In this milestone we’ve decided to change the name for the project we’re working on to “GENOME: Body.” This change has come from multiple things. First, Abby already has a version of Genome from the 2022 NYU Game Center Showcase on her itch page. Second, the look, feel, and theming of the game has changed so much since then that it wouldn’t make sense to put screenshots and builds from the current version onto the showcase page. So we decided to rename the version of Genome we’re working on to Genome: Body to reflect the primary new mechanics of Genome, which is the player manipulating the exocrine, respiratory, and digestive systems of the people below to gain anomalies in their bodies, and the ship itself feeling like the inside of a body. The version of Genome from the showcase is also being renamed to GENOME: Gods, and the original pico8 prototype is being renamed to GENOME: Pixel. This way, all three projects feel like iterations around the core concepts of Genome as a small series.

Writing

There’s been a major writing overhaul for all of the prayers. The goal of the overhaul was to make all the prayers seem like they’re from the same world, that the citizens use the same terms across the board like “Denizens of The Sea Lord” and “Biological Chaos” in their requests. This was done to try and help the player nail down the lore of Genome’s world. Before, there was confusion in terms of what people knew in terms of in-world knowledge, so we thought it was important to straighten out Genome’s jargon so players could feel more invited to understand the story unfolding before them. All reference of “Garamax” was removed, as it felt superfluous. Garamax originally was the whale in the middle of the city’s small water reservoir, but given that the cutscene in the beginning changed, along with the lore that Garamax and the whales are some form of power reactors, it felt it made more sense to focus on the flood happening instead of a jumble of concepts behind the flood. A lot of the prayers were re-written to reflect the citizens’ fear as the water creeps higher, and how they experience the feeling of loss triggered by such disastrous events. We also tried to bring consistency in terms of how much the citizens know about themselves being changed. In-game now, it seems like the Denizens of The Sea Emperor are common knowledge among the residents, and they’ve seen the water rise in the rest of the world, but some of them refuse to accept the Denizens’ methods as viable options for salvation.

UI/UX

We made some tweaks to the way depositing resources in the lungs looks - the player can now see each individual resource as a textured sphere that travels down the trachea and into the lungs:

We've also added buttons to the Prayer Log which allow the prayer to scroll up and down through the lists of in-progress and completed prayers:

Alongside these changes has been the visual iteration of the “citizen display” screen. 

Here is the old version of the citizen display:

We found that from a UX standpoint, the citizen display was too tedious to flip through if the arrows were on the absolute right and left of the display. Our goal was to put the arrows at a place where the player can still see the rest of the chart. This fix attempt can be shown in the second iteration of the citizen display:

With this iteration we found that if the citizen has any bodily changes, they seem to be grouped with the UI elements on the display above them. For example, in the screenshot above, Blackfoot disease and Peripheral neuropathy would be grouped with the citizen’s stats and name above. It looks like all the information is sorted into 3 columns that don’t necessarily have to do with one another, which is not the display of information we are trying to achieve. The arrows problem of the first citizen display is solved somewhat, as when the player uses the arrows they can see a good amount of information and doesn’t need to move from side to side while going back and forth between citizens, but the information that’s shown to them during this back and forth is the citizens’ names mainly, which could be fixed with better placement of the arrows.

Here is the final iteration of the citizen display:

Another update to UI/UX includes lots of labeling when players can/cannot interact with things.  A big one for this is the “Anomaly Lights” at the ship’s brain, where if you hover over one of the lights it will tell the player what type of Anomalies they have. The example in the picture below shows "Petuitary Control" achieved in

On a similar note for the hovering text, we have text display now for the heart being locked to use and traveling to buildings being locked until they are unlocked via their spot in the tutorial.

Finally, on the UI side, we decided to include the triangle chart on the canvas so that the players can more easily see the changes they’re making as they input different substances into each district’s body. Although on a perfectionism level including the chart both in screen space and on the citizen display is a little heavy handed visually, we found that telling players this information wherever they are is worth it and adds to the game experience if they can see the changes they make directly. The text on the chart is currently somewhat illegible but we are fixing that soon. 

Code

The biggest recent code change is implementing a save/load system. We want players to be able to quit the game and come back to it with their progress saved. This is a relatively large technical undertaking since we have to make sure every bit of game state is saved and loaded correctly. We are still ironing out some minor kinks but the basic framework is working, and we've added a Load button to the title screen (in addition to the word “Body” as to signify the iteration of this version of Genome in a series):

Alongside that change we've also been working on the high-level structure of the game - making sure that the flow from title screen -> intro -> main game always works correctly, and that the logic for all the game endings (good and bad!) is in place.

And as usual we've been doing lots of general bug fixing and polish across the whole game, focusing on this as we get closer to release.

The “glowing windows bug” was finally figured out and fixed. Windows on the buildings, the ones that are emitting light at night, were showing up during the day if there was a transparent material between the  player and the windows. This obviously looked really confusing but came down to a more simple fix: using the saturate function. The saturate function tethers the values of a shader to between 0 and 1. The windows were going to below 0 before implementing the saturate function.

This screenshot shows some windows glowing a dark blue, and is before the bug fix.

This screenshot is after the bug fix, where you can’t see any glowing windows.

Another issue code-wise that’s been solved has been deleting notifications at the top of the screen so that they don’t slow down the game after a lot of time has passed and a lot of notifications have piled up. This was fixed by adding a counter to each notification, and when that notification gets bumped up, off the screen, from other notifications spawning, its game object gets deleted along with its “notification” object. This has helped keep the game from freezing later as each new notification is spawned.