Howdy.
So as mentioned in the last Firewalker Dev Ramblings I've been working on a new project. One with smaller scale and more realistic goals - something a one-man show can actually pull off without working on it forever. One where there's a fixed feature set and the game mechanics are known and implementable as to prevent most of the feature creep.
And today I'll present a bit of that. It's the work of most of the last year.
The full title is "John Amry in: The Vrennman Case". Or short "The Vrennman Case" or even shorter "VC". As the full title would suggest it's a story you're going to play. Like with most adventures, really. You'll have a ghost companion that'll help you on your way to stop the Vrennman clan from summoning the six evil lord demons and raise hell on earth.
Here's a bit of 2D lightmap testing and Ghostmode. Which is very cheaty because A) In that scene you actually can't have ghost mode and B) With the ghost you can walk through walls (which is intended).
There's a lot of work already done here. I've got save games, controller friendly menus (an in-game controls of course) and a pretty advanced game-event system I dubbed CSP. The initial version of it was devised during the Firewalker development and is sort of a Unity port of the Source engines I/O system.
You interact with the world via the Actions menu. There you have one to three options based on the thing you're interacting with. This door here can be kicked or it can be opened. Both actions have an effect, more or less. This system, on the technical side, is reusable and it scales nicely. This together with the CSP system allows for complex puzzle building and fast iterations. So that puzzle design should be quick and efficient.
Okay. So basically the foundations are all down and ready.
Currently I'm tiding up a little. Make sure the first level is rigged properly, the asset placeholders are, for the bigger part, replaced with real assets and colliders are in place where they need to be.
Current status in percent, I'd say is 10%. I'm working on the first couple of scenes to get the player to know John, his companion and the enemies they are facing.
And that's it for today. I might, finally, get around making an actual game page for this project. We shall see.
Have a good one, folks!
-df
