Hello dear Dreamers!
It's been a busy few months. We've just about fully assembled the first draft and skeleton of the main gameplay and different levels, but a big effort beyond that has been bringing it all together via the game's story. For this update, we wanted to share the intro to the game, which we will release to backers soon (first the higher-tier playtest backers then more generally) so you can experience it for yourselves.
Our goal above all else is to make it feel like a playable Winsor McCay comic, so we tried to bring together familiar story bits (it's all about the walking bed!), along with the tone and characterization for our heroes. Here's the preview of everything up through the beginning of the Night Sky level:
While it's 6 or so minutes of gameplay, this is the result of months of work, so we wanted to give you a peek into the different tools and systems making this run.
We've talked a little about this before, but to help drive the cutscenes and interaction in the game we put together a mini scripting language. You can can see these exact lines in the video above and can see the actors we refer to in these sequences.
The animated sequences have been a combination of setting an actor's state (walking, jumping, etc) and driven by timeline animation.
The process of stitching all of this together is incredibly time consuming. Max in particular has been combining these in some pretty awesome ways, and really hitting it out of the park with these cinema sequences.
We've been working on the game into pretty late in development for a couple of key reasons: as a teaching experience (this part of the game teaches you how to play the rest), we need to figure out what we should teach players by setting up and playing all of the later levels. It's also where the resources used to make the cool stuff in the rest of the game come together to create a great experience in the first few minutes.
All of this is to say that a lot of the systems we're using to string together the beginning are also being used to connect scenes throughout the game, such as this example of how players will come and go from the challenge levels in Befuddle Hall:
That's it for now! We'll be reaching out soon with more info on those demos.
Cheers,
Chris and Team Nemo