PENITENCE - Welcome to the project!

Well hello again!

It's been a while since I've done a dev update - my last one was my "goodbye" post for Demon Detective when I decided to park it. That project was paused because I wanted to focus on something smaller that would take less time to do, and after several months of behind-the-scenes work, here it is!

Except it's not, really. It's still in development, but I'm launching the page now as I believe it's progressed far enough to be interesting to read about, and there is enough there in terms of interactions and dialogue to be able to show you something decent in screenshots and videos.

In fact, here's the first one:

Thrilling! OMG the excitement :D 

So, right now I have a character walking around a blockout level, you can interact with NPCs (orange cubes) and start conversations with them that appear in dialogue bubbles above everyones' heads, you can interact with tablets and computers that bring up a separate UI to allow you to read messages on them, and doors of various sizes can be locked or unlocked and slide open on approach.

Oh, and there is also level loading based on trigger volumes, and the camera changes position while in conversations and reading texts. So it might not look like much right now, but all the basic game systems are in place. This means my main work at the moment is creating the conversation trees and hooking them up to any game events that need to know what's been said and who has been spoken to. And, of course, I'm still writing the dialogue and working out the logic for the remaining levels, of which there are seven in total.

I will do more technical posts in future to go through what have been the most challenging aspects to get working, and explain how the sytems have been set up to do what I need them to do.

All in all, it hasn't taken me too long to get to this stage, and I think I can get it to alpha by the end of the year, but that's not a promise :)

Tony.