Dialogue Overhaul and flourish

This week may have been our slowest week so far. Or perhaps it simply felt like that because we focused on overhauling the dialogue system to allow us to include portraits and name boxes.  That, along with bug fixes, took us about half the week.

I added a fair bit of flourish to the rooms, more interactions, sound effects and decorations, and we worked on the narrative progression of the game so objectives are now a little clearer.

After waking up, the player can now progress into the empty mainhall, where he will muse about finding matches. Upon finding the matches in the supply room, he can light the fire and find Orpheus in the center of the house, who will order him to turn on the fusebox in the basement. Once that is done, the lights in the hallways will turn on and the whole house will be brighter.

I created assets for a future potential gallery puzzle, as well as the spider room that has been in the works for a while. I also styled the pantry from where the spider's food can be picked up later, and drew up one portrait for each character to use in the new dialogue system. The ghost wife now has an idle animation.

I fixed the bathtub in the bathroom to be animated as well, and started setting up triggers in all rooms to further the narrative and give important puzzle clues. We have a problem with the trigger dialogue however, as turning a trigger box off permanetly will turn off all others. They all share the same script. Cian has been working on that today and is still looking for a solution.

More layout additions, sprites, bugfixing

Today and yesterday we enhanced the house with some more rooms and items.
I restyled the spider-combat room to look more like a library.
I styled a supply room, where the player will be able to pick up matches as his first item.
I added nameplates to each room so that player navigation will be easier. Luckily, this can easily be supported by the narrative of the game as well.

I created a bathtub for the bathroom, including animations that don't quite work yet in terms of coded interaction, and I created my probably most complicated and best sprite yet: the grandpiano for the living room.

I also styled the basement and linked it up to the main house, so the dark room is accessible once more.
Cian fixed the issues with the inventory system, so everything works smoothly again.

We also finally fixed the sprite overlap issue, so the player cna now step infront and behind objects and will render correctly! I used a script I had looked at a long time ago for this, and after some fussing around with it, Cian rightly identified that we only needed to change part of it to an update function, and voila!

Cian has been working on the prototype for the next puzzle. The assets for that are already created and just need plugging into the game. In terms of space and design, the house and the game are really coming together. The navigation and exploration of the house itself is also adding a lot of content that can be nicely detailed and flourished.

Soon we will be looking into a different dialogue system so that we can include nameboxes and portraits during character dialogue. Hopefully this way, we can streamline the narrative and better portray the relationship between the characters. We felt it disingenious to simply have Orpheus write out how the player was meant to be feeling, whilst the player was projecting himself onto a mute, blank slate character.

Here are some screenshots for today's and yesterday's work.

14th of February, Creation of House Layout

A fair few things got done today and yesterday that really helped bring together what we had so far.

On monday, I mapped out the basic house layout in a new scene, adding hallways and staircases to link the house together from the servant room to the living room. Today, this static layout got styled further, and is now decorated with banners, wooden beams and pillars.

It also features a decorated entrance door and area, as well as an upstairs that can't quite be reached yet.

Cian fixed the warp around so that doors have to be interacted with for the player to enter a new area, and he made it so that when they exited a room, they would be back in the right place within the halls. Thanks to that, we could link all our rooms into the layout today, meaning they are accessible to the player from the start.

We fixed the issue with players still being able to move when the textbox was up, so dialogue now freezes the character. I also quickly made a prefab for triggered dialogue, so some clues can be given when entering a new room.

Yesterday evening, I drew up some sinks and dripping water animations, because Cian finished the prototype for a faucet puzzle yesterday. This is now all styled and fully playable, with lovely dripping water sound effects. 

Cian also made the inventory static, and after some discussion we did figure out a way to make it so that even when holding an item, basic objects can still be interacted with. Now the player can pick the duster up in a cleaning cupboard rather than in the library. 

I found a new side for sound effects that we can use under creative commons attribution 4.0 mostly. That site is orangefreesounds.com. I got a range of lovely creepy background sounds from there, as well as some classical music and background music tracks. 

I adapted some of the sound in the start room to work better.

In terms of assets, what's new? Pillars, beams, banners, rugs and sinks, as well as the stairs of course, and the cleaning equipment you can see above. 

10th of February - Initial prototype completion

Today we presented the initial prototype for our project, and as such can proudly proclaim that the first playable build is complete. Thanks to a week of bug fixing and preparing for the presentation, the five-room build is fairly bugfree and two playtesters were able to complete a runthrough without too many problems.

The reaction towards the initial build has so far been positive.

During this recent week, Cian and I did a lot of rethinking of our initial project idea. Whilst we originally wanted to assign one challenge room after the next in randomized, maze like order, we found that playtesters were in agreement that the puzzles felt unconnected and unexplained. They felt that there was no incentive to complete them other than to move on, and that there was little sense in terms of narrative continuity.

After some discussion, we decided that whilst making the house a maze would be technically challenging and interesting, it was not the best choice in terms of game design and user engagement.
A maze would mean that the player has little connection to any specific location in the house, and that puzzles would be unrelated and feel jagged and chaotic at best.

We redesigned the game to work with a static house layout. After waking up in the servant quarters, the player would move through hallways by himself and find the living room, the core of the house, with a hint towards the first puzzle he should undertake. (a single room key, house plan, to-do list, etc.)
The player would then later return to that living room to see it liven up more and more as the game progresses, as well as encountering Orpheus, the master of the house, on each occasion. Orpheus may give him a new task or a piece of information, or offer some advise, or simply company. We want that living room to be a comfortable hub in which house keeping activities truely matter.
So the player can tend to the fire and answer Orpheus' trivial questions whilst receiving orders from hin.

Having a static layout also means that the player will keep inventory items once collected, and so things like the duster can regularly be reused to clean up things around the house.
Puzzles will have to be put into linear order, so the completion of one is necessary to start another.
Now the player can be given an incentive to compelte a puzzle, such as fetching a book from the library overrun with spiders, or fixing the leak in the bathroom in exchange for a favour from Orpheus.
It will also make it far easier to have a linear storyline, with hints properly incorperated into the house and set locations for diary entries and hidden items.

So! Specifically, what have I been up to this week?
Well, aside from creating a screen fader to fade to and from black between levels and fixing some minor bugs, I created an initial living room. The fire can be lit by the player, and will burn down after many seconds to be glowing, and eventually going out entirely. It can then be relit.

The bookshelves in the living room now have descriptions added to them.

I created several pieces of living room furniture, some more paintings and decorations, like candles and a table cloth. I also created another idle animation for Orpheus, so that he may read on one of the sofas.

And, after adding the fire into the build yesterday, I got feedback from two playtesters who kindly looked for bugs and gave us valueable feedback on the process so far. That feedback is already noted down in Evernote, and will be added to a to-do list of bug fixes and adjustments.

Last but not least, we started discussing and putting some thought into the game's narrative background, adding some ideas of notes and diary entries, and explaining the existance of the player housekeeper in the first place. We have planned three more puzzles ahead and will be able to prototype these shortly. Assets will be created alongside the prototypes again. Hopefully, by the next presentation deadline, we will have an extra five rooms. That would be one to two weeks per room.

And hopefully, we will have a nicely flourishing narrative and good dialogue progression with Orpheus, who, as a character, is really starting to connect with the mythology behind his name, so that we are more and more comfortable calling him such.

2nd of Februrary 2017 - Polishing

Next week, Cian and I will focus our attention on preparing for the presentation on Friday.
With the presentation coming up, we have spent most of our time polishing the rooms and mechanics we already have, adding animations and  a few sound effects, and fixing up level lay outs.
This means that we don't have much new to present this week, but what we have looks a lot better than it did last week.
So here's what we've been up to!

Start Room:

The book in the start room can now be interacted with and will produce a dialogue box with text. The book has a page turn soundeffect when opening, and there is also some sound on the bed.

As is visible below, there is now a basic UI, although in this room it is not much use. We will later work on fading this in and out when it becomes essential for the player, and otherwise keep the screen as empty and immersive as possible.

Combat Room:

The spiders have better AI now and will follow when the player is unarmed, and run when the player is armed with the gun. Thanks to the UI, this level is now nicely playable. The player switches through items using a Q, which is visualized in the top left corner.

The player now dies on contact with the spider bullets, and the level is a nice amount of challenging.
There is also a cleaning animation for when the player wipes away webs!

Dark Room:

The Dark room too is now playable, albeit still a little buggy. The player will die if he walks out into the dark whilst lights flicker, and monsters will spawn with a low piano sound everyime the lights go out. When in the dark, the monsters will spawn right atop the player and eat him. 

The fusebox in the top right corner will now activate all the lights and stabilize them, so that the player can safely reach the door and avoid all monsters easily.

Hallway

 With the introduction of UI and dialogue came the ability to actually chat to people ingame. This is the hallway with our reocurring character leaning against the wall. He will provide some information on the house and keep the player some company.

This means I can now start writing diary entries and dialogue lines.

Freezer Room:

Cian fixed all the ice mechanics, so the freezer room is now functional and a path has been designed for the player to slide over in order to get to the air conditioning. We yet have to code in a result to this, as the air conditioning should remove the ice and hence allow the player to move on,

End Room:

Last but not least we did some experimenting with paralax scrolling scripts so that we may let our player be stuck on the path away from the mansion for eternity! (Unless he turns around and resigns himself to his fate, that is.) Whilst the scrolling is currently an unfunctional mess, There now is at least a path that we will one day be able to loop.

Miscellaneous:

- created idle animation for the Master of the house hanging off the edge in the abyss room.
- created furher statue and winter garden assets.
- created a chessboard tile which will be useful for a chess puzzle later on.
- created some interact animations for the player that are so far unused.

Cian has also been working on 2D maze algorithms and started up the prototype for a spider-feeding room. Overall we are happy with our progress to this stage and, if we fix up the dialogue, will have a presentable start-to-end framework for our first presentation.