Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: New Dungeon Art

In my previous report, I finished my main intro sequence work and fixed a number of issues that were bothering me with The Dungeon Under My House, my non-violent, first-person role-playing game and my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I also decided to update the in-dungeon art to replace the temporary art.

Sprints 2024-18 and 2024-19: Art

Planned and complete:

• Create dungeon wall textures

Unplanned and complete:

• Defect: Topics Page text label z-order is behind button

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Show broom knocked over when searching for pickles

Having a map editor that allows me to specify arbitrary floors, ceilings, and walls in a particular grid cell, it was time to finally take advantage of it to have the game render those different kinds of textures.

And I focused on this work mainly because the game looks and feels more exciting now.

Last time, I already showed my new dirt wall texture.

Now, you can see what the dungeon looks like when the floors and ceilings match.

In fact, I finally replaced the stone wall texture I was using everywhere (here’s a screenshot from almost a year ago):

With this one:

And now the large room has its own look and feel (although I still need to figure out why it is tinted orange instead of red like I expected):

Over the last couple of weeks, I spent a little bit of time looking into the architecture of buildings such as Chicago’s Union Station to get some inspiration. While I won’t be able to create multiple floors and large vertical spaces with the technology I’ve created, I do think I will need to find ways to ensure there are unique designs and identifiable landmarks, such as signs and art on walls or statuary.

But for now, I fixed a minor issue with a bit of text showing up behind some buttons, then worked on polishing up the intro sequence by going back to the part where the player discovers the secret 2nd basement room.

Right now, there is just a script that hints that something happened, and then suddenly there is a door where there wasn’t one before. So I’m working on making that more obvious. I could make an entire animated sequence, but I think I will opt for simple solutions.

Why? Well, since it is June, it means that I’m almost halfway through the year, and it has me thinking about stepping back and figuring out what will and won’t be in this game.

I feel like I am very far away from even a stripped-down, simplistic vision I have for this game. I can’t keep adding features indefinitely, and I don’t want to spend years on this one project. So I’ll be focusing on project management. It’s less about managing scope creep and more about clearly defining the scope in the first place. Too much is still too vague and open to possibility as opposed to nailed down and determined.

Thanks for reading!

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