Devlog #15- Quests

Hello all, I'm back from a two week break. I was busy for most of the time so there hasn't been much progress, but I've gotten back into it over the last few days. To be completely frank, I'm in quite a major rut and it's making development very slow. I've been striving towards a demo for a while now, and I keep crossing the checkpoint for what I think I would need to release one- then finding something else that I decide is necessary before public release. I've had a few close friends play my game at random points throughout development but none of them would usually play games like mine so I get very little valuable feedback. I know that the next important thing to do is to get people to play my game, so I may just need to force myself to release it in a state I'm not 100% happy with before it gets out of control.

What pushes me to continue making my game is that I really enjoy gamedev, and I like the constant progression and slowly building up a world however I please. Realistically I don't think it'll be a really successful game, or even profit enough to cover my music budget. But I hope that it's a stepping stone towards a successful future game. At the very least I hope it's the type of game someone plays and even if they hate it they'll say "There's potential for a better game so I'll keep an eye on the developer". 

Anyway, onto this weeks topic- Quests.

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One of the few things I did get done during my break is the design of the Quest Log menu. I'm still trying to think of a better term to use than 'quests', but everything I come up with feels a little forced so it's just quests for now.

Quests will be added to the list on the right side as you find them, and I'll add the ability to show/hide ones you've finished.  I tried to make this screen as simple as possible, but I might have to add some other functionality in the future. The top area is where you can see the current stability of the dream during exploration. If you don't know what stability is referring to, I wrote about in the last devlog.

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But why do I need a quest menu?

There are two main reasons I decided to add a quest menu- (other than it being an RPG staple). 
The first is for the collector appeal, being able to see a list of what needs to be done and also a list of your achievements so far checked off is a huge spur for me when playing games of this genre. 
The second reason is it allows me to add long-term quests that can be left on the back burner without being forgotten, and also easily convey to the player which tasks are important.

From what I've seen of video essays talking about quests in video games, if you want a quest to be memorable and have an impact on the player then a good way to do that is with multiple stages and story twists and turns. I've left a large area in the menu UI for the description that I can update as the quest's story evolves, and you'll see the quest goal says "next" because I plan for almost all quests to have more than one stage.

The quest in the screenshot here is likely one of the first you'll come across, and the first goal may seem simple but it leads to a much more important next stage. I want players to know that doing anything in the quest log will lead to something interesting and worthwhile, so there will be no filler quests to extend playtime.

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Thanks for reading! Wish me luck getting out of this rut, and I'll be back again next week hopefully a bit closer to a public release demo.