Hi everyone!
Here are a few of the things that have been taking shape recently.
Work has begun on iterating the opening scene of the game: the moment you first arrive in the country left behind in early childhood. The return is meant to reunite you with your brother, but instead reveals his flat sealed, his neighbours silent and scared. The first signs that something has gone very wrong.
Progress has also been made on the pace of turn-based combat. One of the main experiments involves simultaneous movement during NPC turns, so enemies no longer move one by one in a slow procession. There is still a lot to improve, but the basics are now working, and it already gives a much better sense of how fast combat can feel.
The main character model has been adjusted as well. It now matches the version of the character shown on the Steam capsule more closely.
New trigger zones and interactive objects have been added to support more environmental interactions (e.g. a manhole used to enter another level, dialogue scripts started through trigger zones etc).
There is now basic support for consumable inventory items, such as all sorts of medkits and ammunition.
The localisation components used across the UI have been improved.
Basic Steam Deck support was tested via Proton, along with custom controller mappings. Watch the video below:
Some time has gone into internal tools too, including tile and obstacle visualisation, entity tools, and debugging improvements.
There has also been experimentation with dialogue system integration in Visual Studio Code. The original DOS version of the game already had a custom scripting language, so I’ve been revisiting that idea from a slightly more modern angle. Ink and Yarn are both impressive tools, but neither has felt like a perfect fit for how this game handles dialogue, scripting, state management, branching interactions and localisation. So I’ve been working towards a custom workflow that better matches the structure of the project.
There have been many other small changes and fixes along the way, but the real walls of text are being saved for the final game...
