So, basically Papers, Please but with animals instead of Soviets.

ahhhh, oh god I hope this doesn't seem too close to Papers, Please. Ripping that game off was definitely not my intent but now that I'm thinking more about it, there are a lot of similarities. I need to be more conscious of this and consider how I can better differentiate this game.

That octopus is super good! He's very menacing and grand.

Just FYI, it looks like you can see the gap between the octopus body and tentacles if you keep an eye on the spaces between the dark rocks, though it's probably very hard to notice if you aren't watching this on loop a bunch of times like I just was.

Second pass at that UI. The thumbs up paw is off-screen until you stamp every form and then it slides in. I was worried about people accidentally clicking it before they were ready or knew what it did. I kinda wanted ppl to be able to turn in forms without having stamped them all, but it wasn't a big enough deal for me to risk accidental submissions. I also ditched that little pop-out UI for the stamps. I spent some time on that but it slowed down stamping a bit and I think they fit on the screen pretty well this way.

Also drew up the final employee.



His name is Alan. He wears a salmon-colored sweater and kinda likes frogs. He doesn't really care too much about animals though...

Dang, so that was a longer break than I wanted. I've only gotten in about 2 days of work (including today) since the last update. BUT...now I'm actually moved into my new place and all set up with furniture so things are going to happen again.


Ummm, main effort has gone into UI for the forms section. It had no UI before and was controlled through a bunch of random buttons on the keyboard. Now it has real controls.

I am...not satisfied with this so far. There's dead space on the bottom of the screen (I might put a clock there, IDK yet) and it all feels a lil jumbled. Any thoughts ppl have would be cool. I'm definitely going to need to take another pass at this later, but just having something halfway legit here is a nice step for now.


Other updates:

My easing library now supports easing multiple objects at once which is how the UI is all flying in and out, and it has a name (Inchworm).

I updated the OP a lil.

Last update for a week because I won't have internet for a little bit. After that it's clear skies for miles.

Again, not much visual progress, besides a bunch of teeny visual tweaks and fixes. I set up the scoring framework and I did some story outlining. I'm trying to figure out how serious to go with things. It's easy to get caught up in the first complete idea that comes along so I want to give myself some options before going hardcore into content creation.  IDK, I want this to be goofy with little serious whiffs, but it's way easier to let the serious stuff overtake everything else.

Also, I got scene transitions working so it looks nice when transitioning between conversations and forms and stuff. Went a long way towards making things feel not janky. I built a little tweening utility prefab that's super easy to hook into and use and extend going forward. Very basic right now but it feels good to build things that you can re-use for other projects.

To give this post some visuals, if anyone's at all interested in how I'm doing the stack re-alignment tapping thing, here's what it looks like behind the scenes. It's just unity physics. Invisible hands, basically. I manually move the forms on the way up for the end of each tap but the tap down and side taps are all just little invisible physics fingers doing their thing. (pls ignore the WIP form graphics. I needed to increase their resolution but I still need to take another pass at them).

This game has a great concept but I do not know if I have the heart to doom virtual animals.

Lovely effects and aesthetic!

Haha, thanks so much! I'm hoping most people feel similarly when they play it, honestly. I want it to be mostly goofy but still kinda sad when you have to reject something.

I'm a the point now where building up core systems doesn't make much sense. I have most of the base stuff there, so now I'm going ahead with content and I'll add system tweaks as I need them.

Progress today was mostly dialogue and some stuff I don't want to show yet, but here's your boss. His conversation box is a wolf. The hair was fun.




Best thing though is that I screwed with the graphic import settings until I figured out what was causing my sprites to look like garbage when they were downscaled (it was auto generated mipmaps). Now everything finally looks nice and crisp.

omg! <3

This is real cute! Beautiful color palette on the level you just posted.

I want to touch the moth.

How is this meant to work? Will the player need to review the animal notes and identify combinations of traits that indicate approval or failure?

The first gif made me think that this was a game where you just wrote funny comments about pet pictures for other people to read.

Haha, yeah, I guess it might not be super clear from the gifs. The comments you can write don't currently have any gameplay implications, it's just a role-playing thing if the player wants to play along. I was originally thinking I'd give people a way to tweet out animal cards they'd filled in, but I don't know if I'll end up taking it that far. I've also thought a little about doing some basic comment parsing. Maybe simple stuff like throwing in some warning dialogue from a boss if not many comments are being left, or if the comments are not primarily English words.

As far as what animals to approve of and ones to reject, right away it'll be sort of arbitrary, but mandates will start coming in to approve/reject certain types and numbers of animals. Also, the organization of things will get progressively worse. Forms might be improperly filled out, there could be duplicates, etc, etc. Throughout all this, you're going to want to maintain a good relationship with your coworkers. They'll all have their own simple moral codes and animal preferences, and word gets back to them if you've been operating in a way they agree/disagree with. This is all balanced with you trying to keep your job. If you violate company procedure too many times, you're fired.

In a single sentence, the game is supposed to be a balancing act between maintaining coworker relationships and following convoluted/arbitrary/morally reprehensible company mandates with the goal of maintaining your job long enough to oversee the inspection of your own dog.

Does that make any sense at all, or am I just rambling?

Now you can accept or reject all the different animals. You can stamp each one as many times as you want, but rejection always overrides approval, so be careful...




Going to add variation to the stamp distressing in a later pass, and I still need to update the form graphics. It'll look nicer soon.

Got all the main conversation system elements in place, I think.

Still more polish to do in a later pass (still want to add more visual feedback, and I don't think it's obvious enough that you need to drag the fish to the cat's mouth), but this is all enough to map things out. Feeding boxes food can branch the conversation, and each choice you make can increase or decrease your relationship with the person you're talking to. If specified, lines will or will not parse based on relationships you have, so it's all pretty dynamic and easy to modify.




I clicked pretty quick through this convo so the gif wasn't too big (the floating cat makes for lots of new data every frame).

So yeah, the next step now is to go back to the animal form stacks. I need to let you approve/reject animals still, and I need to modify those graphics to fit the style in the above few images.

Nice, I like the look so far. 

Thanks! I think I'll be able to make content in this style reasonably quick, so I'm excited it's looking ok. Art's usually the biggest gamedev roadblock for me.

Dang, this is slick as hell. Love all the little details you're pumping into the world.

This is looking real nice; I'm loving all your menu work!

Most of the day went towards making things look much nicer than that last screenshot, which I hate more every time I see. New, higher res graphics, some motion, and there's no more anti-aliasing on the pixels (looks a lot better when not compressed into gif format).



Spent a decent chunk of the day fiddling with those fish too. The next step is letting you feed those guys to the cat box to advance the conversation.

First day working on this since the last update. Finished stage 1 of my move and now I'm locked in for a little bit, which will be nice.


Started working on the conversation system. Super rough stuff so far. Right now I'm going ahead with the idea that every character's convo box is a different animal depending on their personality/pet situation.

I want the box to be nice and squishy; eyes following the cursor, wagging tongue, etc. When conversations give you branching choices, there's going to be little pieces of animal food that appear onscreen with different options on them, and you'll choose an option by feeding the conversation box that piece of food.  Very excited to implement that.

For now, it's just templating stuff. I got it switching between this stuff and the form stuff and I implemented a basic parser so I can set up entire conversations through txt files. I also did that thing where sentences appear letter by letter and are smart about pre-adding line breaks and not re-arranging the entire block when a word would otherwise overflow.

Lot's of temp stuff (especially the font), but here's what it looks like so far.

I'm in the process of moving so I haven't worked on this a ton.


Some new stuff though:

Fixed some dumb math bugs with my form flipping code.

The stack of forms now gets slowly more out of alignment every time you flip it (on purpose, not just because of floating point drift). There's caps for max rotation and movement so it's not ridiculous, but it can get a lil messy.

Thankfully you can now also tap the forms against your desk to realign them.

A clean workspace is the key to an efficient day ~

[The game is out!http://tomastle.itch.io/animal-inspector]

The game is out!
http://tomastle.itch.io/animal-inspector

Animal Inspector takes place in a world with an animal issue. Convinced there are too many, the government puts a plan into effect to eradicate all wild animals. Still not satisfied with the number of animals that remain, the Animal Inspection Agency is formed to go through the country's pets. As a member of this agency, it's your job to go through stacks of animals and decide which ones to keep and which ones to mark for termination. You got a pooch of your own back home and you hope your position with the agency and the connections you'll form will be enough to save your little buddy.

     

The game is a narrative-driven experience split between two different mode of play. There are coworker conversations where you can interact directly with everyone, and then there's your job itself, where you go through and process stacks of animals. The choices you make and the way you do your job all affect your relationships. Everyone reacts to the choices you make, and and your boss will occasionally add extra rules for you to follow. Keep breaking them and you'll find yourself fired before your dog comes up for inspection.

I'm aiming for the game to be lightly funny throughout with little touches of reality and a few beats that are hopefully a little funnier than average. There's some slight branching narrative and a lot of one-off dialogue beats, so different playstyles yield at least somewhat different experiences.

The game takes about 30 minutes to play.

First Update preserved below:

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So far I've been fiddling with the form stacks. I've got some nifty template loading, level creation, and stack flipping simulation. I've considered investing in paperclip tech to affix the photos but for now the lore implies that they're glued on.

Animal portraits are placeholder. I haven't decided exactly what style to use for them yet.

The idea is that the game takes place over multiple "work days" and 3 different views. There's the job itself, which involves flipping through forms and evaluating animal worth. There's coworker break room conversations to build up relationships and form connections to try and increase the chances of saving your dog. And there's a minor home segment every morning where you can pet your pup before you head off to work. I have some ideas to connect all these segments and ideas for more segments depending on how quick this stuff comes together (probably slower than I want).

My biggest concern right now is the amount of art needed for all the animals you inspect. I have it scoped for around 50 pics right now (10 days at 5 animals a day). Considering going this photo route to save time, but I'm unsure. Everything else I have a rough plan for.

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It's been 3 years since I last used Unity and I'm trying to get back into the swing of things. It's all much nicer than I remember. I want this project to stay fairly small and I'm trying to keep it roped down, but I'm only working periodically on this right now so it's not moving super quick.

Thanks so much guys!  I wasn't sure if anyone would find it funny, or if people would just think it was dumb!

And thanks for the suggestions OurPleasure!  If I had had more time, I definitely would've liked to have added some extra text for the various conversation dead ends.