Welcome to Friday Fun, the blog where I poke my head up from underground, let you all know I’m still alive, and hopefully entertain you with some bits about my project progress and game development experience.
Just a reminder that Preview Demo 1 for Dehoarder 2 is now available for download for Patreon supporters at Beta Cat tier or higher! Sign up as a patron today and be among the first to play this early, pre-release version of the game!
Story Update: Chapter 2
Of course the biggest news this week is the release (finally) of chapter 2 elements. In chapter 2, Harry meets three new characters, gets started on recycling, clears a path into the living room, unburies his telephone, and in collaboration with Joe makes some decisions on what path he will proceed with.
The story between Boulder the FIB Agent and Klaatu the Extraterrestrial gets a significant overhaul, and is introduced in this installment. Who will Harry eventually decide to help, if either of them?
In-Game Clocks
I want to simplify the HUD for the game, particularly the status panel in the upper right. It contains a lot of information that is important at times, but not of universal importance. Also, I know that for any eventual VR version of the game, I’m not going to be able to rely on corner-parked HUD displays.
So to get to my goal of simplifying the status HUD, I need alternate yet convenient ways to access the information that is in the status HUD display, and the more immersive the means of access, the better. I’m starting with the time display, where the obvious and immersive choice are clocks that live within the world.
So far, I have created two clock objects, one digital, and one analog. The digital clock also doubles as a radio wake-up alarm. (Funny thing – the story references a radio playing to wake up Harry in the very beginning, and it has been like this through years and several expos. But no one has ever seemed to notice that there was no actual radio object nearby. Or if they did notice, they did not point it out to me.)
I am currently working on calendar objects as well. This is actually making me think a bit about the structure of a year within the game – and right now I am leaning toward having years consisting of four seasons each lasting four days (with week/month/season all being four days in length). This way the game plays out over the course of about 2-3 years of in-game time, since at the moment my intended game length is 30-45 in-game days. All numbers subject to change, of course.
My UI binding system that I created is really paying off. I was able to implement the dynamically updating display of the time on the clocks with minimal coding, for instance, using a stack of binding objects to turn the data for the game time into rotations to apply to the clock hands. There’s even a binding in the middle of the stack for lerping values over time, so the clock animates to the correct time rather than jumping to it. The bindings only evaluate when informed that their underlying value changed, so everything is nice and efficient with no frame update code.
Prepare For Warp Update
In the midst of all of this, I am also still slowly working on late-game balance of Prepare For Warp, with the latest update having been released earlier this week. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been generally relaxing the requirements for the highest tiers of Legacy Achievement so that fewer hours of overall play are needed to unlock them.
I’ll admit, I’m still not quite happy with Timed Mode. Whereas with Challenge Mode it makes sense to gradually step up the difficulty on a fairly fine-grained basis, with Timed Mode the small incremental changes to the time limit make for uninteresting progression. I’m still in ideation mode over what to do to fix it, but my first inclination is to reduce the number of Timed Mode ranks significantly (5 max?), so that each rank brings a meaningful increase in difficulty. Of course, rewards would have to increase, too.
Conclusion
With two updates going out the door this week and a bunch of other stuff going on behind the scenes, it has been quite a busy week here. There is still a lot to accomplish, so I will leave off here for now. Until next time, have fun, and be good to each other.