This devlog is a little less unified since I’ve been switching between a lot of different hats lately.  Generally speaking things have been progressing quickly and I haven't been stuck on any one thing. There’s a passage from Phil Elverum’s latest album that comes to mind:

Making poems is dripping
not straining toward some masterpiece
a day is followed by another day

In a sense I’m making two games; the experience of hiking around Hollow Hills National Park, and a more dreamlike visual novel that tells the story of how you got there and why. My idea was one experience drops breadcrumbs for the other one. The cross-cutting works as a 'palate cleanser' to break up long periods of otherwise contextless exploration. These points of transition are also an interesting place to play with time, or reveal new information, or create dissonance.

Hopefully, it works out that way, otherwise, I’ll have forced two dull and confusing experiences to live in a jumbled mess under one roof.

In terms of tasks I’ve managed to check off since the last update; the park map is finished, aside from some polish items that I'll keep noodling with until release. It’s now possible to make a “round trip” from one end of the world to the other, through all the sub-levels and world-state changes.

Another task has been getting all the stuff I wrote into a usable state in-editor. The visual novel sequences (which for project-nomenclatural-simplicity I’ve called Storyboards) live in custom data table structs. This way I can build out custom behaviors and variables tied to a particular line of text or dialog event. Outside of Storyboards the other place the player can read words is via the signs throughout the park. This writing is broken into much shorter chunks and isn’t dynamic. It made more sense (to me, at least) to store it as a list of text variables in the park sign base class. Which sign message is displayed is determined per sign instance in-editor by changing a variable.

I think I’ve mentioned in past blogs the idea of ‘hidden complexity’. Even though I’m making a pretty linear experience, jumping between Storyboard and Exploration created some unanticipated challenges. Information about the state of the world, what the player has done, picked up, where they’ve been, etc… Needs to be preserved through cross-cutting, at whatever point the player encounters an opportunity to do so.

In my current setup I'm passing all the relevant info off onto the Game Instance (a class which persists as long as the game is running). The Game Instance hands over its information to the save manager (located in the Player's HUD class) whenever a save or checkpoint is required. The player is the only entity that needs to get/record information about the world so that simplifies things considerably. On past projects, I would have simplified even more by breaking the park into a series of smaller level sequences. I think there’s something exciting about the park existing as one big, continuity of space and events. Unless this creates performance issues down the road in which case… But so far so good.