So, how did this go?

Art is courtesy of the lovely Ben Hunter

It is definitely worth saying that Final Hour was an incredibly fun, stressful, and fun experience to develop before I say much of anything else. I wasn't ever really going to write anything up for this, but the recent release of Mouthwashing (Steam link provided, it is worth your time and money!) made me look back on it and realise I think it is a special little game to me, as rough around the edges it is.

The actual idea for it came about when I was craving something technically interesting and creatively dense when I was working on a Uni project that had thoroughly worn me down. Development and group issues had left me drained and I wanted something I could sink my teeth into that I could feel proud of. Looking back on it, it was not the heathliest mentality to go about making a game, and I definitely am a lot more proud of that Uni project now, but regardless, a simple idea had popped into my head.

"The Return of the Obra Dinn has a gorgeous art style, huh? Imagine that in space."

It was for 1-Bit Game Jam specifically we were making this game. So it certainly fit. Aside from the technical art, handled by my lovely friend Phoenix, I was the sole programmer. I was, at the time, a greenhorn, with maybe 8 months of Unity experience under my belt, suddenly heading up and architecting a project that was probably beyond my skill level at the time.

But I tend to gravitate to trials by fire, I like pressure and working under it. I have always been the type to try and jump into an advanced topic once I get the basics, and loop back if needed.

The first thing I did for Final Hour was break down exactly what was needed for the core gameplay loop to begin being tested, that being:
- A dialogue system that can render lines of dialogue one character at a time (Easy, I had done this before)
- A method of creating objects that can store dialogue information, so it would not need to be hard coded to each game object (A bit more challenging)
- Each dialogue box to render an image of a character talking, using a set of 4 or so frames of animation (Simple, but ended up having some quirks)
- Dialogue options. (We will get into this! It is, in retrospect, something I make sound harder than it was. But at the time I needed to do a lot of research into topics I wasn't expect to.)
- A character controller, that can interact with various different types of objects (I would certainly do this differently now)
- A game flow/flag management system to make sure there is clear and linear progression (This was a challenge, less to create, more to work with)

So, a lot. And we had a week to do it. Well, I had a week to do it in. And less, really, since we had to make sure there was time to create the levels, and set up the dialogue, and everything else. So this came down to a case of developing tools. This was something my education at the time had not touched, and I didn't imagine practising at any point. So I was flying by the seat of my pants.

Still writing! Come back soon!