Devlog 4

It's DEVLOG TIME again!

Since I'm behind and not expecting to finish, I've pretty much abandoned my original roadmap and working on things almost at random. Spent the last day (or two?)  tidying up some models, started doing (placeholder, for now) UV textures, composed some music for the soundtrack and started creating the environment - there's actual (early) in-game stuff I can show now \o/.

Now I think my goal is just to get the first in-game day done, and anything beyond that is a bonus. This still means I need to get all the different mechanics and game flow in (they're all used on day one), but it means I'm not crunching to get the entire script done by the deadline (which I've done before and never ends well). It also means there will (hopefully!) be something playable for the showcase stream.

I've also been scoping stuff down to try to get back on schedule. The trick is to scope out stuff the game doesn't need, but actually figuring out which parts those are can be tricky when the game's not made yet. With Dead On Time (the game I made for last year's 7DFPS/Procjam) I made the mistake of scoping out things which were actually pretty important to how the game worked and had to patch them in with post-jam updates.

With Hugton Loves You there's a phone the player picks up from time to time. I originally planned to be able to place it pretty much anywhere on your desk between calls. To do that, the game would have to: check that there's a flat area with enough room, do a raycast to make sure no other objects are in front of it (so it's not blocked when you need to pick it up again), make sure the phone is rotated in a way that makes sense and so on. 

A bunch of fiddly, time consuming stuff for something that's nice but not super critical. So I've scoped it out so the phone stays on a fixed place on the desk, teleports to your hands when you pick it up and then teleports back to the exact same space on the desk when you're done. A little less polished, but saves a lot of work.

I've done similar down-scoping in other areas and the project feels a bit more manageable now - I'm still behind, but not to the panic-stations degree I was with the last devlog. 

And with that I will leave you with a picture of the phone as it's looking right now.