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[marcAKAmarc]

Enjoying reading the dev log!  Love seeing the world building side of the process. 

[oahda]

Thank you!!

[oahda]

So no numbered update just yet, but here's some concepting/worldbuilding:

18

Partial town tour

All right, let's turn this into a proper update!

We'll only be looking at some major locations today, but I want to leave a lot of exploration up to you too of course! I'm sure we'll be doing more tours in the future.

Let's start with an updated overview of my 3D sketch. Still quite unfinished, especially on the left side, and the models are not intended for actual use in the game. It's just so I can figure it all out!



As you can see I made the town square a bit wider than last time. Scale is hard with these things and I keep making things too small compared to the amount of space they really do take up in real life. Not adding more content or anything, just making the square and the houses… bigger, so people and furniture can actually fit and have room to move.

Town hall

Same big centrepiece as ever, but now with a bit of a fancy garden/park in front, as well as a whole little forest nearby; I wanted to get some more actual nature in as well.



Zip line

This town has a lot of water running through it, making good use of its flow to drive a system of cable cars all the way from the lower town up to here! There is also a mechanism to periodically raise the wheel and stop the cars for a bit to let people safely on and off, and of course a manual override just in case!



Train station

If you need to go further, you can cross a bridge from the town hall park and travel far and wide with the steam engines that live behind this big building!



Docks

At the other end of the zip line is the harbour where smaller boats can be stationed in front, and bigger ships can enter on the sides to have their cargo loaded off by cranes and perhaps sent up in a cable car, or transported around the lower town by delivery vessels in the canal.



Centre

The water that runs from the mountains down through the entire town finally meets the sea by going down this central ramp, which has a special cultural purpose connected also with the big circular structure on the town square. I'll leave you guessing there for a bit longer!

Town square is currently a lot emptier than it's going to be, but is again where you start the game and where a lot of the NPC activity is going to be taking place as people mingle.



Park

In addition to the town hall garden, there is a nice park to hang out not far from the square. On occasion there is dancing to be had to live music in the gazebo-like house! Or you could watch the waterfall and feed some birds in the pond behind.

[JobLeonard]

This town has a lot of water running through it, making good use of its flow to drive a system of cable cars all the way from the lower town up to here! There is also a mechanism to periodically raise the wheel and stop the cars for a bit to let people safely on and off, and of course a manual override just in case!

I'm in love with this town already 

[Makhor]

Zip line

This town has a lot of water running through it, making good use of its flow to drive a system of cable cars all the way from the lower town up to here! There is also a mechanism to periodically raise the wheel and stop the cars for a bit to let people safely on and off, and of course a manual override just in case!

Wow, can't believe this town won my heart in a single paragraph. It may be just sketches atm, but it looks gorgeous! I love the layout!

[ChrisLSound]

This is absurdly cool!! I'd live here for sure!
...hmmmm although considering what we know about how it ends up...
Seeing the town get more fleshed out is making me sadder to know its fate

[Dr. Büni]

Oh, cable cars ♥ I am looking forward to see how that city will look like with finished art pieces.

[RealScaniX]

Those are some very cool updates. That's an awesome city layout to explore.

[oahda]

Seems like the zip line is a favourite! Thanks, everyone! Makes me very motivated to keep rolling with this!

This is absurdly cool!! I'd live here for sure!
...hmmmm although considering what we know about how it ends up...
Seeing the town get more fleshed out is making me sadder to know its fate

Luckily there are kind of two layers of fiction here! I envision this town as being a real place, and this game just being a story set in it, so in my mind the town still exists safe and sound outside of this game, if that makes sense?

[Suttebun]

Good job on the blockout, keep it up ~

[oahda]

Thanks! I keep having to upsize areas to get sizes right at town scale but I do mostly know what areas I want!

[oahda]

Some extras

Throwing in a small unnumbered update here with some "bonus" content.

Noticed there are some parallels to the dev going on in amasinton's fantastic log for The Resurrection.

Plotting the plot

For one thing, we've both started figuring out charts for the timelines in our games. Mine is a little less fancy and a simple spreadsheet for now, but I feel like I too may have to do something more custom later when I start plotting out how the timelines differ when the player makes changes.

In my case I have a column for each NPC so I can see side by side what they're doing in parallel at the same points in time.



Prototyping

There was also some simple 2D prototyping in that thread to work things out. I did mine ages ago, before I even started this thread, but I've never shown it here, so here it is:



This was before I decided that you can only interact indirectly, so here you were actually going around showing photos to people and talking to them directly. Also experimented with a screen to show relations between people. Still not sure how to deal with it, but I imagine it might be more of a freeform thing where you can move things around a bit like you prefer, a bit like in ColePowered's Shadows of Doubt, another cool game on TIGS with some similarities to mine!

Also these spicy names are not indicative of the final game.

Laying the layers

Then there's also the fact that we're both trying to cram a lot into a small space, with the layers offered by time travel. I've decided for now to mainly focus my efforts on the town square, since that's going to be the most bustling place. I have ideas to perhaps make the outskirts more procedural or randomised (not in terms of layout as the town is what it is, but in terms of events and the exact locations of characters' homes and so on), but we'll see!

Problem solving

Seems we're both ending up with certain gameplay decisions as solutions to problem too. Creativity may no longer be spurred as much by specs limitations as in the old days of gamedev, but having to fit the story and gameplay bits together comes with its own problem solving, and it's fun to figure that puzzle out!

Boring backend

Anyway, I'm back to working on the editor for a bit, adding stuff I need to get stuff into the game more easily so I can actually be productive, and I don't want to make my proper updates about technical stuff that's not even in the game, so I'm dumping a picture here in the bonus post as well.



Bye for now!

[RealScaniX]

I don't know what to say other than: That's a really interesting dev log entry!
 
That's some impressive external tooling and prototyping, you got there.

[Ishi]

This is dear imgui usage we can all aspire to! I love that it's even colour-coordinated to fit the game.
(I can't remember if you've shown this editor before, and if so I may have commented something similar then, I'm getting deja vu)

[oahda]

Thank you both!

Ishi, you might be remembering earlier in the thread when I actually picked ImGui colours from the game, before I had the editor. As for the editor, I like purple, so game and editor alike have it!

Didn't do anything properly "productive" today but I got some icons, a nicer font, and high DPI support in there.



Full size: https://i.imgur.com/ZPoqlwT.png

Actually, the high DPI applies to the game itself too, so I guess that was productive! Still no anti-aliasing tho.

[Dr. Büni]

Keep up the good work, Prinsessa!

[Suttebun]

This is dear imgui usage we can all aspire to..

AHGH

I'm writing a 3d camera and level editor on SmileBasic (the nintendo ds) to prototype my game,
and seeing your editor inspires me so.

[oahda]

Thank you two!

DS stuff sounds so cool, Suttebun! Hadn't seen your devlog before either, looks like it cropped up just around the same time I returned from slightly reduced online activity, gonna check it out!

[ProgramGamer]

I didn't think I'd see SmileBasic mentioned here of all places haha

Also, as others have said, the tools you've made look great!

[oahda]

Thanks! \o/