Week 4: The Start Of The Ending

A lot of work was done, lets just say that.

- Setting the Scene -

After last week ended with creating the characters. I was pleasantly surprised with how faithfully I was able to recreate the designs I had in mind, this is the first real game where I have done art fully sketched by hand. Previously I have used vector graphics, simple shapes, pixel art, or on my first game jam game AI art (It was early AI art, and I didn't foresee it getting so problematic). But for this game I fully committed to making it look good, and I feel as if after 5 or so years of slowly trying to learn to draw, learning bits and pieces here and there, I have finally gotten my art to a point where I feel comfortable letting it work as game assets. Obviously now that I learned how to critically analyze art for quality the bar has seriously been raised and my art still looks very primitive. At least now I can sketch and analyze my own art for areas I can improve.

That whole rant was leading up to me not wanting to fully display all of my art. Letting the art be too visible would make it easier to pick out the flaws, so I decided I needed to do some lighting to make the scene more interesting. By applying some 2D lights to the unity scene I am actually able  to convey a lot more information is the perspective view than I was before. The light for each character glows brighter when its there turn, and turns off completely when they are out of money. The light also makes the background less noticeable, so I don't feel nearly as pressured to try and make it look nicer.

- Todays Menu -

On the menu for the game I wanted to hint at some more plot that I probably won't really expand on too much in dialogue, but I can put it here if your interested. Despite the styling on the tarot deck being 1920s, the game is actually set in a 1950s time period. So the main menu is supposed to be a 50s style casino, which is most notable in the design of the slot machine. The slot machine was really fun to animate and I think it is a nice touch since originally I wanted the title screen to be a bunch of really fast played stacks, starting with the fool and randomly drawing cards until death. I didn't know how I would stylistically pull that off, so instead you get a slot machine that always rolls a fool in the first slot and a death in the last slot, then rolls a random card from the deck in the middle.

In the back of the casino is the door to the room you play the main game in. Its locked with a padlock initially, but you end up cutting that to get into the room (or potentially entering the code if I end up making this game multiplayer). The door is super out of place since it has some sort of runic etching that is a similar design to the card backs. I am not actually sure what this implies, but I'm sure its important :P

The play button is weird and dripping. This is technically because you have a voice in you head that caused to to seek out this casino and break into this door, but I don't think I will have  time to properly make that obvious in game.

- So Talkative -

I added text boxes! Its really not that complicated to implement but it takes time to do it right. The text speed is actually tied to the frame rate, so don't run the game on a potato or you will get stuck in dialogue for a while. Currently the players don't actually say anything interesting, and its hard to get their personality from the few programmed lines I have them say. I'm planning to randomize the lines the players can say at the start, and whenever I want to have long stretches of dialogue, that way I don't have to bog the player down with dialogue while still being able to differentiate the characters (It even makes death useful!). 

- The Aforementioned End -

There are two endings currently programmed. You can lose and end up with a watery grave, or you can win and "escape" which just boots you back to the main menu. This is not the planned end since I still want to do a second round in the game.

That's a good segue into what I'm doing this week. There is some small stuff I want to do to clean up the game, with making some expressions for the players when they talk, and making the UI a little cleaner. The major thing I want to get done before this Thursday (when I plan to claim the game as finished)  is to get the second round together. This means making an acid shader, making a sprite for the laced cream donut, and making the cards hallucinate as different cards.

Thx for reading

- Tado