And so it begins...

Hello there, I will be submitting this project to the r/Solodevelopment Marathon jam as a way to motivate myself to finish something for once. Since the Jam has such free form and is meant to help you reach a milestone, I wanted to document the state of my game before the jam, so I can compare it to the state of the game after the jam.

I'll do a very abstract and conceptual overview of the game and what it's supposed to be and if you are interested in the nitty gritty details just read on.

Conceptual overview

The game is meant to be a first person story adventure in a sci-fi horror setting, it has morphed over time to become essentially a "choices matter" type of game. For this I've implemented branching dialogue and a way to log EVERY thing you do in game, this should allow me to make very little decisions matter or pay-off in some way which should force you to play the whole game "in character". I've also implemented and showcased computer as a way to interact with the world, this was meant as the main way to present challenges or puzzles to keep you engaged during the course of the game. All of this features are usable as of now, though I want to refine them to make it easier for me to use and setup this tools in engine (I should be able to setup an entire level without having to code) and that is one of my main milestones I want to hit in the jam. The other milestone is, when I started working on this game I chose horror to take up on the following challenge: "scare a player by using audio as the primary source of fear", I wanted to see if it was posible to make you believe there is some danger with only your hearing. As of right now I haven't even started trying to do that, so I want to setup a full level and release it to see if I'm able to.

The nitty gritty

As mentioned before there is a branching dialogue system in place thanks to the Not Yet: Dialogue Plugin System, it was really easy to setup and I absolutely love it, if you want it and have the money buy it, otherwise you can build from source but try to give them a hand with marketing. I used this system to setup my dialogues and writing in it is a joy, with this I've also implemented a "fact logging system" inspired by this talk by a game desginer from Firewatch. This system allows me to have a bunch of boolean variables that represent weather a player did something or not, the cool thing is that this "blackboard" of facts is avalable to every actor in the game world and not just to the dialogue, this means that it's not only what you say that matters it's also what you do.

Also I've implemented a computer system that emulates a Unix terminal, I was quite proud when I managed to put this together, especially the directory structure since it was really hard to make it infinitely nestable because ue4 blueprints don't really like recursion but I found a solid workaround. Now from the level editor I can place a computer and quickly build it's directory, which can contain al sorts of information and have access to all kinds of systems within the base. I'm getting a little worried that it might not fit the rest of the game's tone and may serve as an intimidating barrier of entry for non techy people, but even if I do cut it from the game I'm still really proud of it and I have a bunch of game ideas where this feature would be more at home.

When it comes to my "Horror audio" milestone, I guess that's a little more abstract, I've been researching about what exactly causes fear and I've been watching some video-essays about it. I still don't really know how I'm going to acomplish this but hopefully I'll figure it out.

By the way, if you are still reading for some reason. Let me brag to you about a air-pressure system I set up so that I can have rooms with diferent atmospheric pressures and when a door opens it applies an according force the the objects it the rooms, it was really hard to set up and I had to learn a bunch about graph theory and a buch of weird algorithms, but I feel so accomplished that I couldn't not brag about it. Sorry and Thanks for reading.