Project Tilly Devlog #4

Today marks the end of week 4 of development on Project Tilly. This week was a bit of a quiet one for development, mainly due to a lack to free time to work on it as life took priority. I have managed to get a little bit done as well as begun organising the plan for the demo level & what I need to make for it.

Interactables

The main system worked on this week is the interaction system. Its not a finished system yet as I’m still working on how this system will work with others in the game. I do now have an idea of how I want it to work. But it’ll rely on the a few base scripts being made correctly first which will be next weeks goal. Currently I have the selection side of it done with the hit object stored in a object that I can reference to any script easily, I’ve added a little UI to show the name of the selected item, but next week I hope to have it also display options here as well.

Items

Items are a bit part of the game as they can trigger memories, journal entries & bring the environment to life. The flat level will have plenty to interact with, the idea being you can mess around with it if you wish and move most of the object in the scene around should you wish.

wk4   headphones

Inventories

Player inventories are a little extra I wanted to add. Now in a game like this, it isn’t essential but I wanted the player to be able to equip for items like the headphones and gain a bonus from doing so. So for instance, the headphones when equipped and in use reduce the stress and or anxiety level of the main character a little which may help the player progress through a section that they cannot traverse otherwise. There will be more on this in a future week where I work on the player stats and mental health mechanics.

wk4   metadata

Project Planning

The last little bit I’ve done this week is organise what I need to do into tasks on Notion. If you don’t know what Notion is, it is a great note taking software that is very flexible and can be used in a variety of ways. In this case I’m using it to write down my plans for the game and organise the tasks I need to complete on a kotoban board style layout with both status and priority sorting the tasks into a neat order for me to look at. Each tasks is its own page which I can add to with to-do lists to breakdown each task and and references I made need such as articles or media which may help with the task. I’ll be using this throughout development as I create the game.

wk4   notion

That’s about it for this weeks update. I know last week I said a build would be around week 4-5, that is looking a little less likely with next week also having a few life events taking up the little free time I get during the week. Due to this I’m aiming to just get the systems for pickup up items and dropping them sorted, if I get that done early in the week I’ll do more on the inventory system along with any other outstanding tasks.

Project Tilly Devlog #3

Summary

So today marks the end of the 3rd week of development on Project Tilly and so far so good. The game is mostly stable with the current features implemented, though a new build would be available until week 4/5 due to most of the new content not being accessible without more features being added in.

This week was focused on finishing up the journal system as well as making some developer tools to help with testing and saves.

Journal

The journal got a few tweaks from last week as well as the display setup was implemented fully to show entries based on if the user had unlocked them. I also added a little UI element to show when the user has a new entry in their journal. This is all and working as intended for the most part. I’ll get around to making final polish steps down the line, but for now the system is functional which is good enough to move on.

Save Editor

The other main bit of progress is on the development side. The Save Manager that is a copy of our public asset of the same name needed a little extension to let me edit the data in the editor for testing etc. This took a little work but I now have a little editor window that can be used to test the systems, such as the journal system, and change the users state as I play to make sure it works as intended. This will be a valuable tool as I keep working on the game. The only downside to the system is the fact that I will have to manually add any new data values to the editor script on the fly.

Upcoming

Next week I will be focusing on adding a system for letting the user interact with objects in the game. This is a vital system for the game and will be needed for the next build so the new systems can be used without dev tools. If all goes well a new build will be in next weeks update, if not the week after. Though its still early days and it just the systems to playtest really.

Speak to y’all next week xD

Project Tilly Devlog #2

Its the end of week 2 of development! This week was a relatively quiet week as my 9-5 was draining this week with a lot of bugs to fix on my work project. Due to that not much progress was made this week.

However, most of the backend for the journal system has been made. It is just the implementing and testing that needs doing. Currently the book art is placeholder as the actual book be custom made to fit the art style. Each page can have several elements to it, which can be revealed and hidden using an ID which is defined for each entry in the journal. Pages can be changed using the arrow buttons or the left & right controls for moving around.

The idea of the system is that when the player completed a story beat to add to the journal, we would pass the ID for the entry we want to show to the journal manager, which will unlock it on the journal and call an action to let any subscribing scripts that a new entry has been added to the journal. Entries in the journal fade in when newly revealed, but uniformly fade in and out at a fast rate if previously unlocked.

Next week will be focused on finishing up the UI side of things, testing the page turning, fading, entry unlocking and action system so it all works as intended. If I get time I’ll get to work on a new system.

Project Tilly Devlog #1

Hey y’all, so its coming to the end of the week and as a goal to keep posting at regular intervals I’ll be posting weekly updates on development no matter how big or small the work in the week was, if any. Do note that I work on this in my spare time which is limited and that I work in the industry full-time as is, so I only get around 5-10 hours a week on this at best.

This week was mostly focused on the backend for the main menu & options menu in the game. I wanted to make a system that could work in future titles as well as this one so I took my time to get it to a good spot. I’ve added in most of the options in to the game with their values updating in the global save. The plan is to add fully re-mappable key bindings in the future, but that is down the line a little.

You can see the current progress in this short video: