Category: Game Development

Last week, I reported that I added animated transitions when navigating through the rooms of the house in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I had some finishing touches on those transitions, then I could work on creating more actual content for the game.

Sprint 48: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and complete:

• Move between rooms of house by doorways/stairwells

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Redo intro to be more interactive

As I last reported, at the end of the previous week, transitions between rooms looked like this:

But halfway through last week, I added some character movement:

And then with a little more work that same day, the walking animation now looks like this:

Seriously, that’s adorable, right?

I’m actually impressed with how great it feels even though it is slower. In order to sell the bouncing movement and have it read well, I had to double time pre- and post- transition walking animations, yet it isn’t noticeable that the total transition time has increased from 1 second to 1.5 seconds.

Redoing the intro

So, my rough plan was to finish the transitions animations and then immediately set to work on the dungeon.

But I remembered that I hated the intro sequence I had created.

It was basically one long, unskippable cutscene, and I wanted something better.

So I set out to make my intro much more interactive.

I broke up the long intro into smaller pieces, so there is now only a few pieces of dialogue to introduce the main character, the Explorer’s Club, and setting the tone “We have an Explorer’s Club, but we live in a boring town, so we’re not really explorers, but we’re inducting a new member today!” , and then you can do whatever you want.

Well, within limits. To keep the player focused, the entire game at this point is purposefully isolated to the bedroom where the Explorer’s Club is having its meeting. While I could allow the player free movement, at this point, the Explorer’s Club meeting is going to be a bit of a tutorial to onboard new players into how to interact with the characters of the world.

So while I had a way to start scripts based on the player entering a room, I needed new code to prevent a player from leaving a room in the first place.

Instead of catching the end of the initiation ceremony, you can now start it.

To do so, I want the player to talk to the person who is joining, ask about the club, and have them say, “I am ready!” And then give the player the option to say “Hold on…” or “Let’s start the ceremony”.

And instead of pre-scripting the entire ceremony, I think it would be neat to have the player ask X questions of the initiate, and then end the ceremony after the last question is asked by doing a short pre-scripted sequence.

BUT despite many months of work I have done before, and the work I’ve done on asking questions and producing generated dialogue in particular, I didn’t have any code to support generating an arbitrary, pre-scripted response to a question you might ask. So I needed new code for that, too.

Well, I was delightfully surprised at how quickly I was able to add that code and see it working in-game.

Here’s the script that starts when the player tries to leave the room before they have initiated the new member ceremony:

And here’s part of the ceremony, in which the player asks the initiate some questions:

This dynamic quiz is hardcoded, but it makes use of various flags, commands, and code to track how many questions there are left. The player can ask in any order, and while it doesn’t matter yet, there could be other situations in which what was chosen and in what order might make an impactful difference on the player’s experience.

What’s left for the intro

Once the ceremony is over, which involves Pat reciting the Explorer’s Club oath, the mood should be anticlimactic. The Explorer’s Club isn’t actively doing any exploring or going on quests, after all.

Then I want the club members to propose a quest to get snacks, which involves the player going to the kitchen to meet their parents, who will still tell them to get pickles in the basement.

To make that part interactive as well, I will need to add some code that allows the player to click on items in the background, such as the shelving in the basement.

And only then will the secret basement door to the secret basement room will be revealed.

Revisiting the intro sequence to make it more engaging for the player has led me to add code to make things happen that I couldn’t do before, and at the start of the week I was worried that it was going to be a lot of work and that I was very far away from anything playable even after a year of working on this project.

But while it is true that there is quite a bit left to do, I am finding the work of adding the capabilities into the project aren’t as big of a lift as I was worried it was going to be.

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: Transitions and Dungeonbuilding:

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

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!
—

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!