Thanks for all of the comments, guys. It's so nice to hear words of encouragement from other game creators I admire. I'm trying to keep the updates coming!
Thanks Creamy, a lot of the backgrounds are almost isometric, but the ones with different perspectives are really interesting for me too. In particular, I love the gate piece.
Thanks Cassie. Yes, I got your other comment.
Riaise and Hoob, I figure I might as well share everything with you guys. Almost all of us here are developers. More to the point, I think that not talking about what I'm doing for fear of spoilers is perhaps the silliest thing a developer can do. I might write a mini-update about it sometime.
One Room Two WeeksI don't know if any of you have experienced this, but I got bogged down on one room. Specifically, I got bogged down on a single puzzle. To my credit though, there were other rooms involved.
The puzzle occurs about a third of the way through the game. Girl A spent the prior day with the handsome (secret vampire) antagonist. In the morning, she wakes Girl B and informs her that she's going out on another date, lumping Girl B with a bunch of errands to do. One of those errands is to pick up a book from the excessively quaint bookshop cum coffee shop on campus. For testing, I'm using Kate, but it could be either girl in either role.
The book shop is run by Yuri (behind the counter):
And additionally staffed by Fernando:
In addition, there are three background characters. I like this style for representing them. They're people you don't care about or interact with and I wanted something that would indicate this clearly while remaining fairly dull.
I'm going with what I think is an adventure game classic, an out-of-order coffee machine. In this case, it's a bit contrived. Yuri insists on giving you a free coffee with the textbook, and while it's out of order, that's just not possible. He wants to wait for the maintenance man to come by and fix it.
Yuri's the villain of this section. He bullies Fernando and Fernando just puts up with it.
There are two ways to solve the puzzle. Method 1 involves you going outside to the maintenance man to borrow his screwdriver:
You then use the screwdriver to tighten the release valve on the coffee machine. Fernando goes to make another coffee, but the coffee machine blows up. Yuri, of course, blames this on Fernando (it was his idea), and Fernando leaves in a huff. With the coffee machine destroyed, Yuri's happy to concede that it's impossible to serve you a coffee, so you get the textbook.
Method 2 involves a trip to the library to look up academic records:
You see, Yuri explains that he and Fernando are both immigrants, and what distinguishes Yuri is his education. This is why, as Yuri reasons it, he is there to give orders and Fernando is there to take them. If you present Fernando with a true picture of Yuri's accomplishments, you can humiliate Yuri in front of Fernando, at which point, he storms out. Fernando is then free to run the shop and happy to give you the textbook.
The big question then, why did this take so long?
The time consuming part was figuring out how to structure the puzzles. In the end, it's just a couple of simple fetch quests, but it's about telling a greater story (I hope). In this case, I wanted a workplace where bullying occurred, and I wanted two distinct ways of dealing with it: the path of self-interest and the path of dealing with said bullying problem.
I had (and still have) some issues with the mechanism that holds up progress. The idea that you're required to take a coffee with your book order is a little soft a blockade for my liking. I'm planning to explain that away with Yuri's sense of order and propriety.
That's another thing, I haven't really completely fleshed out all of the dialogue and all of the interactions yet. To get to this point, I focussed on just the dialogue involved in the puzzles. Yuri and Fernando, and to some extent, the maintenance man, are a bit like character sketches right now. I have to go back and flesh them out at some point, probably later as I want to give this a rest for a while.
The second thing that made this time consuming is, as I've hopefully demonstrated, it wasn't ONE room. I had to create a little routine that the maintenance man follows, and script all of his interactions. I had to script the computer interactions too.
The third thing is that I'm still running interference with artists. I need to hold impromptu meetings with them to establish what I want. Often I get interrupted just to OK work on assets.
Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the progress that I've made. This is a big chunk of the middle part of the story. There are two other, smaller errands -- signing up at the library and signing up for tutes. These are pretty much just "find the location and talk to the person", so the major work in the university quad is done.
I think the next thing I'll tackle is the radio room. It's in the same section of the game, but it's completely optional and involves a timed puzzle, but not in the way you think. Until next time, thanks for reading my updates!
