March 28 - April 3 (Milestone 1)
Cool! Milestone one! And we’ve hit 80% of the things we wanted for it, good job, team!
Stuck in pre-production hell, still, I started trying to learn a dynamic narrative writing program called Articy:Draft, in preparation for the upcoming weeks when dialogue would start to become relevant.
Though this was still on the backburner as I mostly focused on miscellaneous help wherever I was needed, answering questions, making production lists and clearing up what the game vision was.
Though this was still on the backburner as I mostly focused on miscellaneous help wherever I was needed, answering questions, making production lists and clearing up what the game vision was.
At this point I’d put my co-designers to work with playtesting the driver syndicate game to get a better feel of what the car controller were trying to mimic is like while ours was still in development, and to make a blockout in unreal of the map / roads.
Both of these had been going well but now Jonathan felt as though he had a good grasp of the controller and the more pressing matter was the interface of the game. UI. We discussed HUD, Main and Pause menu layouts and how to integrate the map in the least disruptive way.
Pause menu/Map is where we got stuck the most.
We saw how driver syndicate had a pause menu that barely covered half the screen, and we really liked that, since whenever the player would un-pause the game, they’d know exactly what their surroundings were like. And since pausing doesn’t remove momentum, not knowing what surrounds you would make it very easy to accidentally crash into things, messing up the mission unexpectedly.
Still, the question of the map remained.
Did we want it to cover the full screen? Yes, and Jonathan’s compromise to the issue was to put it in the pause menu, controlled with the D-pad (for zooming) and just having the entire thing have rather low opacity. I hated this solution.
Not only would I barely see my surroundings, but I’d barely be able to see the map, as well! Awful! Hate it! So we tried to brainstorm some more.
Eventually, we landed on having a button prompt on the pause menu that would pull out the full, FULL OPACITY, map, hiding the pause menu. Clicking the same button prompt, would clear out the map and return you to the half-screen pause menu. Very good!
As for HUD, the entire team was rather split between accessibility and difficulty. In the end, Jonathan and I decided to keep a speedometer+Compass, with the option to either add or remove a health bar and mission text. Much of the week was spent concepting and making mockups, gathering feedback and reiterating until Jonathan asked to do implementation in Unreal.
We’d discussed the Visual Novel aspects and I’d started drafting up some dialogue.
And then Philip told me the Articy:Draft plugin worked great on PC, buuuuuut wasn’t working to the PS5. Okay. I’ll find something else,
NAY, NAY, says Philip. I saw the features it had, I’ll make something similar that you can access through blueprints, says Philip.
OKAY?! Rad! Hell yeah!