Jonathan Carter

Project Tilly Devlog #6

February 13, 2022September 23, 2022 by Jonathanin Devlogs, Game DevelopmentLeave a Comment

Today marks the end of week 6 of development on Project Tilly. This week’s plan was to fix all the problems currently in the game so I could move forward for more stuff in the coming weeks. This has been achieved mostly, with a lot of little issues fixed and some obsolete code removed.

Here’s a little preview of how the existing content looks now, with a few UI adjustments to make the system feel a little more polished.

Some of the issues fixed include:

The pause menu could be opened when the journal was open and vice versa.
When interacting with doors, the door would sometimes not open correctly.
When interacting with doors, and spamming the interact button, the door would stack the inputs instead of just listening to the first input until the door was available again.
Fixed issues where the player would collide with the bed during the intro tutorial.
Re-worked the inventory system to be simplistic as the old system was a bit over-engineered for the job at hand.

Next week I’ll be moving on with computer system mechanic, where the player can use devices such as laptops & phones in a similar way to real life. This won’t be done in a week for sure, but it should only take a few weeks to get sorted so I might as well get started.

Monthly Update | Jan 2022

February 6, 2022September 21, 2022 by Jonathanin Archive, UpdateLeave a Comment

Here is the first monthly update for 2022. This will be a monthly update news post going over the main highlights of what I have been working on in the past month.

Website Updates

Recently I’ve updated the website with a new section for packages, these are smaller assets/tools that are not on the unity asset store. These are normally experimental or niece systems that are not 100% complete yet but are public if anyone wants to use them.

I’ve also added a section in our products on the home page for Project Tilly, which has been the main focus for the month.

Project Tilly

Project Tilly is our first major game project prototype. The game follows a week in the life of Isabelle, a student living alone in a small studio flat. Experience her struggle as she tries to go from day to day, suffering from several mental health issues such as anxiety, loneliness & depression. The project is planned for a end of Q2 demo build, where I will gauge if the project is going to go anywhere & either move on to another project or continue with it to the next build.

Current progress is good, though a little messy. I the next moth I will be focusing on this project more and trying to get a playable build ready with some minor story elements & main mechanics in.

You can see our weekly updates either on the upcoming channel in our discord server (hidden under the games role), or here: https://carter-games.itch.io/project-tilly/devlog

Audio Manager

I’ve made a minor patch to the Audio Manager, which updates the debug log’s to provide more information about the problems they report. As of writing it is still pending and will be a silent update, so we will post when the update is live to ley you know as and when this happens.

Discord Server Changes

At the end of year year, I made some changes to the discord server. These changes mean new members to the server don’t see the whole server and need to react with an emoji in the server info rules channel to gain access to other parts of the server. I made this change partly to help the new user experience and partly to reduce the amount of incorrect channel usage. So far this has worked well, with roles for asset support, games & community along with an option notification role that gets mentioned with all announcement posts.

That’s all for this post, we’ll be back in the first week of March with the February update!

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 #3

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

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