Lips Like Velum (devlog 2)

Well the framework of the game is now about as fleshed out as its going to get, or rather, the tools that I'm going to use in creating the game have been figured out, and now I just have to actually use them.  I'm kind of happy now that I started with the germ of a new idea and didn't just give up on this jam, because I think the fact that I did have to start over a bit gave me motivation to try and get more work done. I'm no veteran game dev but it seems like generally the things you think are easy are not easy and the things you think are hard tend to be more surmountable than you think. Today I spent like an hour and thirty minutes trying to work on a single 15 second cutscene that I thought would be a breeze to work through. I guess it will be easier the next time around now that I have some idea about how to handle such things though.

Speaking of things that were easy to come up with: Passing through rooms is basically done by plopping in four cardinal directions with different conditionals in their creation statement that set a value for where they send you once you click them. Whew, long sentence. It's probably a kind of amateur way to do it, but I am an amateur! It also lets me change up the structure of the rooms on the fly if I need to, like if I don't like this room leading there I can just draw up a new sprite and add in a different conditional. Although it is kind of annoying sometimes when I forget to put in some sort of conditional.

Another annoying thing has been setting a tool up and then going back to it and forgetting how it worked. I started commenting code because of this, but even then, sometimes I don't write comments very well for my future self, so I get doubly confused by how to use the thing and also what I meant when I wrote the comment.

Oh I should probably give more hints about the story since I have more of an idea about where its going. So the set up is you are contacted beyond the grave by your late sister who tells you that you are in grave danger. She tells you that you need to get out of the house where you are kept by your parents, lest you meet the same fate as her. That's about where the game starts. With story stuff I'm trying to keep it kind of vague. I like games that omit details a lot with their stories so you have to sort of search them out, kind of like Dark Souls. I'm not gonna go crazy with the lore, but I do want to try and make this an interesting world, even though it's probably not going to be that long of a game.

Well, hope whoever is reading this has a nice week. It's starting to get very cold where I live and I'm loving it. It's not really fall until it starts to get into sweater weather.

Until next time,

Yames