Hi there, Marcus here. Since Steam's news system seems to be quite nice to work with, I decided to post future development updates and logs here and remove the devlog from the Wormventures - Barrier 51 homepage. At first I will move my older devlogs to Steam to have them all at one place.
This time I want to tell more about my approach to create this game, beginning with implenting the raw game logic and then detailing each scene.
Creation philosophy
First thing I did was creating each scene with just simple geometry like boxes and cylinders that represent the very rough scene layout and the things, the player can interact with. This was completely done with Blender, a free 3D modeling software and meanwhile a beast of an application. I work with Blender for many years now and since it was a little bit quirky in the past (selecting with right mouse button and so on, which can be really confusing when switching back and forth between Unity and Blender) it is now completely industry compatible in terms of controls (common mouse and keyboard layout).
This is an example of a super-rough greyboxing scene layout in Blender:
After designing the scene in Blender it was opened in Unity, the game engine I'm using to create this game. In Unity all logic elements of a scene were added like hotspots, markers to move the characters from point to point and triggers to make things happen if the player moves into a certain area. Camera and a rough lighting was implemented as well at this point of time.
This is the same scene in Unity with the hotspots and markers in place:
This process was done for all scenes. Basic dialogs were implemented, some of them as simple as "Give me item" for the player to say. Just there to connect the whole game logic underneath. By doing this I had a completely playable game in a relatively short period of time ... which was unbelievably ugly. Since then all the graphics, sounds, music, lighting, animations, dialogs and of course the story are being added. Some rooms with local puzzles are unfinished and are currently skipped when playing the game. They can be included into the game very quickly and get in, when they are done.
This is the same scene in a more detailed state:
