[You're no longer taking photos]

Thank you two!!

I see that you have it well thought.

It's coming along!

When you make a correct connection in the “stored details” subscreen, you get some sort of confirmation, meaning it’s impossible to bring incorrect info to the coordinator -- right?

I imagine players might find something they think is a discrepancy but isn’t really. Will they somehow be able to present that false discrepancy to characters, or will there be a more obvious “Discrepancy Get!” moment prior to presenting it?

Confirmation, yes. Ended up doing some serious rubberducking (thanks!!) responding to this, so I'll basically make an addition to the update here to clarify some mechanics I didn't go over very well there.

• You're no longer taking photos at all and I'll probably remove the camera around the character model's neck to make this absolutely clear. You're just "cataloguing details" (in your head) at a specific point in a witness account, represented by a picture to help the player organise it, but really consisting of the text metadata you've seen before: who/what is there, doing what, how, involving whom else, at what point in time etc. Let's call them nodes instead of "photos" from here on out!
  
  
• There will probably be a few separate kinds of connections you can make. Discrepancy will be one of them, relationship (who is this person to that person) another, maybe more. Meaningful combinations will spawn new nodes connected to the parent nodes by lines. In turn there might even be connections between such child nodes and other nodes at any level! So we might be seeing JL's description of my spreadsheet in the game itself as well!
  
  
  
  
• The nodes are this game's version of dialogue options. Choosing one to "present" to a character in the base is literally just asking them about the information you heard or deduced. So you're not "showing them a photo" as it was previously. Will try to make this clearer from now on, and in the game! I also envision group conversations where other characters you've rescued might chime in if they know something, since you're all in the same room, and this will progress the present timeline story as well and let you get better acquainted with the characters.

Given this, I hope I can answer the question.

So you can confront any character with any node I think, only getting meaningful answers, and new nodes, if they actually know.

As for combining any nodes, I'm not sure. It could be simple differentiation between metadata (this node from this account claims they said so at such time, but that node from that one disagrees) in which case it should be clear just by looking at them, or perhaps you have to pick out the specific metadata entries you want to compare.

Another one could be a character mentioning a fact about the parent of a named character, but you don't know who the parent is, nor does anyone in the base, but later that named character names them in another account, and now you can connect the name to the parent's node, unless that sort of direct information should automatically give you the node (or fill in the information in your existing node for the previously unnamed character).

But what I think all of this means is that no, you can't point out discrepancies that aren't there because you can't spawn any nodes suggesting them, but you do have to look through the nodes you have by yourself (and there will be quite a few eventually!) and find what looks like a mismatch before you can draw a line between the relevant metadata entries or however the interface will work.

Sure, you could just draw lines between absolutely everything and maybe discover something by chance, but it does get unfeasible at some point, if you've even got the nodes you need, since you need to make them yourself by taking snapshots at the right times of the right motifs, so I think that's fine.



Quack!

Is it possible to find people in the overworld just by wandering around in the present, or will they always be behind some sort of obstacle that you need the coordinator to help with? If the former, would you be able to tell the coordinator about it even without having made a connection in the subscreen?

The latter. Hopefully all the above babbling should make it clear (and why) that no, you can't tell them without having made the connection and spawned the node that serves as the correct dialogue option~

Regarding when the coordinator is ready to fetch a person: What if they gave you an "I'm ready" / "Hold on a minute" dialogue option? Then, when you say you're ready, it would just be a cutscene walk. Maybe even a force-follow where you can still move the camera around? Also, this whole thing might still be a bit ludonarrative dissonancey if you wait for a long time to say you're ready while the person is out there dying...

I spent some more time thinking after reading this and I think I might just go for cutscening the whole thing, especially since you'll be doing it over and over again and I can't imagine it'll be fun repeating the same kind of walk repeatedly, especially since you already know where it is after checking it out in the past. So basically just fade to the characters reaching the spot, moving some rubble, fade to them carrying the person, fade to them being back in the base, all within the span of a few seconds, perhaps even skippable.

There might be some instances at a certain point into the game where you actually can't get inside just by moving rubble (something I already had planned for a while but also hadn't properly thought about how to implement before now), where you need to get access to some kind of prop (like a key) and have to scour the past for clues to where to find it, again making connections and using nodes to figure it out, in which case the cutscene will stop halfway and force you back prematurely.

Random idea that might not make any sense in the design. If someone is speaking but is out of earshot, what if you showed faint speech bubbles with garbled-looking text, but as you get within earshot, it becomes clearer? It could also serve as a nudge towards "maybe I should talk to that person in the present".

Yes, for sure, should be able to see that people are speaking, even if you can't make it out!

This is a super exciting update! I can absolutely see and feel the game through it!

Thank you! The cave is the entrance to an underground rabbit city. I sort of took the idea of rabbits in the real world living in these underground warrens and kind of expanded on that into what if that was the same in this world, but on a larger scale?

Oh, I love that. Great take on it!

Glad you all like them! I'll probably remedy the stare with some automatic blinking.

48

Tutorial

Believe it or not, but you're getting a numbered update again! It's a long one, but if you're interested, you're finally getting some of those old questions on how this game is even going to play answered in a fair amount of detail, in the form of an outline of how the game itself might teach you its mechanics in the beginning!

Design doc

In addition to my spreadsheet, I have three more dev tabs with a permanent spot in my browser. One of them (in)famous design docs is there too. For me that's actually the briefest of the lot, and not the huge thing some master docs can be. I only put things I'm sure of in there to make it easy to get a quick reminder, not including the story which lives in its own file. Headlines with a paragraph each, describing a major mechanic or concept. And the flowchart I made that time.

Today I added a whole page to this previously two-page document. It was time to really figure out once and for all how to introduce the player to the game, while weaving it into the story and making it feel as non-gamey as possible. I'll be implementing it into the Unity prototype over the upcoming days, but in the meantime I'd love some feedback on the ideas!

Teaching mechanics, pt. 1

I don't want to teach the player everything all at once (i.e. during the first "time travel") but spread it out a bit to give you some freedom to play with the initial mechanics before learning the rest, and with most of it being organic for immersion's sake and skippable not to annoy returning players, but without confusing newcomers.

Before I go into the details, here are the things I want to clue you in on during this initial segment of the game:

• Testimonies: "time travel" by listening to a witness account.
• Time control: rewind, fast forward, pause, slow down, "keyframes".
• Inquisition: focus on details ("photos"), get info from witness.

1. First foray into the past

As previously shown, you'll meet the town's coordinator almost as soon as you step off your boat and into the town, and be led to the place that'll serve as your base of operations for the rest of the game.



In there you'll talk (with better writing than this) and fade into the coordinator's account of the very end of the evening (so not the whole cycle yet):



As you can see, the player character is not visible in the past. I haven't decided exactly how to deal with free roaming yet, but regardless you'll be able to "lock on" to characters and move with them, which is what you'll probably be restricted to at this point either way, coordinator being the initial target.

2. Keyframe commentary

At this point, time pauses and a speech bubble representing the coordinator in the present providing commentary on this account of theirs will pop up. Not like the in-world ones coming from characters in 3D space, but a disembodied bigger one with an avatar of the storyteller. They'll tell you about what's going on at this point in the timeline (funeral ceremony for the person now being set to sea in the burning boat).



These are the sorts of points you'll have little markers for on your timeline and be able to go back to, but not yet.

3. Examination

Time ticks for a little bit and the boat moves along, but not too far; the body inside remains within view, albeit wrapped up in a cloth. At this point, time freezes again and the "photo camera" interface pops up along with a speech bubble from the player character asking whose funeral it was, who's in the boat. Your only available action here is to snap a photo of the body. You then get a reply, and the "photo" along with the info gets added to your mental notes.



4. Fast forward

You exit examination mode and time resumes. The boat travels some more before another speech bubble from the coordinator  tells you that not a lot happened for a bit, and you get to fast forward ahead until the dam breaks and the flood begins after another keyframe commenting on it. After this events play out until the end of the timeline, where you may fast forward if you wish. You can't miss anything important, because some more keyframes along the way will still halt you in the most important moments, and you'll have full time control of the whole thing afterwards anyway.

You exit the past view, and find yourself once more visible back with the coordinator in the present timeline...

Teaching mechanics, pt. 2

• Present timeline: moving around the non-past town.
• Past timeline: the rest of the time controls.
• Deduction: analysing "photo" details to make conclusions.
• Progression: using conclusions to find new witnesses and learn more of the past.

Now it's time to let you loose in the ruined version of the town, or the "overworld" as I find myself referring to it as even tho it's the same place as in the past. Coordinator asks you, since you have your gas mask, to see if you can find anybody out there, while they recover from the daze of the noxious air outside. Player control is restored.

5. Companion character

Coordinator is now your "companion", a mechanically meaningful concept in the game. They're your hint function when you get stuck, as talking to them will point you in the right way while serving as narratively meaningful conversation at the same time. They leave the house for short stints to help you out once you do figure something out by exploring the past, and know exactly where to take them.

6. Roaming

You're now free to move around town in its post-flood state. Ruins and water hinder your progress beyond the square and the docks where you arrived for now. You can look around but will not find anybody you can help. Talking to your companion will yield a hint to think things through and if anything the coordinator could remember was helpful.



7. Fully exploring the past

Throughout this you'll have access to revisit the witness account you heard at any time as soon as you return to the present for the first time. A thought bubble from the player character will pop up, saying something like "let me go over this again", and having already learnt about fast forwarding, the HUD itself should be enough for you to understand going backwards, pausing, setting the speed and so on, as the correct input to press will be visible next to all of the icons, all along the top of the screen.



At the bottom will be your timeline, with markers at the aforementioned keyframes, and dedicated input for jumping between these as well (e.g. gamepad might bind left and right triggers to winding backwards and forwards, with the corresponding shoulder buttons above for the keyframes). There won't actually be an exact digital clock as seen in the devlog; that's always just been for me while working on the game.

It'll be less intrusive than the mockup, and togglable.

8. Making connections

You'll also have access to your stored details, those "photos", on some subscreen. I'll work out the details later, but I think it'll be fairly freeform for you to organise things in your own way. For now one function is important: "combining" or "comparing" photos to make connections that can be presented to your companion. Details to be decided on, but you'll learn this in the UI when you actually go check out this menu.



(one of my earliest tests, in 2D)

9. Progressing

You'll use this function to make a connection that leads you and your companion to realise the likely location of a person. The coordinator sets out to this location and won't wait for you with the limited time given by the air. You'll have to follow. To combat that ol' ludonarrative dissonance I won't let you actually let them wait for you, either by fading to black and starting a cutscene once they get there, or by just making you following them a cutscene or a jumpcut as well, not sure yet, but I don't want to remove player control more than necessary. Input welcome! To be clear, this is a mechanic, and connections will be confirmed by the game in the form of a new "item" of some sort that you can present to your companion.

Teaching mechanics, pt. 3

• Past timeline: non-locked navigation and access to the full timeline.
• Confrontations: "combining photos" to find discrepancies to ask about.

The second character that you found is now with you in your underground base, recovering. After confirmation that they're okay, and some story-forwarding conversation (there's story progression in the present timeline as well, eventually converging on the past timeline with certain events between milestones), you get their witness account, now from the very beginning of the timeline that you'll have access to throughout the game. This is earlier in the evening, some time before the sunset.

10. Multiple witness accounts

Now you'll be able to swap between accounts, revisiting either that of this character or that of the coordinator.

11. Free roaming

You'll also get to move freely around the past now, not just staying locked to your witnesses, and will discover those time bubbles if you stray too far away from the focal point of the account you're exploring, as information is lacking in these spots and will need to be filled in by other characters. Things will flicker away, and perhaps at least the first time you do this, a speech bubble will explain to you that you haven't learnt about that place/time yet.



Not sure how the character will look in this state, but probably ghostly, transparent, not quite there, and then when you lock on to someone you swoosh into them like a spirit, keeping some of that flair from the original idea for the game, eh?

12. Confrontations

In this new account, mainly taking place on the square by the fountain, where this character sat feeding birds, you'll soon see the coordinator's past self just out of earshot entering the square, moving about, probably highlighted by one of those keyframe speech bubbles from the bird feeder to clue you in on the fact that you can "take a picture" of the coordinator, and perhaps the bird feeder's speech even encouraging you to ask the coordinator (in the present) themselves what they were doing or saying.

Now you can ask them, and unlock the rest of their account of the full timeline too.

Following this, probably again highlighted by a keyframe speech bubble just to teach you the first time, you'll find a discrepancy between the account the bird feeder gave you and the account that the coordinator gave you of something that happened on the square, just so you can take a snapshot of each version, compare them in that UI thingy, and confront one of them about it to move things along.

Then you're fully free to use these tools to figure out the rest of the game, more or less!

Done

Wow, this post was incredibly lengthy! I'm getting to bed way later than I was supposed to. But I feel good about getting this out. There were still a few things I hadn't fully considered while I started writing this, so you're my rubber ducks; thank you very much!

Maybe spoilery stuff here but this is related to the tutorial so I think it'll be hard to keep out of the thread.



Capsules are staying, but you can get a lot of extra mileage out of eyes and brows! Possibly mouth later too. Just like adding hairstyles is important to the mechanic of telling people apart, expressions might also be useful to gameplay and not just a visual thing.



Will be getting close to tying the game loop up once you can start doing something with the "photos" and taking them to your companion character.

Beautiful! And great to see some of the world itself come together, with the houses and that mysterious cave.

Nice! Website looks good too, and hey, there's the team!

Based on my experience browsing shorts on my phone I wonder if the most important keywords ("action RPG") might not be visible in the tiny thumbnail and lose you some potential viewers who would be interested in that, so I wonder if you should reorder the words so that "My action RPG" comes first, and then the rest?

Yay! Spreadsheet is just notes, so it's not in a computer-friendly format unfortunately.

I did consider something like that, but after adding stuff in practice into Unity, I think I want an editor tool that's a bit like an animation suite instead. This is almost filmmaking so it would be helpful. Nothing fancy, just a GUI version of the scripted schedule format and a way to play things back in the editor without starting the game fully so I can iterate immediately. c:

Yeah

Happy new year and welcome back, and congrats on updating the progress bar!!

That looks really smooth, and I really like that you can operate the gravity inverter indirectly by shooting at it too, lots of puzzle potential there!

Very much reminded me of the story I heard of the train being a hat in a Fallout game. Reading up on it now, apparently it's actually a glove? And more fun in this Reddit thread I found (I especially liked the raycast by apple).

I think it would make sense to just rename the concept of an NPC to a "schedulable" in all my files/code back in the real engine, as that's all they really are. It's just any actual NPC will also have an "identifiable" (for photography and """AI""" to recognise entities of some description) and an "interactable" (for listening/talking in their case, but can also be to read a sign or open a door etc.) component, and of course a matching 3D model.

Making things up as fast as I can as I go along in true game jam fashion while working on the prototype, trying to get things done yet still not making a complete mess of things that will make further quick iteration—the whole point of this—really cumbersome…

For one: everything is an NPC!





I'm currently working on the end of the timeline (that's where the first memory/tutorial puts you) but I don't really know how long the whole thing is going to be yet so I'm just inserting it at the beginning at the moment. The important thing is to keep timing between events correct relative to each other.

Since all the events are just hand-scripted, I don't want to have to update things in a bunch of places when I need to move stuff or insert more before them, so I just made a list of constants like where every following value is offset from the one before it:



These are kind of the same as in my spreadsheet, where I have a column for "major events" to do basically the same thing; I might not know the absolute time of anything, but I do know if a character's actions need to happen before or after one of these.



So most recently I needed to add the boat into Unity, so I just inserted the new constant and made the wave (flood) start be offset from that, and automatically anything that was scripted to happen after that using the constant got pushed forward 30 seconds instead of now coïnciding with the boat, e.g. this character who currently doesn't have anything to do before then:

Thank you two! I hope so too. It remains a slow but steady project. Wondering if I might hit a threshold eventually where things start snowballing a bit, once there is enough to go off of. And I guess I'll be successful story-wise if I manage to convey some emotion even with VeggieTales-looking characters

Sequoia trees are so cool, that's a great concept for a climbing level! And looking forward to seeing more of the story unfold.

Thank you!!

Agreed, looks good in the video!

Looking good! Can't wait to see the spider crawling and hopping about

Thanks! Yeah, partially the convenience and speed of prototyping of Unity, partially to keep the versions separate so I can do quick and dirty stuff and take shortcuts without worrying about future maintenance since I won't be using this code in the end—it's really freeing to have a playground version like that!


Unrelatedly, some award-winning acting, "jump" being the superstar once again:

Can we save them if we use the time loop right?

Yay! It may be a blocky prototype, but being able to tell characters apart is still an essential mechanic

Thanks, everyone! c:

what exactly does the flock of birds do with/to the player?

They're essentially also characters that you need to keep track of to make connections. There are some other animals too!

Btw. the capsule with the nose, scarf and hat is adorable

\o/

Btw, I like your coding (indentation) style. It's well readable.

Aligning stuff manually is a hobby of mine