The first two weeks of the contest’s one month deadline have passed and I’m pretty happy with the progress so far. Though I won’t be able to put much work into the game this week due to job assignments I’m confident to have it done in time. At least the “PGD Challenge 2013 edition”, and depending on feedback I may add more stuff to the game after it’s release. After all a month is not that much, especially when you’ve got a full-time job, so there are lots of things I’d like to implement that won’t make it in time. So an enhanced version of the game with more content, gameplay and visuals is something on my todo-list.
Current screenshots (still work-in-progress, click to enlarge) :
The “game” itself is now fully playable from end to finish. There is also a main menu with an about screen, and on top of that I also added logging to the game for troubleshooting. I also added two visual types for the player’s decisions, so in addition to the long and dark corridors there are now also holes (that symbolized some kind of descend) and “hovering” doors in space (I guess you can see what mystery series influenced me on that from a mile away ;) ). This adds a bit of variety, and I have additional visual types planned, though as noted above these may not make it into the final game.
You can now also actually “die” by failing to select an answer for a decision within a given timeframe. The longer you stare at the answers, the blurrier they get (once again using a shader with a FBO for that) and at some point reality starts to fade in again, with you lying on your death bed while people around you have come for your funeral. You still have time to select an answer during this phase, though I you won’t answer the screen will fade as you finally die.
In terms of game logic answers now have a bias that add to the player’s bias towards the questions asked, and that bias (along with your answers) will be shown in the ending screen. So pretty much all of the game logic is done, though the ending screen still needs some more functionality and a few bugs need to be ironed out.
There’s now also dark and eerie (and perfectly fitting I must admit) music in the game, thanks to Kistol from over at opengameart.org. I haven’t started implementing sounds yet, but since the game will be very minimalistic in that area, I’ll either only add very few sounds or just leave it up to the music.