The final date is quickly approaching, with only one week left to finish work on Trugbild. Last week was extremly busy (including a business trip), so I didn’t make much progress on it. To compensate for this I sat down the whole weekend to push progress on the project, and I can happily announce that all coding work on the game is done.
I finalized the ending screen, which now has two (slightly) different visuals, depending on the player’s bias. In my last posting I wrote that each answer changes your bias towards the negative or positive, and depending on this final bias the game will display a different “ending”. Though don’t expect endings like you used to be from games like Silent Hill, just simply different screens with different texts depending on your choices.
The game now also has a final scene that you can reach when answering all questions in time, kinda like a “happy ending” which will also influence the ending. And to make things more interesting, the game speeds up with the number of decisions taken. The further you go, the quicker you’ll have to react (or you’ll die like shown in the last posting).
And last but not least I slipped in an additional visual styles. I had a mockup for this made with Photoshop some time ago, and decided to put this one in during this afternoon. So in addition to holes, corridors and doors, you’ll now also see ladders that your character can climb. This should add to the diversity of the game, and if time permits I may add one of the other additional visual styles I’ve pinned down in my design document.
(click to enlarge)
I even found time to package and release a prototype for people to test (over at the PGD forums), mostly to check hardware compatibility. As this prototype seems to run fine on different hardware (even on integrated Intel GPUs) and all the gameplay elements are in, I’m pretty much finished with coding. The project is currently standing at roughly 4,500 LOC (not counting all the existing stuff from my basecode), and the project’s directory grew to ~ 250 MBytes. The final release will be at roughly 30 MBytes, and will be available for windows first. I plan on having a linux version out at a later point, and I’d love to see it on android (maybe with XE5), though I haven’t decided on that yet.
And to close this posting off, here are two debugging screenshots, displaying the (up to) 6 different frame buffer objects the game uses to compose it’s visuals :
(click to enlarge)
So the final week of the contest will be used to create content for the game, which means writing dialogue and adding much more decisions.