Devlog #44: Indoors

Long time no devlog! Life isn't going my way lately, and I didn't make any real progress for a long while but I'm slowly returning to usual levels of productivity, and that includes getting back on schedule with devlogs.

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Game Jam Results

Last devlog I talked about my plans to enter the 50th GMC game jam, and I ended up making a little game called Dunk Tank (that you can play here). I am pretty proud of what I managed to put together, and it's mostly the same as my original vision despite the time limit. Although it’s certainly flawed in places, I got lots of great feedback and it was announced today that it came first place and got the best story award! I’ve never won a jam before so I’m really happy, and I can check it off my gamedev bucket list.

I’m really glad I entered because it’s refreshed my love of gamedev quite a bit, especially through playing everyone else’s entries and thinking through their design choices. It’s also reminded me just how much work HD art assets are, and cemented my choice to go with pixel art for Nagayami Nights; animation are quicker, UI is easier to plan and it's way easier to make small fixes and adjustments.

The other thing the jam made me realise is that my music guy Floopy is way too good, and his tracks are the best chance I have at lifting my game up from a niche game to possibly getting popular. I built Dunk Tank around some of his previously made tracks and there’s no doubt in my mind that without them I wouldn’t have won.

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Animating to the Beat

So this revelation inspired me to pull something out of the “scrapped-for-scope-reasons” bin and work on it these past few weeks:
Timing animations to match the music!

Previously I was simply setting the animation speed to the bpm of the music, but now I can manually set changes to match points in the song for anything in the game including animations, movements and gameplay. So far the main thing I plan to do with this is match all the background animations to the music for each area, but I also plan to implement some gameplay stuff too.

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Indoor areas

I’ve been overthinking how indoor areas in my game should work for a while now, and it’s often made me procrastinate making more of them (you’ll see in previous devlogs how often I planned to work on Yusuke’s interior and never did it).

I think I’ve finally figured out the sweet spot though, with Yusuke’s house (finally done) as an example below-

First major decision is every indoor room will be limited to the size of the game screen, with no moving camera. I think it gives it more of a cozy feeling when you enter, and will keep the style of interiors more consistent across the game. 

When rooms need to be bigger I’ll cut them into smaller sections like in the scene below→

Moving across rooms will be immediate and place you in the same corresponding location every time, so I’ll need to make paths between rooms narrow enough to keep it feeling believable (like the table above splits the wider entry into two). 

All exits will have the dithering effect seen above, and this should work well as an indicator because I don't use dithering in my regular pixel art.

Another bonus improvement that comes from these changes is that with the camera fixed in place I can give indoor ghost ambushes much smaller trigger ranges. For example a purple spoon on a table, or a single purple flower in a vase. I can’t expect the player to scan every pixel of the screen as they run around the overworld, but I think scanning a room for potential ghosts as you enter will add a bit of fun tension when indoors.

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To do this week

No checklist this week, just one major goal: Get the next area I'm working on in a playable state.

I’m not worrying about polished graphics or perfection, just a fully playable section of the game from start to end. Once it’s done I’ll get my brother to playtest and see what he thinks. Devlogs will be back to normal schedule now, so I’ll report back next week and see how close I get.

Thanks for reading!