Alright, let’s talk about my current game project. But first, here is a video from right around the time of my last blog post of my dog playing with a toy duck.
Dog. pic.twitter.com/JzO8Li6dwq
— Ike Ellsworth (@iellswo) January 26, 2016
So, it’s been about 6 months since I’ve touched this website, mostly because there was a lot of floundering for the past year at least, but I think I’ve finally reached some headway where I want to talk about my current game project.
In the development on “Debris” there was a point where both Thomas and I realized that our hearts weren’t really in the project anymore. Maybe we’ll go back to it someday, who knows? In the meantime we’ve both moved on to other projects and work and such.
For the past while I’ve been working on a new game project, which I will talk about more now. (In my last blog post I posted a thing from the first prototype of it, but I’ll talk more here.
In the broadest terms I would describe the game thusly:
A point-and-click murder mystery adventure game where the player finds clues and draws connections between them to solve the case of a missing woman. Inspired by classic film noire and pretty much every detective movie and show out there ever.
I’ve been working on the core mechanics, walking around, picking up clues, etc., but a large amount of time lately has been spent on what I would consider the CORE mechanic of the game. The “Board”. Well, that and replacing my thrown together dialog system with something based off of Yarn, using Yarn Spinner.
(Also, a note: all the gifs and images I post of the game here and on twitter look not great. Everything is placeholder graphics, eventually down the road the goal is to hire artists and make the game actually look like a game.)
Finally got the Yarn Spinner based dialog system working, hadn't worked on it in a few weeks, good to get it done. pic.twitter.com/pCLSrQU53z
— Ike Ellsworth (@iellswo) May 15, 2016
So, the board. You know how pretty much every detective movie and show out there has a board? Like, a cork board where they hang up pictures of clues and people and try to piece it all together? Usually using some form of yarn or twine? So, I had the idea that I wanted to turn that into a game mechanic. The idea was that you would have all the clues the player pick up appear on the board and allow them to literally draw connections between clues, people, etc.
The stated goal of this is to allow the player to feel like they are the ones solving the case, rather than just watching the character do it for them. That’s where I’ve been spending most of my development time on this game in recent weeks and I’ve been making progress, though slowly. I did have to re-write most of what I had recently, decided it was cleaner to use uGui rather than what I was using before, so there is that.
Board rewrite complete: persistence of object positions between loads is now working. #gamedev pic.twitter.com/Cpv0WVkrzI
— Ike Ellsworth (@iellswo) May 26, 2016
Next I’ll be finishing up the ability to draw connections between items on the board.