Very early gameplay

Devblog

February 12, 2021

Very early gameplay

I have made some great progress this week. I finally started to work on actual story content after making the first script for the opening act. I thought that it would. be simple! But as I made more and more progress I ran into more and more issues!

Problems that I solved and other things that I figured out:

Working on a multi storey point and click game location
Saving AI action sequences in mid flow
Jumping back and forth between the interrogation and “real-time”
Using IK hand targeting for AI characters who go about their business
Tile sets for creating ship interiors (still in progress)
Object highlighting with space-bar and mouse over
A bunch of add-ons for Adventure creator for the features that were missing

Screen recording of the very early gameplay.

In this capture, you can see where I am headed at the moment.

The beginning part is a very very early police station placeholder (just a box with 2 characters) but it serves its purpose for now: to test jumping between the interview gameplay and. real-time layer. Also, every character looks the same for now.

I set up some simple conversations to set up the UI and make sure everything works there. I also did a bunch of other UI polish, like hover states for all UI buttons & Icons. Oh, all of the text is completely placeholder. I am just adding lines to get the puzzles in and I will make them nice later.

In the ship, you can now see entering a multi-storey building and some gameplay in it. There is not much of that yet, but you get some idea. I had to spend a lot of time just getting the basic things working, as there were many more issues than I had anticipated. And making a game takes a very long time too. But I made great progress with setting up the ship to have the rooms and areas I need for my story.

So this was just a quick update on where I am at. I will keep on working on the ship scene slowly but steadily. My goal was to have this scene, the police station parts and a scene at a beach done by the end of the year. But working on the ship has shown me that new story ideas pop up all the time and I am allowing them to, so the ship scene has potential to be much longer than I anticipated.