Week 4: Trial By Error

This game jam was originally slated to run for 5 weeks, after my computer crashed half way through the original week one I lost not only all of my work and had to take time to fix my computer I ended up having only 4 weeks left. However, the game jam actually got extended by 2 more weeks . I thought that 5 weeks was a lot of time, but 7 weeks is ridiculous. Since the time was mostly added to give people who haven't started game chance a yet I'm deciding to cut my game off at the original end date.

- Finishing Touches -

The game was mostly done by the start of this week, so nothing too crazy was even added. Most of the work done this week was packaging the game nicely with a title screen, ending and, credits (I even added a loading screen to make it a real game). So rather than doing a lot of programming I did a lot of art. I made the set dressing much nicer by making it so that your time controlling UI looks like the desk of some weird wizard, with gems for controlling the sands of time (the timeline is now an hourglass). The art looks really out of place since its missing a lot of shading and looks far too smooth, but its the best that I can do with the time I spent on it. 

- Title Screen -

I made the title screen take place in a cut locale, the crypt, which was originally supposed to include the dead goblin, and the adventurer hiding. After I cut the crypt I was trying to figure out how best to show the actual crime since, you only get to see the events happen offscreen in the dungeon. I was thinking of potentially making scrolls with a picture of the dead goblin to show during the trial, but that didn't make a ton of sense, but when making the title screen I decided to include the goblin since it lures you in with a mystery before you even start the game.

- Endings -

I added 2 endings to the game, the neutral ending is really just to allow you a stopping point (or more specifically allow me a stopping point when showcasing the game), it really just includes an extra panel and doesn't even play the credits. The good ending (whether its the "true" ending is up to interpretation), is a legitimate cutscene that allows the final trial to play out, and the credits to roll afterwards.

- Tutorial -

I usually don't include tutorials in the games that I make, since I plan to be the only one that ever actually plays them. I liked how this game came out though, and due to the fact that its story driven I don't want to spoil all of it I added a tutorial so that other people can discover the story for themselves.

- General Bugfixes -

Bug fixing is at the same time fun, and extremely infuriating. On one hand you get to see all the silly things that happen when you took shortcuts in your code, like people appearing places they shouldn't be, or floating when they should be walking. On the other hand it near always takes several tries to even identify what is causing the issue. A lot of my recent games I have been trying to make my code cleaner so that I don't have to struggle nearly as much, except for this one I did not plan my code far enough ahead and it ended up a spaghetti mess. As you can expect many issues came from me simply forgetting what my code did.

- Conclusion and Takeaways -

This is the most fun section to write anytime I finish a game log. From this game I did a lot of new stuff with virtual classes and animators, which will prove very useful for games in the future. However, I also let my code turn to spaghetti and spent way to long making art. One of the interesting things about the art is that I try something new with ever game, for this one it was vector art. For one the  utility of vector art is nice since you can make your lines exactly how you want them, but the workflow is a bit difficult. Not only did I accidentally export my art as the wrong file type on far too many equations, the animation software I was using (Synfig Studio) was really old and terribly optimized. I would probably use vector art again, but probably not for animation or characters. 

If I was to have extra time on this project (I technically do, but I'm not going to use it) I would add in the extra area and choices that I removed with the crypt. I would probably flesh the dialog trees out a bit more to make them more versatile, and I would spend much more time on the art to make the shading and animations better.

Thanks for reading

-Thad