Seams - Week 7

Hey all, and welcome back to the weekly blog on the development of the latest game I'm involved with, Project PsychWard. As usual, I've been hard at work with finishing off my current objectives for the last few weeks and as a result of that, I have a fair bit new to show off.

Progress throughout the team

While I've been programming the quests present on level 1, our team's writer expanded on the level 1 story flowchart with the exact dialogue needed for each scene and character interaction as well as making a flowchart for level 2.

(Both the level 1 and level 2 flowcharts, they're very big so you can't really see anything in this picture)

On the other hand, the artists have been busy with creating new assets for the game. A bunch of character sprites have been finished as well as assets for different rooms and some elements of the next levels have been finished. The main UI overlay was properly designed, though the submenus haven't been finished yet, some concepts have been thrown around the group.

(The overlay UI in all its glory)

The level designers went back to level 1 and touched up its design to include more details, add a missing room (and connecting door in the hallway) as well as adjusting the size of one of the other rooms.

(A few screenshots demonstrating the changes I just listed)

This week's assignment

This week I had to continue working on level 1. Last week, I only implemented a puzzle for one of the quests so this week I went back and made some actual puzzles for the remaining two quests.

One of the quests involves going to a keypad in front of one of the rooms, entering a specific code to receive a battery, and then rolling the battery under one of the doors to make the person behind it unlock the door. Last week this quest involved just picking up the battery which was randomly placed in the hallway, so it's good to finally get the proper structure almost done for this quest ('almost' as in there passcode is found on a note that the player is supposed to receive during a cutscene, which hasn't been implemented yet).

The UI design of the keypad is currently a placeholder and once the actual design is complete it may have a different interaction (on-screen buttons as opposed to typing on the input-field directly).

The next quest involves finding food for one of the other characters. First, you talk to the character to start the quest, go to their room, find a framed picture and removing it from its frame to reveal what food they like and then go back to your room to find that food. The puzzle UI I created for this quest involves removing the photo from its frame.

To remove the photo from the frame, the player must first flip over the photo (by clicking and dragging on an invisible slider) and then remove the four screws by clicking on them.

Currently when you pick up the photo the UI is pulled up immediately because the UI for the inventory hasn't been finished yet. But when that is done, you would need to 'use' the item through that menu to bring up this UI.

For some miscellaneous features I programmed this week, I created a class called "PlayerFlags" that acts as a way for me to set bools and assign them specific names that I can then call in code if i wan't to change or check their value.

Then, the Player class has a list containing these flags and some public functions that either checks these flags or changes them to true. The main purpose of doing this is for organisation, as I think it would be easier to check these than just a regular array of bools that are unnamed and is in preparation for implementing save data.

Another feature I implemented recently involves the UI overlay again. The icons of the first four items in your inventory are now displayed on the side of the overlay in the four little inventory preview spaces.

Reflection

This week has been quite productive and I am quite satisfied with everything I've showed off on this blog post, but there are some things I have issues with this week.

I need to make sure that the designers are working and interacting with the project properly. With the new level designs, they were made in a separate project so I had to move them into the main project files, which also involved dragging the images and sprites as they wouldn't have loaded otherwise, this has resulted in some pretty messy file management issues in the project and a bit of an inflated file size. As I am arguably the most experienced using things like GitHub on our team I need to make sure that everyone else learns and is interacting with it properly so that our development doesn't get too disrupted by issues like this.

That's all that I have to say this week, overall a good week and I look forward to seeing what is going to be done next week. Thank you once again, for reading this blog and keeping up with it, I look forward to you seeing our progress again.