Seams - Week 11

Hello everyone and Welcome back to the weekly blog of Seams, which as you should know by now is a game being made for my university group project assignment. This week's blog will be the final for this assignment and should accompany the official release of the game's demo! As expected, a lot of things have been happening this week so let's go through it all.

Progress throughout the team

As the team prepares itself for the end of the assignment, we've been making sure to finish off any loose ends. One of them being various UI elements. One of the team members created some proper sprites for the cutlery drawer puzzle at my request, making the puzzle complete as a whole.

Our musician created a game over track, you'll be able to hear this in the demo if you fail the final segment of it. The other audio team member created audio clips for characters speaking dialogue, including voice samples of saying specific letters that get played randomly while the text is being typed on-screen.

This week's assignment

The assignment for this week can pretty much be simplified as "Finish everything", which in of itself required things like the final maze being implemented. Before that though I had my focuses on something that I had been neglecting to work on for most of the duration of this project; the UI. I had been purposefully trying to avoid programming the user interface for the primary reason of I don't like programming them, but unfortunately I was in a situation where I had started programming it in a specific way, and if I had left it for the other programmer I felt like it would've been done differently and that there would be a mismatch there. I started with the main inventory screen, basing its layout loosely on a concept that was thrown about earlier, the current menu looks like this:

The idea is that 8 items can be displayed on a single page, and that the player has an unlimited amount of regular inventory space, but a very limited amount of space in a separate storage in the main character's room.

Speaking of, I also worked on that mechanic this week. It has a limited amount of storage space, but every item inside of it is safe from being taken away in the room inspection. A general idea was also that you could expand this storage space slightly later on in the game. The UI for it is somewhat complex. The player must choose one of the slots on the screen, if it is empty, then a new menu is brought up to select an item to put into storage. Otherwise you just receive a prompt to move whatever was in that slot back into your inventory. Have a look at how that UI looks below:

Next I worked on the quest menu, which allows the player to view all active quests. Something I realised after designing this menu though is that in the demo you can only really have one quest active at a time. It is programmed to display all active quests though so if in the main game you are able to have multiple quests at once they would be viewable (and the menu would be a lot more useful as a result).

Finally after that I worked on the settings menu. Because there currently isn't many settings to actually change it was the easiest UI to make thus far.

The UI in of itself took up most of the week due to backend problems with other parts of the game (I'm looking at you item system...) and required a lot of rewriting code and in general was incredibly frustrating to work with. But I think right now it works pretty well.

The other part of the game that I worked on this last week is the rooftop. The idea here is that it is a chase sequence where you run away from one of the scary entities of the game. It is supposed to be the final part of the full game but in the demo we're giving a sneak peak at it.

The first part was taking the maze that the designers made and adjust it according to the size of the player object. It ended up requiring the maze to be scaled up by a considerable amount but here's how it looks right now:

This part of the game has you surrounded by darkness, with only a very minimal amount of light surrounding you, you must navigate to the bottom right of the maze while being chased. This is achieved using a global light with 0 illumination to plunge the whole scene in darkness, and then a simple light put onto the player that lights up their surrounding area.

At the end of the maze, a cutscene will play for a brief moment and then the game will reach its 'end of demo' screen. Throughout the chase sequence the entity following you uses the technology of A* pathfinding to locate you and the best route towards you.

I decided to use A* because of two reasons primarily: one, it is very good at what it does and for being free, and two, Given the amount of time I had to finish everything at this point I couldn't have really made anything myself. Regardless, the roof sequence itself is quite good and might be the highlight of the game for me.

Next, I worked on a few quality of life things that help make the gameplay generally better and more clear for the user. The first of which included additional visual queues to help make the UI more understandable for the user, for example, in puzzles that require the use of the mouse, I added a flashing icon that shows you need to use the mouse (you can see it in a screenshot I put in here earlier). Another addition is a gray hue that appears whenever the menu controls have been enabled in order to help better illustrate to the player that they are currently controlling the menu and that is why they can't currently move. Lastly, I added a control prompt to the dialogue UI so that the player knows immediately which button to press to continue dialogue (from playtests in the team where I forgot to tell them the controls, they struggled to continue from the first dialogue).

Lastly, I continued working on the main menu to finalise its look and make it prettier. This involved having an animated logo that has a startup animation, a loop, an animation of it changing as the menu buttons enter the screen when the player presses a button to continue. There's also a scrolling background that shows the hallway of the first floor for some added flair.

I also finally got around to adding in all the music and sfx to the game this week, the music in particular is quite the treat and really adds to the atmosphere to the game.

Reflection

This week was incredibly productive (which seems obvious given its the last) and I'm quite happy with how the demo has turned out. Obviously I still do have some issues though.

For starters, I really wanted to include the first night time segment in the demo too, but unfortunately we couldn't get it ready in time in consideration with everything else we wanted to get done, so we ended up just not including it in the build (well, what we did have is probably in the files somewhere but there's no way to access it).

As for reflection on the general development for the game, I pretty much went talked about everything I was thinking on the previous week's blog post.

That's everything that I think I have to show. Thank you for following me on this journey, it's been a long and wild ride and with the release of the demo happening imminently as I'm writing this, I hope that you all enjoy what we've been working on, and what we will be working on in the future. I'll see you all soon, goodbye for now!