Dev Log #4

Welcome back to my fourth Dev Log for Paint Yellow! (I forgot to do this last week).  I've been super busy working on the game these past few weeks, and a lot has been completed. Last Dev Log I wrote about my plan, which included creating workers and AI for them, finishing the Dialogue Controller and manager's office, adding some new paintable objects, and creating assets for level 2. I ended up doing just a tiny bit more than this in my perpetual focus. Here's a brief list of completed tasks I accomplished these past 2 or 3 weeks:

• Dialogue Controller and Manager's Office completed
• Fully finished voice acting
• NPC workers which can be interacted with
• Two new paintable objects;  the forklift and the mechanical arm.
• Sanity systems added
• Save systems revamped
• Settings menu is fully completed and tied to the save system
• Remade the main menu (again) to fit the new sanity system
• Level 1 Revamped with workers and new details
• Levels 2, 3, and 4 were added and fully implemented with sanity systems
• Several music tracks were completed
• Wide monitor support (Allegedly)

In all honesty, I took the loading screen out back and shot it. The game is lower poly and has low-resolution textures, which not only aids with the game currently only being 100 MB but also aids in loading times. There was no real point for a loading screen in this game unless you're running on a literal toaster or enjoy going into epileptic shock, and for the former, I've added graphics settings to hopefully help players with less powerful computers. 

Now on to the design portion of this Dev Log.

I spent a long time working on level design these past weeks, and I'm glad to say it's mostly over. The framework for the game is all laid out, and creating levels is as simple as plopping all the prefabs I've created into a scene in an interesting layout. Level 2 was fairly interesting to create as I added a new decorative object to the scene, a ceiling-mounted conveyor lift transporting large sheets of metal (and sometimes other things c;). I also made use of a new interactable feature which was a button, and I used the interactable script again in level 3 to introduce doors that can be opened. For level four, I decided to make it a bit shorter just to add some variety to the level design. I haven't started levels 5 or 6 yet. However, I'm planning to get them up and running within a few days. One of the big things I started finally touching on these last three weeks was the sanity system. I got around to adding the variable to the save manager, and connecting different event systems to it which allows me to more easily create sanity events. I also added a variable to each scene which allows a passive sanity drain. I've been considering making a change to the scoring system, as I noticed during playtesting people either didn't look for the spooky things around each level or chose to ignore them, as the timer seemed to be a great motivator. Because of this, I wanted to set the clock back a bit when the player makes a discovery, in an attempt to encourage and reward exploration a bit. 

Some of my goals before my next Dev Log, which is hopefully release:

• Finishing the final two levels of the game
• Adding the three different endings
• Decorating the manager's office a bit more
• Adding notes and memos containing lore to the game rather than having it all be interpretive
• Bug fixes (If they arise)
• More sanity events (In development currently, I'm an idiot sandwich and can't figure out a minor issue)

That's a wrap for this semi/bi-weekly occasionally deca-quarterly Dev Log, and here's hoping all goes smooth for the next week or so.