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Project Tilly Devlog #5

February 6, 2022September 23, 2022 by Jonathanin Devlogs, Game DevelopmentLeave a Comment

Today marks the end of week 5 of development on Project Tilly. This week was another quiet one due to life taking priority, but a few things have been done on the project, which you can see below. Over the next 4 weeks I’ll have an extra day a week to work on the project, so hopefully that will help get more progress done in the coming weeks.

Wake Up Animation

This week I did some story design to the game and I decided to do a little work on some of the animations I would need for the project. One of these being a wake up and get out of bed sequence. On the backend this added a cutscene manager that allows elements of the game to have different states when a cutscene is started or completed. This animation will be improved on in future weeks, I already have plans to add hands and an eye blink effect to make it more realistic.

Doors

While nothing to write home about, I added interactable doors so the player can actually open/close the doors as they wish. This uses the same interactables system made last week with an addition to define if the item is an inventory item or not when interacted with.

Backend

During the week I worked a little more on my Multi Scene system, which is used in this project. The new version adds the option for me to order when the multi-scene awake, enable & start interface methods run, as well as neatening up the code in the system.

If you are interested, you can get the system here:

Dark Mode

MultiScene (this link opens in a new window) by CarterGames (this link opens in a new window)

A multi-scene workflow/tool for using multiple scenes in one go in Unity.

https://github.com/JonathanMCarter/MultiScene

Along with that I’ve been cleaning up some of the existing code, removing old scripts that are not in use etc.

Next weeks plan is to mostly clean up & fix any existing problems with the game in its current state. As at the rate I’m working at I will get muddled very easily, which is a common problem with projects of this size.

Project Tilly Devlog #4

January 30, 2022September 23, 2022 by Jonathanin Devlogs, Game DevelopmentLeave a Comment

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.

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.

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.

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 #2

January 16, 2022September 23, 2022 by Jonathanin Devlogs, Game DevelopmentLeave a Comment

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

January 16, 2022September 23, 2022 by Jonathanin Devlogs, Game DevelopmentLeave a Comment

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:

End of November Update

December 1, 2021September 21, 2022 by Jonathanin Archive, News, UpdateLeave a Comment

End of November Update

Its been a few weeks since the last update, but we do have a bit of news to share so here goes.

Build Versions

Build versions, our latest asset, is finally out on the Unity Asset Store after a really long review time, which was around 45 days give or take. The first few days of the asset being live have been great though xD, We’ve had record page views & asset claims which has made it worth the wait. I recently filmed a short overview video for the asset which I’m still working on the captions for as I write this. You can see the video on the store listing or on our YouTube channel. I plan film more of these for our other assets soon so each one has at-least 1 video explaining how to use it xD

Drop Tables

What happened with Drop Tables? yea, I’m still undecided on what the use case this asset is for and how it should be setup to allow it to work with multiple games. Because of this, I’m postponing the asset for now until I get the time to sort this fully xD

Audio Manager Version 3

We’ve notice a few issues with Audio Manager 2.5.4, which we are working on a patch for presently. However we also have a major overhaul coming soon! Its Version 3 baby! Backend wise some of the stuff is getting moved around and the way the asset is used is changed from inspector based to scriptable object based. Mostly this means the asset will be more flexible and hopefully more performant with less laggy inspectors, improved auto scanning, manual scanning options & more! This may or may not come out this year, we’ll see how it goes.

Leaderboard Manager

The backend for the new leaderboard manager changes are ready, we just need to test it & do all the front end stuff xD This is on track, though I’d expect it to be coming out early 2022 as most of the development time will be during and after Christmas and the asset store review team will probably be off until new year by then xD

Games in 2022

We really want to make a game xD With the asset changes currently planned, we should have all of our assets at a decent point where supporting and updating them shouldn’t take too much of our time. So our main goal for next year is to release or make significant progress on a game title. We don’t know what yet, but its our main goal for next year!