Hi everyone! It’s been a little over a week since PLATINUM WHITE came out and the voting for Godot Wild Jam #69 has ended, so I figured now would be a good time to go into some of how PLATINUM WHITE was made for anyone curious.

THE MAKING OF PLATINUM WHITE

PART 1 - Visuals

Around the time Godot Wild Jam #69 had started, I had started messing around with some templated Godot projects to help myself learn the engine. Once I had managed to get a basic first person camera moving around in a 3d world, I had pivoted towards doing work on the project’s visuals. 

At first, I wanted to create something reminiscent of the visual style of games like Return of the Obra Dinn and Who’s Lila. Below are some screenshots from during this process. You can try some of these effects out for yourself here.

The use of perspective in the above screenshots was completely unintentional and extremely nauseating in motion. In an attempt to fix the perspective problem, I accidentally set the final resolution of the game to be lower than the resolution of the dithering output.

Unlike the perspective seen earlier, I thought this visual style was really interesting and I instantly grew attached to it.

PART 2 - UI

Godot Wild Jam #69 had the theme of “void”, and I’ll get back to how I interpreted this theme later, but they also had an array of smaller sub-challenges or “wildcards.” One of them involved hiding an easter egg in the UI, but since I’ve never been the biggest fan of creating user interfaces, I ignored this one. The other two challenges caught my interest. One of them was to integrate a countdown timer and the other was to show an early part of the game near the end. Initially I had planned to do both of these, but I ended up focusing much more on the countdown timer since it ended up making more sense with where I wanted the game to go.

After getting the basics of the visuals working, I started working on the user interface. I knew I wanted to implement a countdown timer and a way to view text at the bottom of the screen.

Initially I wanted to have a typewriter effect on the text at the bottom of the screen. This ended up being a bit of a disaster so I scrapped it for the final game. I liked the final product though, it reminds me of reading subtitles during a movie. Perhaps unlike some similar games, the text is static on the screen for 10 seconds before proceeding to the next line, without any way to control dialogue speed. This was done intentionally: I wanted the text to feel intentionally a bit slow and cumbersome. 

PART 3 - Music

Shortly after deciding to make a game with an omniscient countdown timer, I started composing the music for the game. I have previously composed a few tracks for my other game, REPEAT IT BACK TO ME, but I’m still relatively new to music. Because of this, I wanted to focus on creating one very long track that would play as the counter ticked closer to 0:00. To me, this sounded like the most straightforward way to implement music into the game, as opposed to introducing a more dynamic audio system. I was specifically inspired by the track that plays at the end of Tower of Heaven.

Here’s the description I wrote for PLATINUM WHITE (the song):

For PLATINUM WHITE, I wanted to write a longer track that would play throughout the duration of the entire game (no looping, cuts, etc.) I wrote this track after deciding on the visual style of PLATINUM WHITE, but before writing any of the dialogue or doing any level design.

The song follows a narrative arc where tension is built using strings and wind instruments before giving way to the clarity of the piano melody. The tempo increases before the piano melody is suddenly the only instrument left. The tempo then decreases and the piano melody is taken over by the bird sounds used in the intro. A storm begins to brew before the song suddenly ends, similarly to how PLATINUM WHITE ends immediately once the timer runs out.

Thinking in terms of process, I started with the chord progression on the piano before writing the melody. I built up the strings and wind instruments around the piano piece, and concluded by adding the sounds of birds and the sound of a storm at the end. It’s hard to notice, but the samples used at the end of the song were actually reversed. I think this had a nice effect. You can find the public domain samples I used for the intro and outro below:

https://freesound.org/people/bashrambali/sounds/448196/

https://freesound.org/people/kvgarlic/sounds/135472/

If you want to listen to the song I wrote for PLATINUM WHITE, you can do that on Bandcamp or through Itch.

PART 4 - Speech Bubbles

Before I started writing any dialogue, I had to figure out exactly how I wanted the story to unfold. I considered two main options. Option 1 was to make a static story that would play out exactly the same way over different playthroughs. The player wouldn’t have to move at all to hear the story unfold. In some ways, I think this option gives an immense amount of control to me to adjust how things unfolded. It also would have been relatively easy. The biggest downside to this option, to me, was the aesthetic quality of reading some part of the story in a place that didn’t make sense for it. PLATINUM WHITE was my first 3D game, so I wanted to do more to play with that space.

Two games come to mind when considering what inspired the “speech bubble” implementation in PLATINUM WHITE. First is Kitty Horrorshow’s Exclusion Zone, where the player walks into unmarked locations before getting a short blurb relevant to the story of the world depicted and the specific area the player is currently in. The other main inspiration here was a level in The Beginner’s Guide which features several of these speech bubble-y things placed across the level. The player could go click on all of these speech bubbles to see what they had to say. Their relevance to the level, or the story at large, varied. Ultimately, PLATINUM WHITE’s speech bubbles closer resemble those from The Beginner’s Guide, but the context in which I used them was very different (more on this later.)

When the player walks around in the final game, it’s very possible (if not likely) that a player will find new dialogue before they’ve finished reading a thought. I hoped that these moments, in combination with the countdown timer, would have produced a tension in what the player does. Do they want to see how a thought finishes, or rush into a new one?

The speech bubbles in PLATINUM WHITE used some original code such that every bubble had some associated text and that, when gathered, these bubbles would override whatever dialogue was currently being displayed and start displaying the new lines of text. This system had a lot of limitations since this was my first time working with GDScript. In the future, I will likely look into implementations of the Yarn and Ink narrative scripting languages in Godot instead.

PART 5 - World Building

All of the models seen in PLATINUM WHITE were made by me in Blender. One limitation of the visual style of the monochromatic noise effect was that using textures in the models may have produced messy results. This limitation ended up working in my favor, as I do not have any previous experience texturing models in blender, but I did have some familiarity with the basics of modeling.

A lot of the structures in PLATINUM WHITE were inspired by the locations in the aforementioned Exclusion Zone, as well as settings in the Ice Pick Lodge’s Pathologic games and The Void. I also drew from some of the ruins in The Talos Principle, which while ostensibly a puzzle game, I spent a non-negligible amount of time playing as a walking simulator.

Due to the time limit of the jam, I tried to get away with making as few 3D models as possible. All of the dark arches and rocks seen through the landscape are the same model rotated, flipped around, scaled, etc.. Even structure the player spawns in appears twice in the game, once at the beginning and once in a half buried version found a short ways away:

There are two spires in the game formed through a series of platforms in PLATINUM WHITE. I think these spires (especially the one the player faces at the start of the game) break up the landscape in interesting ways to give it a sense of scale, specifically along the vertical access. I loved the concept of making these tall spires that didn’t lead anywhere important and that the player couldn’t even fully climb if they wanted to. 

PART 6 - Writing

The primary challenge of writing PLATINUM WHITE was to find a way to write a story that could be discovered in basically any order. I had three lines of initial dialogue to serve as set up:

You wake up to the feeling that you’ve been here before.

You know that you can’t trust your feelings.

You also know that you don’t have much time.

From here, the rest of the dialogue tells a story about someone who has entered a dream-like purgatory, presumably following their death. Each dialogue node is associated with a specific thought, memory, or idea. Not all of them are meant to be collected, especially in one playthrough. There are 23 of these speech bubbles in total.

PART 7 - Bringing it all Together (+ Some Recommendations)

So, ok. I have all of these bits and pieces, but what’s the point, what am I getting at here? I don’t want to take away how anyone else experienced PLATINUM WHITE, but personally, I was trying to get an idea about time and what we do with it, specifically in the context of ideas about grief and memories. I wanted players to engage with the idea of what was important under a harsh time limit, whatever that may mean for them. I wanted to portray the theme of "Void" as being exceptionally bright, lonely, and liminal. I thought I did this quite well.

Throughout PLATINUM WHITE, the atmosphere gets progressively lighter in a very literal sense as the screen slowly fades to white. This effect is sped up in the past 10 seconds of play before the application closes and the game is over. I would encourage anyone who found the time limit of PLATINUM WHITE interesting (along with game closing on its own at its end) to go check out city::ephemera, which is similarly limited to a very short play session and was a big source of inspiration for PLATINUM WHITE. 

Shortly before writing PLATINUM WHITE, I played Will Not Let Me Go, which likely informed how I approached themes of death and memories. I think it’s an excellent read. I had also recently read this essay about grief in games, which inspired the narrative structure of PLATINUM WHITE.

FEEDBACK + FINAL THOUGHTS

Feedback for PLATINUM WHITE was generally mixed to positive. I was happy that a lot of players seemed to “get” it in some way, even if they didn’t necessarily “have fun” with the gameplay. The music, visuals, and story were all generally well received.

There were a few technical aspects of the game which came up occasionally. The game didn’t perform well on some devices and the visual style was sometimes too much on physically larger monitors where one pixel would take up a lot of space. While I’m not certain, I think the performance issues probably stemmed from the complex lighting and reflections in the scene as all of the models had a low number of polygons and no texturing. I think some more graphics settings could have helped these issues, but I’m still unsure of how a settings menu could be implemented without sacrificing on the concept of the game. Perhaps something similar to those screens at the start of horror games that ask you to move a slider until an image is barely visible would have been a good fit and fairly unobtrusive.

Overall, I’m quite happy with how PLATINUM WHITE turned out. I think I accomplished all of the goals I set out with. If you’d like to see more stuff I’ve made, feel free to check out both of my previous games, SALTWATER and GUARDIAN ANGEL. Also keep an eye out for the release of REPEAT IT BACK TO ME, my next visual novel, which should be out sometime in the next two months!

Thanks,

Sky