Hello again!
It's the end of day 5 - and what a stonking 5 days it's been so far! Here is the rundown of the past few days since my last devlog;
Day 3:
Myself & matsuringo spent day 3 getting more of the essential functions of the game - namely the crafting system - functioning , with placeholder icons for ingredients, items etc. By the end of the day, matsuringo had worked his magic and the crafting table was working as intended! Ingredients go on (in a certain arrangement a-la Minecraft) and magic items or composite materials come out! It's like magic!
We had a few meetings on discord through the day, one of which focused on an important upcoming task, the design of a window through which the player would receive/complete objectives. The following image shows the excellent work done in mocking up a prototype. The plan is to have 3 magic items requested by shoppers per level. There will then also be bonus tasks to make simple potions (which involve less crafting/time) that will reward the player with more time to complete the 3 main objectives.
Day 4
A lot came together on day 4.
Matsuringo got the temperature functionality working - now items that needed to be cool turned to sludge if left out of the fridge for too long - and items left in the cauldron for too long can burn to ash! This presented us with a new issue, however, one of legibility for the player. We find here the need for some kind of UI overlay that lets the player know if an item is melting, cooking, burning etc. We eventually landed on coloured text that could show up in a small box upon hovering the mouse over an item.
Otherwise, I cranked out a whole bunch more recipes & placeholder sprites, this time for potions! The 'Very Green Potion', made from a dragon's eyelid and some green slime, is a personal favourite.
I also spent time searching for suitable SFX on sites like opengameart.org - with some success.
Also regarding sound, I'm happy to say that a talented musician friend of mine has happily offered to make some simple music for the game! He sent myself and matsuringo a demo & it sounds great!
Finally on day 4 was a big visual change. Aside from putting some textures on the walls and floors, we played with setting the camera to perspective mode as opposed to orthographic. We had originally chosen orthographic view because of the nature of the HUD we were trying to build, but finding that perspective view still allowed us to hit the same general look- whilst making the 3D utilities far more dynamic - it was a bombshell.
Day 5:
That brings us to today. Today the temperature overlays in the UI got put in, but most of the hours went into implementing a proper interface for objective hand-ins. I spent time in the morning coming up with 50-60 lines of dialouge which covered requests & thank you lines. These were written in such a way that the game could slice and insert the name of the item that was being requested! This, combined with the eventual random generation of item requests, should lead to numerous novel (and hopefully funny) requests for the player to fulfill.
The rest of my day was spent making this 3D cauldron model. 3D is one of my greater areas of experience at this point, so it felt great to test my skills in this time sensitive environment! The model took around 1-2 hours. There are still 7 or 8 more models to make, then they'll all need texturing, so the pace needs to keep up!
When modelling the cauldron, I used this sketch I'd doodled up earlier in the day. Using a simple screengrab of the white-box environment I drew lines over the top to roughly concept the size and proportions of some of the items in the scene. The two tall blocks at the back are the fridge and dry storage - both of which will have open/no doors so one can see the ingredients within!
The final issue covered in a meeting on the afternoon of day 5 was concepting the recipe book players will be able to consult in the game. The game is meant to be challenging and we felt that challenge needed to come from a mixture of sources. The level timer, resource/ingredient management & remembering/quickly scanning the recipes for magic items/potions. As such, the current thinking is for the book to be intuitive, but not allow the player to simply click on the correct item icon and be given the recipe in a snap. Instead the contents page will list items by name - through which their graphical crafting recipe will be revealed. From here, constituent materials may be clicked to see how those are made - if relevant.
