TBC Log 10/3/2024

    Howdy dev log readers. It’s Abby here (surprise), and I’m ready to take you on the nonchalant ride.

    So what’s been going on this past September? Huh? Honestly, not as much as usual, but maybe the usual is becoming not as much.

    I was traveling the first two weeks of September, and had an amazing trip. I visited the East Coast, where i’m from, and got to see lots of lovely people in NYC and Philadelphia. It reminded me of how intensely people in NYC take game development, which is valid if you’re clinging to it for dear life, but gosh it is such a more chill and fulfilling experience for me to practice game dev in Chicago. I also went to The Quilt Show in Lancaster county with my father. I have a google photos link if you want to see some of the quilts.

    You may ask, “How’s TBC been doing with all this down time.” Well, the down time I think gave my brain a lot of space and let it cool down to the point where the decisions I make on the development side have increased in clarity and given drive to a much better game. This is obviously very exciting.
    First things first, the design for the logo has pretty much fully solidified, under the prodigious gaze of our very lovely Pat Sanders. This process happened right before/ while I was traveling, so I made sure to show the logo off to as many of my game dev friends as I could while in NYC.

    It’s great, right? It tells you pretty much exactly what you’re getting from this game. Maybe it’s not quite as spooky as the game is as you get more into playing, but it definitely tells you that we’re in the wilderness and ready to do some tree and rock related interactions.

    I feel like some people have this design sense that like, having as much UI be within the game world as possible is the way to progress in “good design,” which I don’t know if I completely agree with for all games, but I’ve been utilizing this thought along with “I like to make weird graphs” to be a design tenant for the UI for TBC.

    Accordingly, since I’ve been back in Chicago, I’ve sort of been working on a UI/UX pass.  This has involved advice from Pat but implementation mainly on my side.

    So, before, when you zoomed in on a creature, a black vignette would appear more and more as you get closer to the creature. This was implemented to make the player feel focused and as if there is a magical tether to the currently selected creature that they’re analyzing. When zoomed in, the vibes are impeccable. But then what about when you’re zoomed out? You’ve just gotta look at all these UI elements that seem untethered to reality and comfortably nondiagetic? I think that there are games where nondiagetic UI make sense, but with TBC I kept getting the feedback, “who am I, as the player”? While I was on the East Coast I was thinking about this a lot.

    The player is meant to be some kind of hermit/old spirit that lives in a cave and utilizes the walls of the cave to make notes on the creatures that it watches. There’s this story that I have from highschool, where one of my friends lived next to this famous author, who I will refer to as Bloyce Sheral Votes. One day, when my friend and his little brother were playing together in their back yard, and their mom was walking the perimeter of the yard. As she was walking, she bumped into Bloyce, crouched in a bush, note pad and pencil in hand. I’m assuming his mother ran her off the property, he never said what happened then, but then he skipped forward and said, “my mother skimmed all (many many books she has written) of Bloyce’s books and has not found anything related to our family in there.” Often in college my father urged me to take a creative writing class that Bloyce taught, he wanted me to write this story down and give it to her to look over and grade. I ignored this idea in relation to the reality of my education, but I do agree with him that would be So Funny.

    So anyway, I want the player to feel like they’re Bloyce Sheral Votes, hunched over in the bushes/their cave, taking notes on the things in front of them. Maybe there could be a stat for how long you’re allowed to be zoomed in, like an amount that decreases while you’re zoomed, and if it hits rock-bottom then the animals SEE YOU. And then depending if they believe in you or not they react accordingly. This is just an idea, who knows.

    But we’ve managed to make the player feel like they’re in a cave, and then when they zoom in it feels like they’re going into a painting in the cave, sort of like in Super Mario 64. The cave motif has also helped the UI become significantly more organized. Below is a picture of the draft of the UI, sadly I can’t really showcase the movement super well, but you can see the static framing of the zoomed out UI.

    As you zoom in, the rock borders slide off screen, the vignette grows, and you start being able to see the whispers of the various creatures around the one you’re currently selecting. You also get to see if the currently selected one enjoys what it is currently doing action-wise, which will increase or decrease their belief in you.

    What I’ve been doing since implementing the sliding rocks has been moving UI elements from the HUD to the physical space of the game. This is so, for example, the hand on the top left will slide off the screen with the rock. So that has also been an interesting process. You can see how, on the right side of the screen, the element is clipping into the rock. This is the most recent UI element I’ve been trying to implement, and while it has been a challenge, I will get it to work, along with how I got all the other elements to work. Also, these are hard to see, but shout out to Gabi Dias for the very light sketches of the three animal tribe buttons under the hand. As the UI gets more and more developed, stuff will stand out more properly, and things will be more clear as to what can be clicked on and how stuff is etched into the stone.

    So that’s about it for now with me! Thank you for checking in on TBC. :)