Great post about Galley House development
I've already urged you to play The Incident at Galley House on the strength of its original version, Type Help. I still personally have not played Galley House, but I have had the time to read this big blog post from the lead developer, Robin Ward.
Warning, the post has some spoilers in the images!
A lot of this post is about the technical decisions made during Galley House's development. The most interesting and gratifying bit to me, however, is the section about how they used spreadsheets during development. The vast majority of games I've worked on have used Google Sheets as a significant part of the pipeline. Like Skin Deep, Galley House used Google Sheets to manage the actual script for the game.
This is not recommended for many games projects! If your game is fucking huge you may end up preferring purpose-built game script management apps. But I fucking loooooove spreadsheets because they are so simple to expand, filter, transform, search, and bulk-edit. I have even written regex in Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are godlike.
Validating spreadsheet content is definitely an issue, however, as is version control. This post goes over their process for spreadsheet downloading, validation, and importing into Godot.
The sickest part of the post is this:
Godot has support for HTTP requests, so I wired up our game so that developers could hit Ctrl-R and it would refresh the game data without restarting the game. This was a huge time saver, as it meant that Jeremy and others could make changes in the spreadsheet, hit Ctrl-R and see how it looked in the game. It was effective enough that Jeremy never bothered to install or learn Godot, because he was able to do all design changes in the spreadsheet and other tools.
This is key shit. Skin Deep was also developed with hot reload! When I worked on Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, we had a UI test app that did the exact same thing with, I think, the exact same Ctrl-R input. I would edit a passage, head over to the app, and reload the content to see how its flow in the UI had changed. The best way to test material is to test it in-game, but any delay for rebuilding or manual re-importing usually makes it impractical to use for small changes. If you can unlock a writer or artist to test even small changes in-game, you are off to the races. I love this kind of process so much!!
I also really appreciated the sections about the scene tool which they used to compose the game's scenes. It's always fun seeing another project's dev tools!