Although we were all recovering from travel and a busy week at GDC this week we were filled with energy! While we were away, our budget approved and this week our parts have started to arrive!

We did so much this week, almost too much to put in to one sentence, but I’ll have a go at it…

…WE completed the dialogue script for the first day of our story, created temp assets of our characters, backgrounds, and UI, to go in our Unity build, we cut the wood for our playfield and walls (learned how to use some industrial level power tools with Dave), we measured out and made a drilling blueprint for our playfield’s posts, then we drilled those posts, and lastly we connected the core of our gameplay together in Unity adding the temp assets and character dialogue script, then ran a small playtest for our advisors to get them up to date on all of our progress!

Script

Using story guide we created a more in-depth plan as to what would happen on each of the five days that our narrative is going to take place in. We identified each day’s goal and a key plot points and when there were going to be gameplay changes and how they would tie into the story. At the end we had an overview of what each day was going to look like blocked out in chunks of gameplay.

After that we created a cast of characters that we would need to make this story come to life. We focused on stereotyping our characters into roles we have seen in pop-media with hopes to create a cast that has distinct personalities that could be identified with just at a glance.

Once we had the characters and the overview of the plot for each of our planned five days we finalized the dialogue to be in each characters own voice and created our DAY 01 Script! (available in both English and Chinese #almostfullybilingualteam)

Temp Assets

Characters! This is the first draft of character designs, they are acting as our placeholders. With our script and character list in text form we kind of knew what we were going for but what helped us most was relating our characters to people we know in real life. For example the character on the far left was created by referencing our amazing programmer Yifan’s calm and quiet energy. Drawing from her we were able to excaudate some of her quirks to achieve our characters tired overworked architype.

Other Temp assets! Here is a preview of some of the background locations we have designed and some of the games shift UI that we are using in our unity project!

Wood Cutting, Blueprinting & Drilling

In order to start the actual building part of our project we had to come up with a plan, it looked something a bit like this…

Measuring

First on the list was making cutting the wood for our board to do this we measured the original board to make sure our new one would fit inside the cabinet base, then we created a template for all of the parts we needed to align by measuring original playfield and adding the new parts placements from our cad design.

Cutting

Using our plastic template, we cut out our playfields base board, the sides/ball lane and made sure it would attach to the metal apron we ordered. Seeing it in the cabinet was such a rewarding feeling.

Drilling

After that using the template we made we actually cut the large holes and drilled some guides for our screw in posts. We planned so much, and making a drilling mistake would mean we would have to completely restart on our board.

Finally

Now we have finished all the drilling and hole cutting we needed to do and are ready to start putting everything together!

Lastly our Gameplay Loop!

This week we didn’t only progress on our hardware and art we also implemented our gameplay loo!. There are essentially 6 parts to our game that are tied to our main character Ren’s daily life.

1.Working a Shift: This is a round of pinball themed like Ren’s factory line job.

2.Taking a Break: This is story and world building, it’s when the player will interact with Ren’s coworkers.

3.Drive Home: A short cutscene that shows Ren leaving work.

4.Interact with BUNNY: This is story, where the player will interact with with Ren’s personal BUNNY that she lives with.

5.Nighttime Minigame: This is where things get “sexy”, just kidding, kinda? It’s a small minigame where players unlock intimate scenes between Ren and Her bunny that shows how their relationship is progressing throughout the game

Work a Shift -> Take a Break -> Work More(X) -> Drive Home -> Talk to your Bunny ->Nighttime Minigame -> Drive to Work -> Repeat

Phew, that covers everything! See you later! – Nina