This week our goal was to start assembling all the pieces we’ve been working on into a complete prototype, that connects the various parts together!
Art
For art this week, we’ve done two main things. First, we’ve started creating the more detailed portraits of characters that appear when you enter dialogue with them. We’ve also created an overworld sprite for The Mayor, so we can test NPCs in the overworld.
And of course, since we’re putting together all the pieces, the fox now has animations for walking up and down the world.
And such a handsome fellow needs a place to live, so we’ve also created a tileset and set of props for his house.
Also, we’ve started on some drafts for our project poster!
Programming
Let’s take a look at how all this art is going into the game! This week we wanted to create some more interactions that use the Playdate’s crank, and we wanted to assemble them all together. Here’s some of our source code.
One of our programmers did a sprint over the weekend, attempting to implement one crank-based mechanic a day, just to see how well our systems accommodate developing new things quickly. On the first day it was digging, and the second was the mortar and pestle.
For some fun mechanics, we’ve got fishing again, grinding things in a mortar and pestle, and digging a hole. The mortar and pestle action currently incorporates both sound and art to enhance the satisfaction of the crank.
Also, using the Playdate’s accelerometer we’ve made it so you can throw out the ingredients if you want to start over!
Here’s digging, without art assets.
The dirt pile disappears when you walk through it, which we might use in the future for a cool visual effect.
And finally, The Fox’s portrait has been put into the dialogue system, as you may have noticed in the previous examples:
Our dialogue system was mostly written before the beginning of the semester during the pitch phase. We’ll show more of it in the future when we talk about writing, but it supports multiple dialogue choices, branching paths, and waving text effects!