So having some downtime at work along with receiving an email has sparked my interest again on an indie I was working on a few months ago called Lurid. I’m planning on moving back to this project as something fun to do in my free time. Where I’ll start is basically to reorganize the code base and clean up a lot of the junk laying around. Having an easy to use framework is a definite motivator. Also, to keep myself motivated I’m creating a twitter account that I’ll use to post what aspect of Lurid I’m currently working on for the dat. Whether it is research on gameplay or ideas that pop in my head. I also want to make a presents on a few forums if possible to help build community. I’ve never really been a common forum junky but who knows. I think the two main avenues that will be used for game updates will be this blog and the twitter account.

I think another big influence which is sparking the interest once more is final fantasy 7 being available on Steam. I forgot how awesome that game is and going back to it has caused me to notice things I never noticed before. One of these things being how FF7 has many aspect that are amazingly similar to a point and click game. From the beginning I wanted Lurid to have point and click components but it wasn’t obvious what that exactly meant. In FF7 I’ve come across situations where I’ll investigate a crate of boxes or some sort of entity in the room and the game will respond with a sort of inner monolog which is more common place in point and click games.

Another example which is fresh in my mind because I recently played through it, is when you acquire batteries from the gun shop in the Wall Market and climb up the wire to place the batteries in order to progress to Shinra headquarters. These type of puzzles and mechanics are common in many games but seem to have been perfected and first crafted in point and click adventures. I’m not a point and click junky at all and I don’t play a ton for video games but currently I’m using FF7 as a library of ideas to test and implement in Lurid. This will allow me to investigate more gameplay opportunities while at the same time distilling the game engine for Lurid to its core.