Lips Like Velum (devlog 1)

Hey all, just wanted to give an update regarding projects, old and new. "Do You Believe In LOCH NESS MONSTER?" has sort of grown out of the scope that I wanted to keep to for the jam I'm working on so I've decided to change gears and conceptualize something new and hopefully more appropriate for the jam. (the jam by the way is the DarkTober Game Jam 2018 https://itch.io/jam/darktober-game-jam-2018).

So with all that being said, I present to you, for your consideration, "Lips Like Velum", a horror point-and-click game featuring many spooks and scares. My ambitions are pretty much the same as before (make a game nailing a specific tone, make a game with a robust framework) but the treatment and story is a little bit different. So far the framework part is going really well, as I've been able to hack in a bunch of tools made by other people and customize them to my game's specifications. Using other people's tools has also made me more aware of how I ought to be going about solving my own problems, and how I might create my own similarly robust tools in the future.

I've accomplished my "base goals", the original of which had to do with having a functioning dialogue system, a system for drawing text for "cut scenes", a working inventory, and a system of interacting with certain objects in the space of the game (mainly puzzles). Much of this could not be done without standing on the shoulders of giants and when the game jam is over I will definitely write a postmortem about my thoughts on becoming a better programmer and a better designer and I will enumerate all the wonderful tools I used and their very talented creators. Or maybe I'll do that in another future devlog? I'm unsure. All I want to do right now is get back to working on the game but I also want to try and keep track of my journey. 

Puzzles, by the way, are something I'm terrible at and should probably not be designing in anyway. Unless the puzzle has to do with knowing some sort of obscure bit of trivia I usually can't hack it, and rely on others who are more practiced and/or talented in the capacity of reason. My maxim thus far has been to err on the side of comprehensibility and ease. Given two options I would rather have a person playing my game jump through the logic hoops that I set out for them and say "Well, that wasn't so hard" then to see them labor over it for hours before giving up. There is something to just "going through the motions" even if it is very easy.

Anyway, I would love to post of screen caps but I don't even have that much in the way of graphics to show off yet, besides a couple of areas that I would rather keep secret.

Until next time,

Yames