Week 3: Working Like a Gremlin

When I say working like a gremlin, I don't mean the goblin kind of gremlin likely to be killed by adventurers, I just mean I did a lot of work this week.

- All Locales Scouted! -

The main gameplay loop of the game involves following the different characters through the events of the day, as part of that you have to unlock different areas (or "Locales" as they are called in the code) that you can view to unlock more choices that influence the day or just to learn the truth about what happened. By the end of last week Only 2 were actually implemented (The barracks and the market), and only the barracks was fully complete. This week not only did I finish off the market by adding in the required choices and interactions, I added the other two main locales. 

The tower is the locale where the sheriff starts and canonically is on the edge of the castle town where the game takes place. From the tower the sheriff is able to see outside the castle, but also has a clear view of the courtyard where the market is.  As part of making the locale, I had to make the sheriff to go with it.

The dungeon is the final locale you will unlock (in the neutral ending) and is the closest locale to where the murder occurred ( I was going to add a crypt locale that would be even closer, but it got cut for time). The dungeon is just a small part of the large abandoned tunnel system under the castle called the catacombs. Canonically, the catacombs are open game for adventurers to loot and patrol, since they are far too large to be useful to the  castle, but the town guard does occasionally clear out the monsters to keep it from being overrun. While only being a small part of the catacombs the dungeon is meant to be a stand in for the entirety of the setting.

- Court is Now in Session -

Going into this week I had less than half of the time in the game jam left, yet still had a whole half of the gameplay left to implement. The whole point of being able to choose what happens during the day is that it affects what gets said and how the trial reaches its outcome. When it comes to dialogue trees I have some experience from the event system I added to Ponder The Void. So it wasn't super hard to make the classes that would stack and lead into each other. What was more difficult was the sheer amount of writing I had to do. Since I only had limited time and sanity to create conversations around every possible course of events I created a rule of thumb to minimize how bad the writing could get. For each of the dialog paths that actually leads to unlocking the next area, I would tailor the conversation to getting to that conclusion, and for any path that fails at one of the requirement, I would disrupt the current conversation and then lead the conversation to hint at the correct choice to get on the correct path. Its not going to become a new york times best seller but it should hopefully make the game playable.

- Final Week Polish-

Going into the last week I don't have any real goals of what I want to get done, but rather a few stretch goals that will depend on how much time I have. I would like to have some sort of tutorial so that other people are actually be able to play the game. There is a "Good Ending" that I would like to add to make the story more satisfying. Also I should probably add a menu and a credits screen so that the gameplay is less abrupt. Other than that I really just want to go through the game bit by bit and try to polish what I can.

Almost done!

-Tad