Category: Game Design

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!

In last week’s report, characters can finally start transferring knowledge to each other in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I set out to figure out various scenarios related to responding to questions the player asks.

Sprint 41: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and incomplete:

• Characters speak when TALKed to

I had a short development week due to being out of town for a funeral, but even with fewer hours, I think I managed to make some decent progress.

If you recall from previous reports, the player can now ask about Topics and about Beliefs about Topics. For instance, once the player’s character learns about the jar of pickles, it is now possible to ask about the location of the jar of pickles, and if a character knows, they will tell you where the jar is.

However, if you asked about the jar of pickles, the default response was “I don’t know anything about them” which is patently false.

So now, whenever you ask a character about a high level Topic, a response gets generated about a random Belief about that Topic.

Which at the moment is always “location” since no other Belief types are in the game yet.

Characters also reply differently based on whether they have direct knowledge or indirect knowledge about something.

Saying “I know the jar of pickles is in the basement” is different from “I heard the jar of pickles is in the basement.”

It’s a small thing, and eventually I’d like individual characters to have unique mannerisms, but for now it makes it a bit clearer who knows what they are talking about versus who is depending on hearsay.

Similarly, when a character hears a response, they update their beliefs.

Which leads me to much of my design work: when should a character update their beliefs?

If a character knows nothing, they should always update their cognition/awareness with what they are told.

If a character gets direct knowledge, such as by directly seeing someone in the kitchen, they should always update that belief.

But what happens when they get indirect knowledge? In other words, if someone tells you something, when do you believe them, and when don’t you?

If I just saw my cat in the kitchen, but then a few moments later my wife says that the cat was in the living room, I might wonder how recently she saw the cat. If it was awhile ago, then I might tell her that the cat is actually in the kitchen, essentially that her information is outdated. But if she saw the cat more recently than I saw the cat, then I might be inclined to believe her instead.

I keep coming back to the concept of a belief getting stale, which means soon I will need to implement a clock of some kind into the game. Maybe it is turns? Maybe it is a simulated clock such as the one featured in the Etrian Odyssey games? I don’t know yet.

But I do know that I will need some criteria for determining if new information should update old information, and information recency will be one criterion. The trustworthiness of the source will be another.

In the meantime, I added some helper functions for myself, as a lot of this dialogue and belief manipulation was getting unwieldy.

And I also started the work of creating the Tell flow. When you ask a character something, you can ask about a Topic or a Belief about that Topic, but you can’t Tell a character about a Topic if you have no associated Beliefs about it.

So I need to create a similar but different Topic menu system. Since you can’t choose a Topic but still need to navigate Beliefs through Topics, I can leverage a lot of the work I did, but I am wondering if the user experience for this menu flow is benefiting from familiarity or suffering from confusion that it is too much like the Ask flow.

Unfortunately, by the end of the short development week, I discovered that I lost the capability to share knowledge about the jar of pickles, so that’s something I’ll need to address first thing this coming week.

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: Transferring Knowledge Between Characters:

Enjoy! And let me know what you think.

Last week, I reported that I created submenus for Beliefs about Topics when asking a character a question in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I set out to finish the asking-questions flow.

Sprint 40: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and incomplete:

• Characters speak when TALKed to

I had to look back because I feel like where I left off last time was a million years ago, even though my progress might otherwise seems slow. But I had quite a few little pieces all add up together to make this update feel a bit more substantial.

So, quick recap: you could ask characters in the game about Topics, such as other characters or arbitrary topics, and some of those Topics will have Beliefs associated with them, which you can see in the asking-questions menus, but you couldn’t actually select them because I hadn’t implemented it yet.

Today, you can actually select a subtopic, such as the location of a character, and ask about it, and you will get an appropriate response.

Originally, the response was a bit generic and non-human sounding, but I think it isn’t too difficult, although maybe a bit tedious, to have variations in how text is generated for questions and responses to based on what is being asked.

A WHERE question uses different words (“Do you know where XYZ is?” -> “XYZ is in the kitchen”) than a WHAT question (“What do you know about XYZ?” -> “XYZ is a pigeon”).

Along those lines, I started work on modifying the text generated based on how a character came to believe what they believe. So instead of always saying, “I believe X”, they might say “I know” or “I heard” based on whether they directly know some information or if they were told this information by someone else. The work is still in progress, but the groundwork is there.

The big thing I accomplished was in making what text is shown on the screen translate into knowledge shared with the player’s party. So when a character says “I believe XYZ is in the kitchen” then everyone in the party updates their beliefs about XYZ.

And tying all of the work I’ve been doing for the last few weeks together, I updated the intro script so that when the parents mention making snacks for the Explorer’s Club members and ask you to go into the basement to get a jar of pickles, “the jar of pickles” becomes an available topic with an associated belief about its location.

There’s still a lot of loose ends to work out. For instance, if the party learns something, they learn it together, but what about non-party members in the room? They don’t yet learn from what someone in the vicinity has said.

Also, if you ask someone what they know about the jar of pickles, they will still say they know nothing about them, even if they do, in fact, know about their location. So what would be nice is if asking someone to tell you about a topic might grab a random belief about that topic and share it instead of feigning ignorance. They will have to wait until I program them to be deceitful on purpose.

Behind the scenes, a lot of the work involved creating helper functions to help me manage the complexity of characters, their awareness of topics, their beliefs about individual topics, and ways to display both the belief name (“the location of the jar of pickles”) and the value of that belief (“basement”) to the player.

Also behind the scenes, I am still learning about linguistics and philosophy. I am currently reading Umberto Eco’s The Role of the Reader, and even though I am still slowly making my way through the introduction, it turns out that a lot of my work for the last few months thinking about the nature of knowledge and how it might manifest in this game and how to display it to the player in sensible ways is me pretty much being an amateur semiotician.

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!