Did everyone get their back to school shopping done? As soon as the month turned over I was struck by a familiar scent in the air that startled me with its punctuality. Autumn is on its way with Halloween quite close behind! Let's go over the steps we made toward Trigger Treat's test build over the last month. With the seasons turning over DD and I are getting closer to showing off the fruits of our labors, a lot of the invisible under-the-hood mechanisms have been put in place and preparations made for graphical assets to be installed in the game. With menu coding and graphics complete, we're ready to start on level design this month! We thought it was important to get one of the more complex sides of game coding out of the way as early as possible and prioritized interface components over much of the summer. In addition to debug options for us on the development side, player-end options are all set up, allowing us to finally build navigable menus. Last month I showed you all some of my concept sketches of what the menus in the game might look like, here's a glimpse of the paintings I did in the time since.
After careful consideration of all my options, I picked a theme that I felt supported the game's narrative. I won't go into detail about the design's significance yet, to avoid spoiling too much we'll save that for another time. For now, you can see the general structure of what I'm going for, each image gives way to the next as the player navigates menu entries. Making these paintings was also great practice in working with the graphical style of the game, I'm hoping making use of dithering and limited colors will help blend the antique with the modern. These details will be more easily visible in the test build, and the paintings will be further refined by the time we get to a final release as well.
As mentioned above, multiple different sides of the gameplay experience were addressed over the last couple of months simultaneously. One of the benefits of this is that I can continue to work on other graphics in front of the public while making progress on other, hidden aspects of the game in private. Here's some more NPC sprites I did on the gamedev streams!
These characters in particular are some of the earliest that players will be seeing in the game, so I felt it was most crucial to capture their sense of personality both for the purposes of gameplay but also to give the most basic impression of the world they inhabit. Rather than inventing new designs as I had for the previous civilian characters, I decided to hearken back to a concept sketch I had done years ago that was made for the express purpose of visualizing the average citizen of Halloween. These characters weren't designed to be used in any specific part of the game, so I had been looking for a good opportunity to show them off. Luckily for me DD proposed a scenario for early in the first level that was perfectly suited for them, and I was happy to finally find a place for the little creeps. There are a few more to come that I'll be continuing to animate in the coming weeks, but I'm especially excited that with the conclusion of menu design, I'll be moving into creating actual gameplay and action assets. Work has begun on a test room that I'll show you all next month, and once plugged into the game we'll start working on enemies so we can begin testing moment-to-moment gameplay. This is the meat of the game, so I'm excited to watch our theoretical plans for action sequences begin to play out in-engine. Keep your eyes peeled and I'll be back with results next month!
-Julian