#12 Experiments with physics and new systems
Hello!The past few weeks I’ve been working on adding new locations, story bits and new systems to play with. I’ve been playing around with ideas to allow players to do a bit more gameplay wise, and this involves the ability to pick and move objects about. Here’s a preview of this using puppies as placeholders (cause, why not?) Yes the puppy(s) will feature in the game as well. As for new locations, here’s where the detective will stay for the duration of the investigation. It’s still a work in progress, and I can’t wait to get it done! Plotting out the surrounding areas Added some color! The woods around Pineview are a major part of the town’s identity, so here’s a look at the atmosphere within them: We’re making speedy progress, let’s keep moving!See you next time-Armaan
#11 Restructuring, bug fixing and shoegazing
Hi!After taking a break for a few days, this week’s been witness to hardcore development! The first couple of days were spent on restructuring the game and creating most of the systems that will allow players to move freely between locations using the main market street as a “hub” between investigations. This mostly meant creating a lot of variables to keep in check if a player has completed a certain investigation, and how the world state of the hub/ market street should react to that (stop the player from re-doing the same investigation, open up a new scene, change time/ weather etc) Of course, there’s not much to show when it comes to that. But other than that, the next few days have been a bit more visually appealing, so here’s some screenshots! The first is a concept art that I made in a couple of minutes while listening to some shoegaze 🙂 The song in question is “Finland” by Vet Trip. Give it a listen, it’s as beautiful, shimmering and dreamy as you’d imagine.I also spent some time creating lightning effects for the church interiors (the quality of the gif isn’t the greatest, but it looks fine in-game!) See you next time!-Armaan
#10 Retrospective: A look back on ~1 year of development
Hi! This week, I’m taking a break from development in order to sort out the admin side of things. There isn’t much to show this week, so I thought would be great to turn around and look back at how far we’ve come. The perspective gained by this should also help plan ahead for the final months.To start with, here’s some concept art created between October-December 2016: Pineview concept art Gameplay concept art Detective Anderson in his motel room It’s also worth discussing the phases of development over the past year or so: October – December 2016: Planning development, creating the idea, story and concept for the game January – May 2017: Creating gameplay prototypes, learning how to work with Unity, fleshing out the story and creating foundations May – December 2017: “Development” begins – The game consists of about 60 “scenes”, 12 scenes were created and polished for the demo that was released in January 2018. A huge number of graphical assets (trees, vegetation, characters, skies, furniture, vehicles, coffee mugs, random clutter etc) were also created during this time, reducing development time for the upcoming months. Many other things, like particle effects animations etc also had to be created from the ground up, and can be reused throughout the game. January – February 2018 : Demo release! A major highlight during the development that gave me a lot of valuable feedback, proved the viability of the game idea, connected me to an interested audience and gave me a LOT of encouragement. This month was spent on making improvements to the demo and fixing bugs according to player feedback. February – March 2018: Next 13 “scenes” completed. It’s interesting to note that the first 12 scenes took about 6 months to finish, and the next 13 took only about a month. This is, as mentioned before, because a huge number of assets were already created in the previous months. I also gained experience and became much quicker with the engine. With these two chunks of 12 and 13 scenes done, there were 35 scenes more of the total 60 to go – 40% of the way there in terms of “making the game” at least! March – April 2018: Staying solidly on track and not falling behind schedule, chunk no. 3 is finished. 36 scenes done, 24 to go. Crossed the halfway mark and made it to 60%! Future plans and schedule- April – May 2018: Finish chunk number 4 (48 out of 60 scenes) to make it 80% of the scenes. May – June 2018: Finish the final chunk and have the complete game ready and playable in terms of all content! June, July, August 2018: Polish the game, add localisations, bug test, bug test, bug test. Make the game cooler in all areas, add some pending features and prepare for release. End August 2018 – early September – hopefully: Release! This is the ideal scenario, but of course there could be delays. Fortunately, development is completely on track as of now and hopefully that continues!It’s crazy to realize that more than 15 months have gone by, and if things go according to plan, there are only 5 more months of development to go. It’s been a lot of fun. What’s also crazy (And fun) is to look back on all the improvements that were made to some of the art for the game. For instance, here’s how the first level (crime scene exterior) of the game looked before: And here’s the new one, which was seen in the demo: The detective’s coat also received an update: Here’s another one. First feeble, terrible attempts at creating the crime scene interior level, before I’d found the groove and discovered the art style for the game: And a few months later: A few months can make a big difference! See you next time? 🙂-Armaan