This blog is detailing the point and click adventure game that I am creating for my Applied Game Development class at the University of Advancing Technology.
So, due to a family emergency, I'm a little behind schedule. This week I was able to complete all the descriptions for all the rooms in the game. This actually went incredibly smooth, though it was pretty time consuming. All the areas of interest in every room are now clickable and help to give the player an idea of what has happened. I also was able to finish the key puzzle. So now the player has to go upstairs and grab the gloves, before they can shove their hand into a gross dead body to get the key. It's basically the same idea of the locked door as far as coding goes, but it went much much smoother. I also made it so if the player tries to grab the key without the gloves, the character will refuse because it's freaking gross. He does say that he needs to find something which is a hint to the gloves. I wasn't able to get the final puzzle completed this week. There was an issue with the ring in the freezer and due to personal issues, I didn't have the time to work through it this week. It will be fixed and finished by next week though. I went back and looked at what I have scheduled for next week, which is sounds, a pause menu, and a short open and end screen. The pause menu is already done and I have some of the sounds, so next weeks work is fairly light so the puzzle shouldn't have an issue getting done. There were also a few minor tweaks that were done this week. The character speed has FINALLY been increased. It took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure it out and it really was embarrassingly simple. The player is now faster and so is his animation speed. Another thing is I figured out how to get the character to say something when he enters a room for the first time. This happens when the game starts up, to let the player know kind of why he is there. It also happens when he enters the kitchen. He doesn't appear to be just totally cool with all the blood and everything now, so that's an improvement. That's this weeks update! Hopefully next week's will come a little bit earlier. P.S. I'm really sick this week and also out of town and having to use my laptop instead of my normal pc, so both my voice and the sound in general on the video suck.
The current project is a point and click adventure game. The player takes control of the a man named Ezra as he wanders around his neighbors house after hearing a horrible scream. Once inside the door slams shut and he is trapped inside. The player's goal is to learn what happened in the home and find a way out.
Several weeks ago (May 11-18) I completed the initial basic game document as well as the paper map for the small game. All pre-production, including the milestone schedule was created that week as well.
The game is being created in Adventure Game Studio. This is the first time I've used this engine, so it has taken me a bit to get used to things, especially the scripting/programming areas. I am not a programmer, so this ended up being a bit difficult for me in the later weeks.
I began work on the game starting on May 18th with the help of David Nisly and his fantastic art skills. I wanted the game to be in the 8-16 bit style and we worked really hard to achieve that. The first week we worked on creating the backgrounds for all the downstairs areas, as well as the walk-able and walk-behind areas.
This was the first time creating anything in this style, so we ended up having to make several changes to the original background created, until it finally had the real NES type of feel to it. Having to keep making changes to the background also meant I had to keep redoing the walk areas, because with each new background the walking areas were slightly altered. After several attempts we finally got it down with all the areas finished.
Starting May 25th, we began work on the upstairs. This whole area was a mess for awhile. While working on the project, David and I were actually about 1300 miles apart, with him in Kansas City and me in Phoenix. This ended up being a much larger problem than I had anticipated because it became difficult for me to explain exactly what needed to be changed. He would end up creating a background and then email it to me. I would look at it and try to explain over the phone what needed to be changed, but sometimes that was super difficult because it's much more difficult to explain things that to just show him.
This issue effected the second milestone a bit. The upstairs was at a slightly different view point and the rooms were much more shallow than the downstairs. I tried to fix it myself, but I only had the PNGs, so I couldn't mess with the layers themselves. When I added all the backgrounds and tested the game, the player sprite looked even more tiny than he did originally and the doors all looked super fat. The rooms also looked a lot more empty in comparison to the downstairs. So, the upstairs was temporarily done this week, including the walk areas, but they definitely needed to be improved later.
One thing that was done really well during that second milestone, was the kitchen. The kitchen was downstairs and was originally done in the first milestone, but after some constructive criticism from another professor, we decided to redo it. In the revised version, we changed up the blood stains. Before it looked like they were almost circling around the table, but after the change, it now looks like it's just large pools of blood. David was able to use different shade of red to make the pooling look more convincing. I believe it turned out really well and makes the room even more disturbing than before, which is a good thing! Also because it was just changing the blood, the rest of the room wasn't altered, I didn't have to change the walk areas.
The third milestone started on June 1st, and went much smoother. David moved to Arizona, which has made everything so much easier. We were able to fix the upstairs by fixing the perspective and making the rooms much deeper. Each room was also given more things that the player will be able to examine. It actually looks like people lived here now. We also worked together to create the items the player will be able to pick up throughout the game.
Like I said before, this is the first time I've used this engine, and the first time I've done really any scripting. I was able to create a way for the player to pick up the items pretty easily. He even says a few short lines for each object, something I wasn't going to add until next week, but I figured it out quick so did it this week.
The real problem came when I was trying to figure out how to make it let the player use the key on the door. For all the regular doors I was able to create regions. When a player walks on the region it causes a room change. This worked really well, much better than the edge method I previously used.
For a locked room, I couldn't use a region. I tried using an if statement basically telling the engine that if a player has the item iKey and walks on the region, then create a room change. I messed with this for over an hour and it just would not work. To get around this I had to make a copy of the door and make it an object. I then had to add in that if the player uses item iKey on object oDoor, then create a room change. This finally worked.
This post is super long because I put like 4 weeks worth in it. Future post will be much shorter. I'll be posting one for each milestone, so once a week. This week I am working on creating all the dialog for all the examinable areas. I'm also going to be creating the puzzle to get the key out of the corpse, right now you can just pick it up but that will be fixed. I'm also going to create the ending puzzle, so that there is an actual win condition finally.
