Devlog #7: Inching toward a playable demo and a last-minute name change
Oof, it's been awhile. I wish I could blame this entirely on being in full-time work again but there's been some writing procrastination in there too. Not a lot has advanced visually but internals are slowly been being put together as the game inches toward a playable demo.
Sound effects have crept in too as I've been lingering on animations to trawl Freesound and tweak Chiptone settings.
And after reflecting, I've decided to rename the game to 'Age of Heralds', which is less thematically on the nose and less confusing than Age of Extraverts ('is it spelt Extrovert of Extravert? What's the difference?') so that was a fun half-day getting all the relevant images, copy and domains updated.
1 Progress
1.1 Minigames
There's still fine-tuning to go but I've been polishing up the first act's four unique minigames that take place in the futuristic world of Skara-Daphne.
I've tried to smooth out the transition going into them, embedding a tutorial that auto-dismisses itself when you've pressed all the relevant buttons, and also making sure each minigame has a second phase (not balanced yet, but at least it's there).
Figure 1: Minigame now displays tutorial and enters different phases
1.2 Jane's Tavern
The second Babelverse scene that takes place in a bar belonging to one of Daphne's old friends has finally been fleshed out:
Figure 2: Jane's Tavern, open for business
1.3 UI
I hacked in some rudimentary rich text support (don't ask how):
Figure 3: Oof, rough crowd
I added in some menu options and a scene select (about time!):
Figure 4: Menu options
Figure 5: Scene select
1.4 Pendant messages
I addressed how pendant messages are received and how their read statuses are preserved across scene (and game) loads.
Previously, messages would be dynamically pushed in from scenes but this wouldn't be kept in sync if you were jumping between scenes (e.g. via scene select) so you mostly started each scene with an empty inbox and no chat threads.
Now, the correspondence is kept in sync on scene load by keeping all the messages in a central list and deciding whether to load them with:
- a
scene
string so that messages sent from older scenes can be pre-populated - a
load_before_scene
flag for expository between-scene messages to be sandwiched in
I also added a id
string for scenes to reference to fetch that message.
—
I've made it more immersive for reading story-centric emails or chat messages; previously, I was having pushing the message into the pendant but also redundantly repeating it as dialogue:
Figure 6: Old: Message body shown and read in the dialogue area (but there is still an unread message)
But I've now moved to having the UI freeze and guiding the player to check the pendant themselves for the notification via a green, glowing notification:
Figure 7: New: Player guideposted to read the message themselves
Figure 8: Reading a full email on the pendant
2 Up Next
Releasing something in January as per my last devlog didn't end up happening so I'm going to stop making these promises (although I really do feel something will be up in another month…).
April will be finishing off remaining art assets, starting the music composition and fine-tuning the gameplay.
Oh, and finally choosing a font.
Get Age of Heralds
Age of Heralds
A coming-of-age interactive fiction game set in a post-scarce, AI co-governed city.
Status | In development |
Author | lionbark |
Genre | Interactive Fiction, Adventure |
Tags | Dystopian, Godot, Indie, Pixel Art |
More posts
- v0.1.2 changelog53 days ago
- Devlog #8: The demo is finally out!72 days ago
- Devlog #6: And nothing of detail was lostJan 13, 2024
- Devlog #5: Through the minigames woodsOct 29, 2023
- Devlog #4: Games, games, gamesOct 13, 2023
- Devlog #3: Delving into Blender-assisted art and dog-fooding a first play-throug...Sep 28, 2023
- Devlog #2: Beginning the journey of not sucking at (pixel) artSep 12, 2023
- Devlog #1: Screenplay driven developmentSep 12, 2023
- Announcing: Age of ExtravertsSep 12, 2023
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