Category: Game Design

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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Want to learn when I release The Dungeon Under My House, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Here’s the companion video for Monday’s Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: House Background Art “Finished”:

Enjoy! And let me know what you think by replying below!

Last week, I reported that I was focused on other priorities and didn’t get too much done in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I set out to finish the background art this week.

Sprint 46: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and complete:

• Create location art

I didn’t spend as much time on game development as I wanted this week either, but it was definitely more substantial work.

I think the bathroom has become my favorite room, partly because I was getting the hang of using Gimp’s Perspective Tool to ensure the perspective of the art was more or less correct.

All that remained was the basement. I created a secret entryway from the main room, which leads to a secret second room with a ladder.

Now, you might have noticed that one image shows in-game footage and the other does not.

That’s because the doorway isn’t always present, and I still need to make the intro script and programming changes to allow the player to go from not knowing about the secret entrance to discovering the secret entrance.

Part of my work is turning that background image of a doorway into a separate set of sprites that I can overlay onto the actual background art.

Anyway, these rooms were the last things to do for this pass of the art work. I anticipate that I might want to change things or revisit, and there is always more I could do to improve the art, but let’s say that it is finished enough for now.

Meanwhile, we’re at the beginning of the December now, which is usually one of my least productive months, partly because I like to use some of my time to prepare for the coming year.

But I also want to take stock of the project and figure out more precisely what the remaining scope is. Despite putting in about a year of development, I feel very, very far away from a concrete version of my vision for this game, which included multiple characters with their own agendas and desires, a sprawling underground dungeon, a player-editable map, items and inventories, and a time system among others.

It’s a lot, and while I already anticipated slimming the scope down, I am worried that I need to do even more scope cutting, and I’d like to make sure I keep the essence of the planned game as well as get a better idea of how much work is left to do.

Thanks for reading!
—

Want to learn when I release The Dungeon Under My House, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Here’s the companion video for Monday’s Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Not Much Progress This Week:

Enjoy! And let me know what you think by replying below!

In last week’s report, I continued updating the background art of the house in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

My plan was to finish the background art this week.

Sprint 45: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and incomplete:

• Create location art

I basically had the bathroom and the second, secret basement room to finish.

But I didn’t spend much time on game development this week in favor of promoting my Black Friday sale at itch.io for both of my previous games, Toytles: Leaf Raking and Toy Factory Fixer.

Today is the last day of the sale, so please check them out!

Anyway, I’d like to think that if I had more hours to dedicate to my business that I could handle both promotion and game development, but sometimes I need to make choices. The Black Friday sale was urgent and important, so I focused on it, and I put in a token amount of game development work, but there really isn’t much to show for it.

So come back next week, when I expect to have more to show.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release The Dungeon Under My House, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Here’s the companion video for Monday’s Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Updating More Temporary Background Art:

Enjoy! And let me know what you think by replying below!

Last week, I reported that I had started updating the temporary background art for the rooms of the house in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I continued the art updates this week.

Sprint 44: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and incomplete:

• Create location art

I am sure that if I was a more competent artist or could afford to hire one that this work would be much faster. That said, I am very happy with how the house has continued to feel like it is coming to life.

Originally I wanted to keep the entryways between rooms dark to save time, but there was something compelling about allowing the player to peek into the rooms that they would enter.

My plan is to get rid of the “To House” button and eventually allow movement by clicking on the doorways and stairways the player can see. Coupled with some transition animations, it should make for a more intuitive experience.

But it also meant that I needed to pay attention to the limited real estate. The location view is already a subset of the window, and there needs to be space for the characters to occupy the room, so all of the room’s “stuff” needs to be near the top and back.

As a result, the “button” of any doorway is already going to be smaller. And I also need to make it clear that it is clickable. If the player is using a mouse, the mouse cursor and the doorway can have hover effects to communicate, but when the player is using a touchscreen on a phone or tablet, I’ll need to communicate that the doorway’s tappability differently since there is no such thing as “mouseover” in that context.

The basement is going to be interesting because I want to make the scene change when the player discovers the secret room in the basement that holds the ladder to the dungeon. So initially, there will be no hint of a secret room, and then later, there will be a visible and interactable secret doorway to the secret room.

All that’s left is the bathroom, and then I can refine the intro sequence, and then…well, just make the rest of the game, right?

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release The Dungeon Under My House, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

In last week’s report, I finally finished (haha) the main dialogue work for The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I had started replacing the temporary art of the house with less-temporary art, and I continued that work.

Sprint 43: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and incomplete:

• Create location art

Going from really simple temporary art to something more appropriate makes the game feel like it is becoming a living, breathing space rather than an abstraction.

Here’s how the bedroom has looked ever since I started this project:

And here’s how it looks today:

Other rooms are getting similar treatment.

Much of the work was spent fighting with the weird perspective I had created in the rooms of the house.

A flat rug on the floor or flat posters on the walls are pretty straightforward. As someone who isn’t an artist by trade but does decent programmer art, it wasn’t difficult to use the Gimp’s Perspective Tool to project things onto the floor or walls.

But I found three-dimensional objects were a bit more challenging.

Here’s how I ended up solving it: I used Gimp to render a 2D grid, then copied it and used the Perspective Tool to project it onto the floor. Now, I can use the original grid to block out where the bed or the refrigerator would go on the floor, then do a similar projection onto the ceiling, then I would manually create a wireframe version of the object, connecting corners from the floor and ceiling.

Then I would draw over that wireframe, and this technique seemed to work, more or less.

The couch, on the other hand, did not get created the same way, and so it currently looks too flat and out of place. I think I can fix it, though.

And then I’ll need to finish the living room, create the bathroom and basement backgrounds, then add doors between the living room and the kitchen and the bathroom, and the house will be good enough for now.

Then I can make the doors and stairs into buttons, so that navigation within the house happens within the view of the house instead of using up space outside in the menus.

Now, I keep referring to this art as less-temporary, but that’s because I keep anticipating that all I’m doing is making the game look a little nicer for now while I still don’t know what I want in the rooms in the final game. When I originally envisioned the game, I wanted the player to be able to search the house to find supplies, such as eggs in the kitchen or towels in the now-non-existent hall closet, things that might help in any quests within the dungeon.

I still want the player to be able to do those things, and so doing this art work feels a bit premature. After all, what if I later design an item into the game and need to redo the layout of the house or make a room more obvious as a home for that item? I’m setting myself up for rework.

But maybe that kind of future rework is inevitable, and so my job as someone working on the game as it is today is to not spend too much time on things that might get replaced.

That’s why the rooms are currently a single image each. The objects in the rooms could have been separate sprites, but I can worry about separating them out when they become more permanent and perhaps interactable.

For now, the game just looks a little nicer in screenshots, and maybe that’s not a bad payoff for a few hours of investment.

Meanwhile, I’m aware that I’ve been working on this project since January, and it’s still in preproduction. I’m still figuring out what the game’s component parts will be, then I will start putting together the game itself in earnest.

So between working on it very, very part-time, not having well-defined scope, and entering into the holiday season when I’ll have even less time to dedicate to it, I’m pretty confident this project will not be published in 2023.

Putting my game producer hat on, I really want to ship this game sooner rather than later. I do not want to take 3 years to make one game, and so I’m already a little sad because it means a lot of my ideas won’t make it in, such as the rich and complex options for dialogue to help make the conversations a bit more compelling to participate in.

But I can remind myself that this game isn’t my last game. I can always build upon what I’ve created, adding more into a future project.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release The Dungeon Under My House, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Last week, I reported that I was creating the Tell dialogue flow to complement the Ask flow in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I was looking forward to finishing the final tasks for talking to characters.

Sprint 42: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and complete:

• Characters speak when TALKed to

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Create location art

Here’s the companion video for this report:

I say final, but what I mean is “currently planned” because I anticipate that there will be more dialogue-related work to do in the future.

But for now, the player can select a Topic and a Belief about that Topic to share with another character.

Before, members of the player’s party were the only ones affected by changing beliefs due to someone else’s response to the party’s questions, but now other characters need to have their beliefs updated. So I added code to update not only the party but also any non-party characters in the same location.

Initially, someone always updated their beliefs based on what someone else said, which in a practical sense is fine.

But I quickly ran into the problem that if Dad tells you where the jar of pickles is located, Dad KNOWS where the jar of pickles is, but it was possible to then have his own belief about the location of the jar of pickles updated.

The location is the same, but to have Dad say “I know where they are” at first but then later say “I heard where they are” is confusing. He’s talking about this belief as if someone else convinced him, but that someone else was himself! His direct knowledge was being replaced with indirect knowledge by his own speech.

So I tweaked the criteria for updating the belief of a character, which means beliefs get updated only if the character either doesn’t have a belief in the first place or they have indirect knowledge about the topic. Eventually there will be more criteria, such as recency of information and trustworthiness of the source.

Finally, in service of making conversations meaningful and impactful, I wanted to make sure that if you ask a character about a Topic, they know not to respond with a random Belief that they’ve already told you.

That is, characters now need to track what beliefs they have shared with other characters, if only so they can avoid repeating info when they have other info to share, and if they shared everything, they can say something like, “I already told you about that.”

It will also be useful for a character to keep track of deceptions and lies they’ve told, as well as making some characters better than others at tracking their own lies. But that work comes later.

For now, dialogue can be scripted and also dynamically generated by the player and the current beliefs any characters have, which is going to be a major part of the game play, and I’m happy this piece is finished.

At the end of the week, I was getting tired of the temporary background art for the rooms of the house, so I started making better-looking temporary background art.

My first attempt was using patterns provided by Gimp, which was serviceable but a bit too noisy and bright.

So I tried a more cartoony style that implied what was there instead of directly showing it, and I think it looks a lot better, especially when using darker colors so that the foreground characters can stand out better.

Soon I’ll add props, such as posters on the wall, a rug, a door, and a bed to make it clear that it is a bedroom and not a strange window-less warehouse prison, and I’ll do similar work for the other rooms as well.

Meanwhile, I was going through my game’s intro and trying to find ways to shorten it and make it more interactive, using the new dialogue options right away to both make the game feel less like a novel and to ensure that the core game play comes up right away.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release The Dungeon Under My House, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Here’s the companion video for Monday’s Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Knowing When to Update Beliefs:

Enjoy! And let me know what you think by replying below!