Emerging from the Chaos: Structure

Dehoarder 2 gameplay is starting to take a form greater than running around pecking at trash on the ground. That may have been fun for a game created in 48 hours, but I’ve always known that Dehoarder 2 needs more. The Dehoarding needs to be guided, structured toward some greater purpose. Hence there are now Missions and Goals (my names for them, not necessarily the final names), which are both partially implemented.

Missions will guide you toward the next objectives in the story. You can have multiple missions at the same time. Missions are strategic in nature, describing to you in story terms what actions are available.

Goals, on the other, hand are more tactical. Goals relate to the gameplay mechanics of disposing items and upgrading fixtures (coming soon), and give you some meta-information about what specifically needs to be accomplished in order to advance missions.

Game Event Scripting has been implemented, borrowing much architecture from Earl’s Warehouse, specifically from the Puzzle Trigger mechanism. Hooray for code re-use. I can now implement scripting commandlets to my heart’s content to allow my event scripts to control any aspect of the game, and already have the basics like playing sound and speech, showing subtitles, starting and stopping music, and scene transitions.

Save state persistence is implemented (thank goodness, it was taking close to a minute to re-generate the world for scratch every time). I borrowed a lot of concepts from the persistence mechanism used for the levels in Earl’s Warehouse, but simplified the code design (no base class requirement, just an interface with one method plus a collection of property mappers/loaders needed). It still needs a little work to be as resilient as the format I used for Earl’s Warehouse, but it is working for now.

There is now an opening story sequence that frames the first major obstacle, and gives the player the first missions and goals for overcoming that obstacle. I actually did placeholder voiceovers for all parts myself, and they turned out not half bad. Due to that and obvious budget constraints, I might actually be one of the voice actors for this thing.

Next steps for Dehoarder 2 include continuing to script the story, finishing implementation of Missions and Goals, adding more junk types, and designing the upgradable fixture mechanism.

I also need to start taking preparations for OGDE seriously, as that is now only 7 weeks away!