Week 1? - An Average Seeming Day

Welcome back!

Last year I decided I wanted to write dev logs for every week I worked on a game for a jam. This time is not the exception!

- What Am I Making This Time? -

Well I'm glad you asked! I am making a game for the UMD GDC Spring 2024 Game Jam, which has themes of Time and Medieval Fantasy With Modern Technology/[Guns]. I'm just saying we could have time cults instead, but everyone had to vote on the really long theme. Regardless the the time theme let me revive an old concept that I had and repurpose it into an actual game. The game itself is  called "Trial By Error", and that is really what came first I had a really catchy name for a game and the gameplay just came along for the ride. In this case the game play involves a series of events over the course of one day, that ends with a court case. On the default path the court case ends in a very upsetting conclusion, where not enough evidence is available to save a potentially innocent adventurer from murder charges and life in the dungeon. However you are able to go back in time and explore the day and influence the choices of the characters so that when the court case occurs again, more evidence is able to come to light. To make the game longer you wont even be able to see all of the locations the characters went to over the course of the day, but by getting people to ask the right questions and reveal good information you can expand your ability to see the truth.

- Timeline Shenanigans -

One of the main results I have to show from this past week is the timeline. Since the whole game revolves around being able to rewind the time surrounding a murder as if it was a recording everything in the game has to be tied to a custom time mechanic. This means character movements and animations, conversations, and important decisions are all exactly the same at a given value of my time variable. This took a lot of coding, and the script for the timeline alone already has near 600 lines of code. but it leads to some pretty cool results.

To actually control time all you have to do is press pause, play, or fast forward. If you hate linear narrative progression you can also just click to different point on the timeline and look at that point specifically.

- I Like Vector Art Now -

As someone who can't even draw a straight line, art has always been the most difficult part of my games. That's why every game I make I try to use a different art style. For PTV that meant pixel art on 3D environments, for DBM that was MS Paint level art drawn in photoshop. But after a recent computer crash deleted all of my adobe products [ ;) ], I decided to try out some open source software. I had known about Inkscape for a while and had always meant to try it, but didn't really know what it was until now. Inkscape is an open source vector art program, which means that instead of typical pixel editing that most art involves, you instead get to edit paths which for someone who can't draw a straight line is very useful. With paths you can easily re adjust a line or shape by moving its nodes until it looks exactly the way you imagine it.

Inkscape is probably my new favorite art tool, but it does have one fairly annoying downside. When trying to animate vector art, there are few programs that do it in a way where you can export it to a sprite sheet. The one I originally was using was called Synfig Studio, which other than completely importing the colors wrong from Inkscape allowed for adequate animation, yet I wasn't a huge fan of it because it seems like it hasn't been updated in 10 years and runs super slow. I tried a couple of other animation software, like OpenToonz which wasn't really suited for sprite animation, and Enve which only exported to animated html which you may notice is not a png sprite sheet. Eventually I decided that Synfig is still probably the best option and I would just have to learn how to use it properly.

- Goals For The Coming Week -

Over the weekend I mostly focused on doing a bunch of art and animation since I knew I likely wouldn't be motivated to do it during the week. Since I have a bit of a busy week ahead I'm going easy and focusing mostly on importing most of the new animations and potentially figuring out how to do a 2D lighting system.