Devlog - January 2021 Review

January was a very satisfying and productive month of game development! I don't know if it's just the motivation of the new year, or if the game is finally starting to come together, but it sure was enjoyable.

The month started working on random events which at this point are just little scenes that can occur during travel or shopping depending on who you're talking to. The main design goal behind them is to shake up the players routine and help add some more color to the world.

There were two main challenges with implementing random events. The first challenge was figuring out how to "inject" this extra interaction into whatever the player was doing. I was able to accomplish this by inventing a concept of a sub-scene that would know enough to get back to wherever the parent scene started. It's not 100% perfect, but it's good enough for the prototype, and works in any scene so I don't have to build something new for each place I want to introduce random events.

The other challenge was more on the design side, and coming up with a way to manage all of these random events, and get them to show up at the right times and in the right places. To solve this I created a persistent list of what random events a player is allowed to encounter, and then whenever a player encounters a random event I remove it from that list so it doesn't happen again. This also works out as a clean way to add new random events based on what the player is doing in the game. I can setup different dialogue options to now add-in new random events to the pool, which has the really cool effect of the player feeling like the world is reacting to their choices.

The remainder of the month was spent on re-working the tutorial experience to include the new features that have been added, more on that later 😉. While I was updating the tutorial I also took the time to make it more designer friendly. This meant adding new unity editor objects to interact with, so a non-programmer can interact with it. This turned out to be way harder than I thought an ate up pretty much the rest of the month. I'm happy to report that I've got it working though so at least future updates to the tutorial, and other "scripted scene" type things will be much easier to create in the future.

After the slog of tutorialization, the last two days of the month were extremely satisfying. With the tutorial finished and inclusive of all major features, I spent the extra time cleaning up some long standing bugs and adding in some more polish and content to the game. New enemies, new items, new conversations, and more were all added to the game surprisingly easily. Having already spent some time making those things designer friendly, I was really pleased to see how much faster content can get added to the game.

With all of that said and done, I'm nearly ready to release v0.1.0 and start another round of playtesting. Keep and eye out for more information on that soon!

Thanks for reading!