Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Transitions and Dungeonbuilding

In last week’s report, I finished (for now) the background art updates for the house in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I set out to add some simple yet effective screen transitions before tackling the dungeon.

Sprint 47: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and incomplete:

• Move between rooms of house by doorways/stairwells

Most of my week was spent writing, between sending out my latest issue of the GBGames Curiosities Newsletter (sign up here: https://www.gbgames.com/get-the-gbgames-curiosities-newsletter/) and creating my 2023 Black Friday Creator Day post-mortem.

So I didn’t get as much time to work on game development, yet in my limited time I think I managed to make something impactful.

Up until now, navigation through the rooms of the house required exiting the room-specific view to see the whole-house view, then clicking on the room you want to go to.

I’ve been wanting to allow the player to click on doors and stairwells to navigate between the rooms of the house, eventually allowing the player to click on other things in any given room to investigate or find items or interact and oh geez I’m making a point-and-click adventure accidentally, aren’t I?

Actually, I’ve been aware that some of my house view screens have been leaning in that direction for some time, and I am just going to have to live with it.

Point-and-click adventures aren’t exactly my favorite type of game. Don’t get me wrong. I have fond memories of playing Maniac Mansion over and over, and I’ve played Sierra’s King’s Quest series at a friend’s house when I was younger, and I remember playing a few others with a different friend, such as the creepy Golden Gate.

So I like point-and-click games when I play them, but I find myself gravitating to strategy and simulation games if I have a choice.

But in practical terms, it means that once I realized that I had point-and-click aspects of my game, I didn’t know what the state of the art was.

But hopefully as the focus of this game will be the dungeon much more than the house, the point-and-click aspects will be relatively minimal, and I can do just enough to support what I need to do, such as allowing the player to scrounge for supplies in the various rooms.

Anyway, transition animations were a nice-to-have that just makes the game look and feel so much better, and between clicking to navigate and these transitions, it took only a few hours to implement.

It’s a little rough, but it’s nicer than instantly teleporting.

The only thing left was to add pre- and post- transition animations of the party members walking towards or away from the doors and stairs. I don’t want to create a walking animation, but as the house was inspired partly from a dollhouse vibe, I want the characters to “walk” in a manner that looks like someone is playing with dolls. Sorta like Monty Python stop motion characters.

In the meantime, I wanted to give some attention to the dungeon itself, and so I sketched a few thumbnails for ideas of different areas of the dungeon that the player might see.

Some of the areas are inspired by real-life sewers, fantastic anthropomorphic burrowing animal apartments, mysterious dirt tunnels, abandoned utility pipelines, and spy thriller ventilation systems.

These sketches helped me see areas that I had already made plans for with actual details, but it’s not an exhaustive set. I spent less than an hour on them, and I look forward to dedicating more time to filling in this world of the dungeon.

But it will definitely be much cooler in-game than merely sketched in these tiny windows.

Thanks for reading!
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