopped. Studying left me little to no free time, and recently I got a part-time job which also didn't help with it, so the game remained frozen up to this day.
And that's where we get to the present
Currently everything is more or less stable. I got some spare time from studying and working and 3 years of actual programming and project managing experience, so I decided to revive the thing. And not to just keep on adding to the snowball of bad design, but to start from scratch.
From the very scratch, starting with the studio. After 5 years I'm starting to think that Dry Cough may be too silly.
So, as you can see, we are now 23 Centimetre Line. Why? Because the domain 21cmline.com is already taken. If it wasn't, I would have taken the name 21 Centimetre Line. Why? After the hydrogen spectral line.
In university I got really, REALLY into web development, so the only natural thing was to make our own website, which you can see right now. I used Astro. It's not much, I'm not a web designer, so I took the Gruvbox palette, changed some hues and designed around it.
Most likely the work on the site will continue further, so be prepared for any changes.
What will happen to Blamyvog now?
Nothing. I'm still very busy. So don't expect anything. I won't begin any shareable work until I'm content with the story and characters. I may show occasional new 3D models, but real big news will only appear after I reasonably planned everything.
But, as a little treat, here are the NEW new models for Renee and Tobert:
Wait, am I redesigning the whole thing?
Yep. Back when I initially started making everything, I didn't have much experience being a designer. I still don't have a lot, but I had plenty of time to absorb some knowledge through osmosis. So yes, all the screenshots you've seen this entire blog post are no longer relevant.
It's not really that big of a deal, a single character can be made in about a day, so I can catch up pretty quickly.
But I won't be catching up pretty quickly. I'm not in a hurry.
Am I doing anything else?
Yes. I'm learning Godot. During the 3 years of programming I have grown to love free and open source software, so I decided to ditch Unity. Also I want to learn Blender. I've been making all the 3D in Cinema 4D, which is fine and I have about 7 years of experience with it, but I simply want a FOSS tool with much bigger community.
I don't want to make the mistake of making my "big" game with tools I'm not completely familiar with, so I need to start small. I decided to make a simple little game first.
In March 2021 I made a little game called Commutator. It's a telephone switchboard operator simulator. A couple of minutes long, very simple, with 2D art by Adich.
In June 2022 I remade it in 3D with Unity, but I never released it:
Now I want to remake it in Godot. That's how it currently looks:
And so I will keep making Commutator 3D. Slowly and steadily. After that, If all is well, I may return to Blamyvog. But there won't be a concrete date, I will simply do things at my own pace.
And so, that's it. I hope I have clarified well enough on what's been happening and what's to come. Right now, you can expect some little devlogs on Commutator 3D from time to time.
Thanks.