That Warroid is a Dick [Devlog]

[catherine]

You're not racist against Warroids or anything. Listen, they had a really rough time in the war. Like, seriously. But it's just this specific Warroid: your next-door neighbour. What's his problem? Why's he gotta be such a dick?

(About me: I'm a first-time poster, first-time Wizard Jammer, convinced to do it by a friend as a fun project over the holiday break. Trying to decide if the title is an HR violation if I mentioned this game at my day job, but if it's good enough for the podcast, it's good enough for me.)

[Travis]

Glad you're joining in! Just reassure HR that is real name is Richard.

[phill]

Welcome! That premise sounds really interesting, are you looking to explore some social themes there?

[Nappi]

Took me while to realize what this was referring to! Terminal7 seems like a goldmine for Wizard Jam titles.

 

Looking forward to seeing what this ends up being! The introduction is very intriguing already.

[zerofiftyone]

Welcome to the forums @catherine!

Best of luck with the game and do let me know if you'd like to join the wizardjam Slack channel . 

[catherine]

Thanks, everyone! I'm having a lot of fun so far.

And yes, good guess on the themes. "That Warroid is a Dick" will hopefully be funny, but it's also about the frustration of living next door to someone who you're sympathetic to, who you know you're meant to be sympathetic to. ("A veteran, for heaven's sake!") ...but someone who's also still a complete jerk. And then navigating that frustration with your friends.

It's a slice-of-life first-person exploration game set in your apartment, built using Unity, with the extremely conveniently-just-released First Person Exploration Kit 2.0, and Fungus for in-person dialogue and text messaging.

...which is also the conceit I'm going to use for the menus.

And thanks, @zerofiftyone. I'll go figure out if you're being literal or if you have a signup page for the wizardjam Slack. If not, catherine@catherinewinters.com pls.

[zerofiftyone]

That menu screen is great

[Mythalore]

ohh this is super cool, I like this very much.

[gerbilsinspace]

zerofiftyone was being literal.

[catherine]

Thanks! I'm not 100% sure I'll stick to the "traced from iOS" look as-is, but my nine-slices for my larger "text messaging" game are all pixel art, and I don't think that really fits with what I'm going for here.

I am happy to say that I've backtracked re: Fungus and gone with Yarn, which is what Night in the Woods uses for its dialogue. It means I can write and translate it independently of Unity itself. Plus it means I can use Robert Yang's excellent Yarn-previewing tool YarnWeaver. And it also makes it a lot easier to ensure I'm using a unique voice for each of the text messages from the full cast of characters:

• Well-meaning Friend
• Snarky Friend
• You

And of course... 

• The Warroid himself.

 

 

[root]

This looks really cool! I'm excited to see there's someone else who's gonna be working with Yarn because I also want to dig into it.

[catherine]

@root: Cool, are you in the Narrative Games Slack? They have a dedicated Yarnspinner channel. https://narrative-game-dev-slack.herokuapp.com/

 

[root]

Oh nice! I am not, but I will join presently!

[infamous space turtle]

Oh damn, that menu is so great. 

[catherine]

I've successfully integrated Yarn and the new FPEkit with the dialogue controls.

 

Next steps:

• Make sure saving/loading works with dialogue states.
• separate out the scripts and UI objects that handle in-person dialogue from the "text messages" on your "phone".
• art
• level design
• more writing

 

[fabian]

Very excited how this turns out!

 

So how is the new FPE? I used the previous version in my Wizard Jam 5 game and it was already very good, curious how the new features work.  

 

[catherine]

@fabian I'm really liking the new FPE, and parts of it are a lot easier to work with than the last version, but I'm still a little unfamiliar with how it does controls this time around. Regardless, I am EXTREMELY impressed with it so far and am pretty sure it's still underpriced on the Asset Store, haha.

The only downside for jamming is that there are far more default assets to mod!

(Also, I've never been able to use a gamepad to play FPSes, so I can't tell if I'm doing something wrong on my Mac or not, even though I have an Xbox controller to test with and that I use for other games, but that seems like something I can figure out later, haha.)

[catherine]

And oh yeah: I'm still cranking away.

 

I'm using the Simple House Interiors asset that I already licensed for my as-yet-untitled game about why you shouldn't go rooting around in your coworkers desks, so building a space and filling it with interactive objects is pretty straightforward.

 

For the UI, I've run into a bit of a snag, identifying a bug that I THINK is with the Yarn parser rather than the Unity wrapper, but we'll see. Long story short, my MVP might have to forego my nice-looking iMessages dialogue bubbles that retain backscroll in favour of not-as-nice ones. Drat. But at least it works. And I'm pleased with the cast of characters thus far: the Warroid in particular comes across as suitably petty and dickish, IMHO.

 

And what of my progress on the b-story? The thing the player character is meant to be doing that these incessant text messages keep taking you away from? loooool. At least I've got a couple days.

Please see the attached tree for an extremely petty conversation about who stole the Warroid's jar from out in the hallway.

 

 

 

[catherine]

Fact: saving/loading definitely doesn't work right with the dialogue system. Cut!

[catherine]

But hey, you can interact with all the objects and I THINK I have the bugs in my trigger-a-text-message-after-3-minutes code all fixed! So there's that.