Devlog #3 - Adding to the game!

Week 4 - 15.08.2018

This week, we've added a little more dialogue and implemented the phone conversation you have with your friend through texts. Most of the week was dedicated to working on that part as well as adding a sense of time which will be more fleshed out by next week. Last year, when working on the game for the game-a-week class, I had a little bit of code for the phone but it wasn't really much because I wasn't sure what exactly I wanted to do with the phone and there wasn't much time to work on it. This time, I changed up how the phone looks and my teammate and I were able to think of a better way to get the phone to look and work!

Everything about the phone from last year was really bad. The writing was stupid cause I didn't put much thought into it at all and it wasn't a priority, so this time, I wanted to do it better because it's such a big part of the game now. Also, I think it just looks better overall but could do with some design changes. That could be something for me to consider later on or if I really want to make this game bigger than already scoped.

After quickly putting it all together in the game, I also worked on  some extra mockups for how it could possibly look and showed some people for some feedback. It looks much better than it does in game right now and I think it might work better but it's a matter of testing it out and seeing what people think when it's in game. The idea is to have the prompt selection where the suggested words bar is on the phone and players can select their options there, they will then be able to "backspace" if they don't like what it says and choose another option. This is something that should be done by next week. 

With that, I also worked on some extra artwork that will be used later on in this project (after we get everything else done). I did some extra screens for the phone which may allow for some more interactivity and some headshots of the first three characters introduced in the start. I wanted to keep the profiles quite simple and minimalistic because I don't want them to be super distiguishable.

And now finally, I'm back to working on the character models to get them all working and animated by next week! This should allows us to add in more interactions and a little "minigame" at the dinner table. Also, I will be fixing up the bathroom scene which I haven't shown yet and there will be another "minigame" there which I'm super excited about. Here's a picture for all of us to be inspired by.

 A lot of this week's work was also programming which is my teammate Zen's forte and he worked on the interactions on the programming side of things and is also working on adding some sort of time to the game. This is something that we are still discussing and I think I've got the solution for it but we'll need to talk through and put it in the game to see how it works!

I think this week went OK. I didn't get as much work as I wanted done because I was sick for half of it but I'm super pumped to get a bunch of work done for next week and the weeks to come! I want this to be good!!!!! Also, playtesting this week has gotten me to think about a lot on the game and reflect on some of the choices I've made and has also given me more to think about in the choices I'm going to have to make in the next few weeks. So much thinking!! 

I hope this week's devlog was more enjoyable. More pictures and GIFs! I think next week's one will be much longer though because it's the final week before mid-semester break. AHH!

Thanks for reading!

- Jo :-)