The prototype and game design document hand-in has passed, and immediately I want to rehaul the whole thing! And so my insecurity manifests. For now, though, basic mechanics in Unity are implemented!
In this prototype, which takes place in Cliffs Apartment (a now-cut location), you can talk to Lang, interact with the fridge, pick up a monkey statue, and go into the bathroom. Dialogue is working near-perfectly, it only needs to be able to invoke Events in each line (animations, item pick-ups, etc) and I need to figure out a quick and easy way to color-pick text colors (perhaps from a palette). Dialogue choices contribute to and are influenced by LH and PM stats, though I'm still unsure where I'm going with PH.
This is the kind of place where a Splash Screen would be best implemented, so the player can see what Cliff is seeing in the fridge. If you look in the bottom right corner, you can also see that Smell is implemented. Not very effectively, but its a feature?
Going through the door into the bathroom triggers a fade-to-black transition while a Coroutine teleports the player into the next room. It actually works fantastically and will be perfect with a little loading animation in the corner.
Only problem right now is this: the inventory system is broke to shit! That's a WIP, but then we're smooth sailing into puzzle design and assets like characters, levels, and dialogues!
Otherwise, there's an internal crisis of "What is this game, really?" Like all weeks, I'm wrought with doubt and inability to commit. What's bothering me most from a concept perspective is being strung by the limbs between four aspects; Grunge urbanity, Rural wilderness, queerness/family, and violence/anarchy. That is the tough thing about juggling and contrasting themes, for me. I think my problem has been attempting too hard to shoe in autoethnography, a field which actually can only apply here as it relates to furries and therians, and not really queer or trans people at all (that equation would be a grave mistake). On the other hand, I feel myself drifting from what was originally interesting to me in the first place; the myths, the history, the biology, the lore. These things were always the backbone of my research and my inspiration, and I've thus far abandoned them. This game is supposed to be a reinterpretation of that mythos in a modern context, it's not second fiddle here.
So in the next weeks, our semester break, I am hitting the books again and really annotating them. They are my primary source of knowledge from the past and of my subject, and they are the true definition, the source, of man's relationship with the wolf; that is what is under the microscope. Secondly, I need to really, actually understand the wolf as an animal, so documentaries, videos, books, and artworks are all in. The characters in Homolupus must be wolves first, and humans second, as if they are actually undergoing a kind of reverse transformation, though still maintaining a queer subtextual, only semi-conscious allegory. Basically, everything must come from a historical or biological reality. It's not really about what I think is cool or rad, as least not on the starting level. It's about reinterpretation.
My homework for the next weeks, besides reading and studying, is to begin work on the first level of the game. That includes environment/location modeling, character modeling, puzzle design, and finally getting down and dirty in the art department. This also includes fixing up still-rough systems like Inventory. By the end of this semester break, a whole level will be complete-complete-complete!
Good luck to me and god-speed to you!
- Monkeydog
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