Week 4

The time to work on this game has come to a close, and I feel as if It went fairly well. While the first 3 weeks where starved for progress, the fourth week made basically half of the entire game. Going into this week all I had was a bunch of scattered gameplay elements and by the end they are pieced together into a somewhat coherent game.

-  Communications Console - 

The communication console got finished off this week since last week it didn't really function. 

In general, it got a heavy coat of polish with fun additions like animated hologram icons for each mission, dynamic option choices that are easy to branch dialogue with that also allow different actions to be taken with each click. The dialogue options can be programmed to require a certain level of sanity to be chosen as well as requiring certain item to click. This lends to many more interesting event ideas that have a meaningful impact on gameplay.

- Player UI -

Thanks to the use of shader graphs I was able to implement sanity, hunger, and fuel bars that display on the users interface.

Each of the stats has a different effect on gameplay that I was hoping to accomplish with it.

Fuel works to measure the players actual progress through the game, where to travel between star systems a certain amount of fuel is used as you travel. Fuel is a general measure and is automatically refilled by removing a fuel Item from the storage when it runs low.

Hunger is slightly different from fuel while still working to measure game progression. Hunger is constantly decreasing as the game runs and makes it so the player has to keep traveling to avoid running low on food rather than just staying in one place continuously to keep crafting product.

Sanity works kind of like a health bar and affects gameplay by reducing the dialogue options you can choose in the communications console. It can only be increased or decreased by events and is partially added to adhere closer to the "Existential Crisis" theme.

The other important part of the players UI is the held item slot. This solves a lot of the problems I was dealing with when trying to figure out how to implement the cargo systems with the other consoles. I knew I wanted the player to have to manually transport items between consoles but was making it to difficult on my self by thinking up really convoluted ways of displaying what item the player was holding .I was originally thinking about having the player just visually hold the items, but that would require more animations that I didn't have time to complete or to just have the objects visually floating behind the player like some sort of hover pod (also would require more animation). The held Item slot became a happy medium that had a way to visually show the player what item they were holding without a ton of animation being necessary.

- Communications Events -

The events are the real meat and potatoes of the game (or maybe they are the meat and everything else is potatoes), because they provide the most actual "gameplay" out of all of the consoles. The random activation of events at certain important intervals gives the other consoles purpose as a way to serve the requirements of each event. Events can take sanity, hunger, or fuel away from the player and can even take items straight out of the cargo bay if need be. When designing events the limiting factor was both time and imagination, as it currently stands there are relatively few unique events in the game and most of them kind of overlap in purpose. It also possible that just the lack of actual gameplay features the events could affect made it much harder to come up with interesting events.

When designing the events I was trying to go for a slightly more serious tone than I usually do (there are still some funny, lol random options) by trying to imagine a galaxy existing where deep space smuggling was actually necessary. One of the biggest things that went un-utilized for the events was the faction system, Each faction had a ton of different characteristics programmed into it when I was working on the star map a couple weeks ago, that I intended to use to influence the types of events or outcomes of different dialogue choices depending on a given star system's attributes, yet I wasn't really able to put it to good use other than just making unique icons for the four faction that I implemented that change depending on which factions star system your in. (I also used the attributes of each star system to generate its name with the faction name then a dash then a bunch of the systems values which is interesting because the random numbers actually mean something).

Some special events that I designed to add more spice to the gameplay where the scan event and the call of the void event. The scan event is special in that it goes through your cargo and marks any product not inside of a crates inventory as contraband and then removes it (cargo on a shelf actually is slightly safer than the floor and has a 50/50 chance of being discovered). The call of the void event is where the name of the game actually comes from. The event has something like a 60% chance of being picked whenever the player encounters an event when traveling between systems and functions as the main way the player loses sanity. This gets at the real heart of the existential topic the game is built around, what is space but vast nothingness. The event rapidly drains the players sanity when activated and randomly generates dialogue options the only way out of the event is to select an option that sacrifices a particular resource, however escape options are not always presented. Sometimes the player gets lucky and a worthy escape is presented immediately and sometimes you have you keep rolling for new dialogue choice before you find something you are willing to lose. When rerolling the dialogue options there are two choices presented to you, one takes away extra sanity while the other does not. This encourages the player to slow down and actually read the options and induces a kind of panic that mimics the pretext of the event.

- Polishing The Game -

I made several addition to try and make the game a more polished experience. The major change was with the decoration. I have had the models to decorate the ship with for a couple weeks at this point but I was finally able to actually add them today. I was able to try and make the rooms look unique and interesting despite only having three assets to pick from, and used a lot of different lighting to color the rooms and I messed with the scaling to give the appear of having more objects than I really. While this still leaves the ship look very same-y and bland, its a vast improvement from the default texture on every single object.

"When you can't design interesting levels, just use post processing" - me, now

I used a bit of post processing on the project like a very slight film grain, a vignette to focus the attention on the center of the screen, and a color filter that just makes the whole ship feel a bit darker.

I polished the UI's a good bit trying to make them look a bit nicer and to remove as many default assets as possible. Mostly I just created an animation that adds faint scan lines to the UI as an overlay to give the appear that its an actual hologram screen on a console rather than the canvas overlay it actually is. I also added the quality of life features of x buttons to every screen just in case a player doesn't know that you can close the console with 'e'.  

- Game Manager -

Overall The major thing that got done this week was putting together a script that properly organizes the game. This means that it controls when you can launch to another star system, when you need to respond to a communication before continuing, and when you really just have to wait until you get to the next event. The game manager puts the actual flow into the game that connects the game together.

- Features I Cut -

To make my time limit a lot of interesting features got cut from the final game. I had originally planned on a money system that would make it easier to make events or shops and would stop the player from hoarding bottle of product, that got cut because I didn't have enough time to make an actual shop event and just used the regular event system to create one. Not having a money system led to the side quest system getting cut, meaning the player could only interact with one mission at a time. Since I had no real special way to reward the player for side quests It just didn't make sense to keep them in. I cut out an entire room from the game's floor plan since I removed the engine feature. The engine was supposed to put much more permanent feeling consequences to event choices as there would be several different components that could get damaged each giving a different debuff. This also meant that the repair kit got cut since it existed entirely as a way to fix the engine. I had meant for it to be possible to semi-permanently upgrade the ship by adding more crates and shelves to the storage bay, but it got cut because there was not actually enough space on the cargo screen to fit more than two of the crate inventories or shelf inventories. Other features that I originally had planned but eventually were delegated to merely stretch goals where things like the character creator that would let you actually customize the player sprite. 

- Conclusion -

This was a really interesting challenge of a game to create, considering that I was not expecting this theme to win and came up with this Idea last second. Every game I make I try to challenge myself to learn one new technique or mechanic for the game, and I definitely accomplished that with the procedural generation system and the inventory system. I am excited to get to showcase the game for the game development club and event made it so that if you use the seed 1337 it makes the game shorter so that I can showcase it in much more reasonable time. If you are part of the game development club and decide the read these devlogs - Try to do a game jam! they are a really fun way to learn, I don't usually team up with people to work on games but if you have a cool idea for the next one or you want pointers, just reach out! 

Stay Creative

-Tad