Okay, final stretch!
Here's the progress I've slowly made last few days:
- My game screen is looking a lot different than that first wireframe (thankfully). I'm going softer, overall...and juxtaposing the real life photos with the simplistic blobby characters seems funny. So right now, the mechanic is dead simple...you drag and drop a clue in front of one of the Todds and he'll tell you how he feels about it via dialogue text above him.
- To spice up that dialogue, I figured out how to write into a JSON file and load that into an array in Construct 3, so I have 5ish responses per clue, per Todd. I'm gonna try to make the responses a little vaguer so that it's not immediately obvious which Todd fits the bill (though I still think it'll be a pretty simple puzzle to solve).
- I found some lovely piano jazz to be my soundtrack and have implemented that.
- I've written most of the opening "cinematic." This took longer than expected to get a couple of one-sided dialogue lines to fire in sequence...totally a result of me being new to the software. But felt triumphant once I cracked that!
- Started sketching out the design for the overall itch.io game page. I love seeing games on itch that use the preview page in interesting ways, so I'm going to try and have that page sort of act as a start screen of sorts. I DID program a simple start screen into the game, which was helpful just to learn how to animate button presses, but may cut it if I can figure this part out.
What's Left:
- Program the win/lose state...which also includes implementing the "select the right Todd" thing. It'll either be a similar drag and drop element with a submit, like a badge that says "THIS IS TODD." Or maybe jump to a different layout and click which Todd from the lineup is the right one. Haven't fully decided yet.
- I need to animate a few more reactions for each Todd...a positive and negative for each, to go with the appropriate text.
- Also need to animate a simple two frame mouth movement when dialogue is firing.
- Details work...maybe adding a few more elements to pretty up the game screen, adding some hover states to the photos, and SFX for everything.
So yeah! Little bits of triumph, lots of bits of detail work. I think the thing I'm learning is that improvising is fun, and a way that my brain knows how to work, but I'm excited to have a more detailed plan going into the next game...which I think I came up with an interesting idea for last night while I was doodling. So...here's hoping I survive this first one to get to the next!