- Dialogue
Walking up to people and talking to them
Writing dialogue as external dialogue tree text files
Variable handling in dialogue trees - Audio
Audio system for playing both soundtrack and sound effects - Clue
Tracking of gathered clues
Tracking of completed clue sets/identities
Both system and UI elements - Suggesting
Walking up to people and suggesting an identity
Rejecting and accepting
World visual effect based on identified state - Layered world rework
Current one is an ugly hack to explore and communicate the idea.
Walking up to a "tunnel"-node should show a prompt, and if the player keeps walking in the direction of the "tunnel", they should be quickly transported to the other end
These "tunnels" should be placed down side-streets and intersections
The player should play a bespoke animation when walking down a "tunnel"
- World interactables and indoors
Being able to enter houses would be cool, talk to people indoors as well.
Seeing in-world objects and "chatting" them up would add some neat variety. This can be hacked together as a character without a model, should not be difficult. Required to be able to enter houses, probably. - Day-night-cycle
Having characters move around the world on a timed path depending on time of day would add a lot of life to the world, but it would also let us get more game out of fewer world assets. - Appointments
Appointments depend on indoors and day/night
When talking to people, they could sometimes agree to swing by your office
To end a day, you'd go back to your office, and people would drop by to talk
Prime place to find more clues, and maybe even suggest an identity
Adds a time element to the clue hunting, making it even more dynamic and varied - Pride-flag drawing system
When the player has figured out an identity, they could be given the opportunity to draw a pride flag.
Could be as simple as selecting an amount of stripes and a set of colours to fill those stripes. Maybe a symbol in the middle, maybe an arrow on the side.
- Audio
Soundtrack
Sound effects - character assets
A beautiful, precious little guy walking around and helping people - Alien character assets
All the poor sods who need help - World assets
Cardboard edges on a beautifully rendered cityscape - Identities
We need to invent some identities, give them names, and some tropes / common archetypes - Dialogue
Just... so much dialogue - UI assets
- Suggestion screen
Needs a mock-up
Could be as simple as a list of unlocked identities, could be as complex as a Papers Please-style system, where you point out past clues collected and connect them to an identity.
- Mock-up
- fonts
- Potentially character portraits
- UI panel, scroll bar
- Buttons
- Potentially a per-line UI element of some kind, such as a speech-bubble, or simply a line on the side
- Mock-up
- Some sort of per-clue and per-identity UI element
- Alien character behavioural scripting
If there is a day-night-cycle, our aliens need to be told where to be when
- 2D alternative
Currently the prototype is in 3D, which might be strange for a 2D game. We should try implementing something roughly equivalent using a 2D camera instead, perhaps with Parallax screens, or just containers we move ourselves. - Camera settings and visual polish
In the current prototype, I haven't done more than muck around with the settings. We need to figure out the lighting and camera settings that work best for our vibe. With a cardboard world, I feel a distance blur similar to a tilt-shift style could work well to sell the scale. It also tends to look very charming, which I think fits the vibe.