In the past two weeks I worked on finishing a demo/proof of concept for my game. Here’s a recap of what I did.
Game Project Files
- I merged all my test projects (NPC/Interaction, dreams, and asset zoo) into a singular one, which I’ll be use for the entire game from now on.
- Setup Oodle texture compression + asset action utility to batch compress textures. The game build size went from 2.4GB to 1.9GB with no noticeable differences.
- Setup Git versioning + edited my NAS backup settings to be faster
Interaction system:
- Added a teleport feature. It can be used to move the player to any location, as well as set the rotation. If an actor tag is provided, it will teleport all actors of that tag as well.
- Added a name feature to interactive objects/NPCs. If the name is set, it will appear on the top left portion of the dialog box, otherwise it will not be shown.
- Reworked some custom actions, and also made it a separate actor that gets spawned into the level (previously it was part of the third person character blueprint)
- Added the possibility for a multichoice question to only have one answer and no question, making it neither multi-choice nor a question lol. It can be used to prompt the player before performing an action. Like “Pull the lever”.
- added a possibility to sync dialog lines between objects. For example all fire alarms will be updated to the same line number if you interact with any one of them.
- Added generic trigger boxes that perform specific tasks when the player overlaps with them, such as: move an actor, play sound, destroy an actor…etc.
Train station environment:
I finished this version of the train station. The layout is intentionally convoluted/weird and a bit inconsistent, because it’s inside a dream, but I tried to keep the experience linear enough and not too confusing.
Once again I used baked lighting, because Lumen doesn’t work well with world position offset, and it cannot run on the Steam Deck. With the baked lighting I’m getting a near consistent 60FPS experience, with frame rate dropping to 50 FPS in some areas. It’s not too bad, and I’ll come back to optimize the graphics quality settings later.
Here are some screenshots
Playable Demo:
I finished a first version of the demo last week, and I shared it with some friends to play test it and get some feedback and thoughts. I am still working on the final touches for the 2nd version of the demo, which I’ll publish on Steam and Itch.io hopefully by the end of this week.
Here is a full playthrough of the first demo.
It is meant to test the interaction system in a more complete “real-life” scenario, but also showcase some of the dream mechanics and weirdness. It can be buggy, and it also uses placeholders for the NPCs and some models.
Dreams will only be a small portion of the final game, and things might change significantly by the time the game releases, but this should hopefully be interesting enough to play.
The second and final version is significantly changed, following playtesters’ feedback and also trying out some ideas I had in mind. My friend LostintheFlowofTime helped proofread and adjust the dialog lines and item descriptions.
I also made a promo video for the final version of the demo, with the updated environment. My friend Florian Gölles made the music.
That’s all for Week 28 + 29. This week will be spent on publishing the game on steam and Itch.io, and doing all the promotional content and taking care of the requirement checklist for both platforms.
Thanks for reading, and see you soon!