Day 1 - Returning to the Game

Day 1 - The Return

I took a long break, long enough to not remember much of what I did.

Some initial Inspirations and thoughts

A mix of Spy vs. Spy (A game I don’t remember and only watched others play.), the Rusty Lake escape-room games, Fallout and Stardew Valley.

The initial thought was to make a turn based point-and-click, but top-down WASD movements were stock and easy with Defold so I went with that to navigate the rooms.

I have coding experience and I’ve created one quick browser based text adventure game to play around with adaptive audio. A “medium” sized game was next. I wanted to limit it to 2D. I’m more of a casual gamer who thinks the Stardew “Night/Day” cycle is too much pressure. I play FTL and am stressed when the game is on pause. I wanted to have turn-based elements so time only moves forward when moving from room to room. Hoping to center the strategy around which rooms you choose to navigate to and what actions the player takes in them. Tracking game state in real-time seemed more difficult than per “interaction”.

The narrative and mechanics went hand in hand. The player is a “Spy” or “Investigator” and has to move from room to room manipulating the environment and NPCs to accomplish tasks that forward the story. Initial thought was a noir, corporate espionage story with a jazzy, Art Deco aesthetic. A time not all that long ago, in a universe not that far away.

Existing Mechanics

• inventory system where actors/NPCs have “placeholder” items, each with skill effects.
• an interaction system where you can trade or talk with NPCs, or open actors.
• a rough AI system that assigns “traversal” paths for NPCs with each room transition
• a “Stardew” faint system if too many turns without rest
• a HUD
  • a game clock that moves forward with room transition and “fainting”
  • with a map of rooms for fast travel and debugging purposes.
    • (had to later disable because of a bug that kept hijacking input focus away from the player)

Where I left off

When interacting with NPCs there are skill checks that effect each NPC’s feelings about the player. Some interactions require conversations with the player so I use MatchaNovel

MatchaNovel is a standalone Visual Novel Engine. It has instructions for integrating it into an existing project, but it didn’t stop me from hastily abstracting it’s save and menu functionality. I did it perfectly and nothing will come back to haunt me. (Currently not working on my live bundled browser version)

(Proof it works locally):

The Tutorial

The game starts with essentially three “real” levels:

• 1.) grounds
• 2.) reception
• 3.) customs

Each “level” is a room at what the story refers to as “The Hub”.

The Hub is an industrial shipping hub for an urban, commerce driven city. The broad goal of the tutorial is to complete enough “quests” to receive security clearance and with it, access to more rooms.

The lone quest, for now, involves the player getting their luggage.

for future logs…

• I’ll get into why I chose Defold
• maybe more dive into existing mechanics.
• I figure there was probably more than one post of “backstory” prior to this log
  • I might break it up over future logs.
• attribute the stock assets used