Devlog #2 - 18/03/24

Hi, all! The Fellas are back again to bring you another devlog! We are still in the process of preparing our beta build of the game, in which all of the chapters should be implemented!

For today, we would love to share our progress for last week!

Art

Character Art

We're delighted to show the characters we've managed to complete. Margot Weaver, an old and amusing woman who runs the antique store, 'Magpie's Corner'.  Her granddaughter, Charlotte, is a young and brave police cadet and is on the case to help Detective Hawkshaw solve the case of the missing painting 'Los fantasmas de la luz'. Each character has varying expressions that will be available to see in the game! We wanted to make Margot more expressive than the other characters to convey her silly personality and make Charlotte more stern and serious compared to her grandmother.

Margot & Charlotte Weaver Designs!  

We have also updated our secretary that is more aligned to fit in with our game's style! We wanted her to convey her original look while still having our modern design upgrade. While tricky, we believe we managed to pull it off in the end.

Ms. Secretary!

One of the characters we are in the middle of finalising is the police chief, Judith Payola. We have rough sketches of what she would look like, such as her uniform. We spent a while deciding on hair designs that would suit the character but we ultimately ended up choosing the 4th design! We were thinking of adding some conventional breaks to her character design in order to convey something being off with her, but more on that in the next devlog!

Judith Design Sketches!

Backgrounds

We spent a good amount of time refining the backgrounds from our prologue/tutorial chapter. The challenge was trying to make the backgrounds visually appealing while also trying to make them not stand out compared to the characters. We have our office, bathroom, lobby and kitchen drawn and set up. We also have eerie versions of these backgrounds for spooky reasons!

UI Art

We have been working on updating our UI before our beta release to remove the prototype designs, after some feedback and suggestions from our Alpha. We have updated the journal icon, making it much bigger removing the text and replacing the sprite.; this makes it much neater and livelier! We also replaced the eye icon, and replacing it to a magnifying glass to make it easier on the eyes for the player. We also changed our dialogue box, to give it more personality and make it more interesting than the placeholder.

Example of UI

Programming

Brief

The brief the final chapter's been completed, introducing the setting and the build up to the investigation. We would show you,  but spoilers! So you'll have to wait and find out!

Investigation

The investigation section for chapter 1  has officially been fully completed, and so has the final chapter's! They follow Hakwshaw collecting pieces of evidence and solving a puzzle each to unlock the interrogation. We worked on a 'spot the difference puzzle' for chapter 1 and a 'rearrange the photo' puzzle for chapter 3. We originally planned a spot the difference puzzle for chapter 3 between the two rooms, we came to a conclusion after deliberating on it for awhile that another 'spot the difference' would be too repetitive for players. Variety is key for these types of games, after all!

We also ran into an amusing bug while making the 'rearrange the photo' puzzle where the player could pick up anything that had a collider instead of just the puzzle pieces. We had a good laugh about it, flinging poor Nicolai around! Rest assured though that the bug was quickly fixed, and the puzzle now works as intended.

Look at Nicolai go!

Interrogation

The interrogation implementation went rather smoothly for chapter 1 and 3. We managed to make the interrogation for chapter 3 work a little bit differently than the rest and we're going to keep it a surprise as we don't want to ruin the fun!

Builds

We have also created a demo build for testing purposes. It was somewhat tricky to get the build down as Unity was causing some issues, however we managed to fix those issues and build the project.

Current Work