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[JobLeonard]

Since you're uploading to imgur anyway, you could just export as an mp4, upload it, and it will do the gif conversion for you IIRC. I don't know if that would result in better or worse visual results on the eventual gif though.

[oahda]

If I can find a friendly lib and the willpower that sounds like a good idea to try!

[oahda]

45

SPOILERS

Gonna let you in on an outline for the first (tutorially) info-based puzzles to solve, to give you an idea of how the game will play and perhaps receive some useful feedback!

Mild spoiler warning even if this will be the easy intro and details might change as this is just a draft.

New game loop

Slightly. You now reach a town where no people at all can be found in the rubble. Your boat ran out of fuel so can't be used. You meet the coordinator character who has tried and failed to find people, unable to shift much rubble on their own, nor able to brave the noxious air for long at a time with only a scarf over their mouth (unlike you, wearing your gas mask).

The core gameplay plan is now this:



The spoilery example

So to teach you how to play while introducing you to the story, I have this in mind:

• Coordinator character initially only tells you what happened immediately before the flood (most townsfolk gathered on the square). This restricts your first past timeline foray in time as well as space, so that you're able to quickly find the one piece of info you need to progress, which is that the bird feeding character was still by the fountain when the flood hit.
  
  
• The two of you clear rubble around the fountain, too heavy for you to shift alone but you couldn't get the coordinator to help you before knowing exactly where to look since they don't have a gas mask and can only move out of the basement in short bursts. You get the bird feeder to safety in the basement.
  
  
• You can now talk to the bird feeder in the basement and this time you get to hear their story, which starts at the very beginning of the whole past timeline cycle.
  
  
• You'll soon notice the coordinator character early on in the past timeline, as told by the bird feeder, moving about the square, interacting with people. You can snap a photo of this and bring it to the present timeline coordinator (i.e. ask them about their presence on the square) to unlock the rest of their recollections and actually be able to listen to these conversations.
  
  
• You'll now have enough to observe (while still mostly restricted to the square) in order to figure out that the people on the square had gathered for a funeral, that the deceased was the person from the flower shop that had actually died during the same evening (you see them alive at the beginning of the cycle!) and that the (grown-up) child of this person had also been present on the square at various points during the evening, as well as serving people in the café, so let's refer to them as the barista.
  
  
• At this point you'll be able to realise that the barista never showed up for their parent's funeral and so wasn't with the others on the square when the flood hit. So where are they? The bird feeder's memories will tell you that the barista went running off into the park at some point but the bird feeder never saw them return due to being away from the fountain for a bit at that point (the flower shop is next to the fountain), but once you unlock the full coordinator's cycle you'll find that the barista actually did return (the coordinator saw it) and went back into the flower shop before the ceremony, so they were still in there!
  
  
• Approach the present timeline coordinator with this info (photo of the barista going back into the flower shop) to get them to help you clear the rubble around the flower shop to get the barista to safety in the basement where you can hear their story as well, learn why they went into the park and later missed the funeral and so on, as well as get access to the past timeline inside the café while they were there.

If anybody read all that, what do you reckon?

The important part to me is that you as the player are making the deductions based on what you can find while looking around completely freely and are able to ask about very specific things by photographing them rather than picking dialogue options that may give away the answers. Nothing is given to you unless you explicitly ask for it. c:

[Alain]

This is a very different type of devlog post of yours and super interesting. I think it is a challenging task to design a gameplay loop that is centered around that type of detective work as yours. I have only done something comparable in much more basic ways than what you are doing. Sometimes I get a glimpse of it when DMing pen and paper games, where you can very easily help players when they get stuck by adding characters/hints on the fly. But for a video game it is a whole different story. I think even big studios struggle with it and often fall back to the most basic gathering of clues and not forcing the player to really deduce, but just choosing the right answer in the end.

The flow chart you present makes sense to me and such gameplay can be fun for sure. The only advice I have is to playtest your core gameplay loop as soon as possible with friends who you think are in your target audience and yet are as different from each other as possible. I have a very basic riddles in my game that require gathering information from dialogues and the game's physical environment. It turned out to be a lot more work than expected do make it work. I had to add a hint system to ensure progressing was possible for everyone. Sorry if that is only very broad input from my side, maybe someone with more experience designing comparable loops can give us hints on things like usual problems that occur.

[oahda]

Thank you! Broad input is very helpful too.

It's hard, yeah. I think the game falls into that class of "information games" that was suggested earlier in the thread, so I've been looking a bit at existing ones for some inspiration as well.

Good to hear the flowchart makes sense! I forgot to mention one thing in it, which is that a present timeline story also progresses gradually as you unlock more of the present timeline town, with the two timelines sort of converging on the solution to the mystery, but you'll still spend most of your gameplay time gathering info in the past.

Will definitely playtest, and hope to put together something blocky but functional soon enough after I've done some more writing and planning on paper, and look forward to sharing that with people once I do. And some way of working an optional hint system into it would be great, yeah.

[ChrisLSound]

Oooh, cool update! The game loop sounds great to me.
There may be things you already have planned or have already talked about that I'm forgetting, and I may be misunderstanding some stuff...but here's what came to my mind from reading the post a few times:

I'd say Ao can be considered an "information game", but the photo mechanic throws a twist into things. It sort of introduces the "point & click" problem of needing to "try every photo on every character" -- except there's the added layer of not being certain what even needs to be photographed in the first place. Plus, there's the possibility of some re-tellings being misleading/untruthful! That's a huge possibility space! You've really emphasized that you don't want the game to be hand-holdy, where making progress is totally dependent on the player. I'm happy to hear that (I hate being robbed of the opportunity to make my own discoveries), but, for the sake of balance, I'd expect to be given tools to help with experimentation/iteration/info-tracking. Since (AFAICT) you have to leave the re-telling in order to show a photo to a character, making it quick/easy to explore times/places would be great too.

On that last point: I know you've shown footage of rewinding/fast-forwarding through time. Is that just a design/debug tool, or is it an actual gameplay mechanic?

... a present timeline story also progresses gradually as you unlock more of the present timeline town, with the two timelines sort of converging on the solution to the mystery, but you'll still spend most of your gameplay time gathering info in the past.

Interesting. So will this present timeline story help you with deduction/identifying relevant subjects in the past timelines? Or will it sort of be its own thing that just ends up converging?

I like the new premise that has you reaching the town because you ran out of fuel, and where everything is contained to the town at the start. In hindsight, the previous setup feels a little convoluted (at least for the very beginning of the game).

I also like that, while you may be able to see that a conversation in the distance is happening, you can't listen in until you unlock a re-telling from someone who actually heard it. Very cool!

The player character has me very curious too. Why were they on a boat? Why were they on it for so long that it ran out of fuel? Why do they conveniently have a gas mask? Why can they traverse time?! Where did they get that cute backpack!!!

[oahda]

Thanks! <3

So I really don't want you just try every photo, and the complexity is itself a way of discouraging that, making it unfeasible. I want the discoveries to be aha moments where it becomes obvious that something matters, and how. The idea is that there isn't really a point to photographing anything before you are certain about it (and you'll probably be restricted to only having a few photos at a time to encourage this). But yes, you'll definitely have tools to organise and compare info.

I'm thinking the events in the present timeline will give you hints for the past timeline, yeah, as you meet more characters in both timelines, and as you eventually figure out the overarching mystery through the past timeline you'll also approach it in the present. I feel like saying more would be telling.

Perhaps you were being rhetorical but the player character simply saw the flood from the lighthouse and experienced the noxious air on the wind so geared up and went to help, and the boat ran out of fuel not because the trip was very long but because it didn't have much left (and out of universe it's because I need to keep the player stuck in town haha), nothing more mysterious than that I'm afraid. Backpack is probably from town! With the new narrative you don't actually time-travel, you just listen to stories that you get to play through, sorry if that was unclear.

I know you've shown footage of rewinding/fast-forwarding through time. Is that just a design/debug tool, or is it an actual gameplay mechanic?

It's a game mechanic so you don't have to wait for or redo stuff and can analyse things at your own pace. c:

[ChrisLSound]

Ah that all sounds great!

I was only being semi-rhetorical, assuming it may have been more tied into the mystery. It all makes sense now though.

With the new narrative you don't actually time-travel, you just listen to stories that you get to play through

Oh, it seems so obvious now! Guess I just failed to make the connection.

[Alain]

I forgot to mention one thing in it, which is that a present timeline story also progresses gradually as you unlock more of the present timeline town, with the two timelines sort of converging on the solution to the mystery, but you'll still spend most of your gameplay time gathering info in the past.

That sounds very interesting! You seem to have things planned out very well and I am sure the experience you are crafting will be great!

[oahda]

Ah that all sounds great!

That sounds very interesting!

Yay!

You seem to have things planned out very well

The rough outline is pretty solid now I think, but lots of devilish details left to iron out

[oahda]

Hey there Still working on this, writing is going pretty well, but there isn't really anything I can show so

I set a lofty goal to myself of finishing some kind of rough draft of the whole script by the end of this month, but it's seeming increasingly impossible, so we'll see. But this was to be the year of content and not of as much programming as before, so everything is going rather well. The writing has informed some more specifics about the town layout too, so I guess I'll put that into the 3D sketch soon.

But in the meantime…

Did a couple of decreasingly detailed character doodles tho so thought I'd post em:




My lovely partner who's a lot better at this than me did some too



EDIT:

Did an architectural one too, so throwing that in as well:

[JobLeonard]

"I have nothing to show", she said as she had tons of sketches to show from her and her partner 

[Alain]

there isn't really anything I can show

To me this looks like a lot to show I hope the writing continues to come along well!

[SolS]

Ooh I really like that fire shrine!

[oahda]

I meant of the writing itself, haha. But thank you all!

EDIT:

Needed a break from writing, so I modelled up the thing!

[JobLeonard]

Ooooh my goodness!

[Alain]

Wow, I like it a lot! Now I understand your pencil concept a lot better and it came together in 3D really nice!

[oahda]

Thanks!! It did end up a bit different from the sketch but I'm happy with it C:

[JobLeonard]

How did you get the hand-drawn quality to the 3D render? Have you been tinkering with shaders more?

[oahda]

It's the viewport in Blender, no particular shader stuff Set it to flat shading and amped up the ambient occlusion and it was pretty nice!