Alonso's Development Blog

   This week felt like a relatively productive week. We started it off with a team meeting to agree on what we needed to finish before the upcoming portfolio night event. This mainly involved all of us needing to help with adding in systems that would improve the game based on player feedback! In my case this meant implementing the lore. We split our tasks to focus on the Hub for the first week, and the Mine level the next.    My alterations to the Hub involved adding in some ways to show people interactable objects. For me this came in two ways. One was to create an interactable computer that opened a UI that displays character information. Seeing as a big part of the lore focuses on us learning about what happened to the miners, I deemed it important to create a segment to read up on some character biographies so nobody is confused on who these people are. Especially since right now this seemed like an easy way to incorporate an interactable object.    I ...

   This week was a continuation of writing out the narrative elements of Delve. With the audio logs completed to handle the miners' side of the story, we now needed to do the cultist's side. This would be told through tablets you would find throughout the latter half of the game. These tablets won't be voice acted though, so I had to make them a bit shorter as to not give players walls of text to read.    The main mindset I had is, whereas the voice logs strung together a mystery and narrative, the tablets expand the worldbuilding and give context behind certain things. This means that they both compliment each other in a way. I wanted the tablets to explore the cultist's society, alongside the various array of thought processes some of these cultists may have.     Currently I set up the scripts for the tablets within the Temple. This just leaves the tablets in the Maze to write out, but there won't be too many of those so I might set them up alongside...

   This week was a little more interesting. We started the week off with a meeting between the designers and project leads in order to find out where we are meant to progress from here. We agreed that we had to make a document compiling all the information needed for the wizard.    From here, the designers would meet in the middle of the week. Or at least, Michael and Chance did alongside myself. This meeting was to compile a list of everything we knew about what we had to do, and make a framework for the document. It was a bit of a lengthy meeting since we had to compile everything that had to be customized. But we came out of it with a solid plan in mind.    We would split everything we had to do amongst all five of our designers. Each designer would work on a specific segment of the documentation. I was tasked with the Tile Selection and Play Game segments. This mostly just involved setting up wireframes on how those sections work, then create descriptio...

   This week was a continuation of my narrative work. I was tasked with creating more audio logs, specifically those for the Temple and Maze levels. I wanted to get both of them done since my main focus was to get the miner's side of the plot done and dusted. This mainly just meant explaining more things on the miner's end and trying to expand upon the eventual chaos that leads to the death of the miners.     Really my only complaint with the narrative is I can already tell the pacing in this regard is a little bit off. However, I don't feel like I have enough time to redraft. I've made a list of everything else I need to do for the narrative and realized that if I want to implement everything else to some degree then having a constantly redraft process is going to be impossible. This mildly infuriates me, but I guess this just proves that I should've pushed to start the narrative work earlier in the semester instead of letting my team agree to put it off until ...

     This week I was given a chance to continue my narrative work and was tasked with outlining scripts for the audio logs within the Mines. I've never done scriptwriting before so this likely is not really industry standard. But I tried to write something out to try and convey the plotline a bit more thoroughly.    Initially I was going to make the audio logs a bit more disjointed where some happened at the start of the expedition, so in the middle, and some towards the end. This didn't really work out how I wanted though since I realized the narrative was going to turn out extremely messy and chaotic. So I decided to make the audio logs a little bit more linear. However if time permits I do want to make audio or written logs (perhaps 'corrupted' ones that need to be uncorrupted) that you can find that convey what happened later on to the miners that can be found in the upper layers of the mine.    As for the actual scripts I wrote, it wasn't too hard...

     This week my main contribution to the project was creating a concept for the wizard's screenflow. I mainly wanted to convey what we likely would have needed for the wizard to function properly. This mainly just included making outlines for our various menus and such.    I also tried to convey some of the requirements we would need for the editor portion of the wizard. This mainly just includes various click-based interactions and such. I tried to make sure the interactions would feasibly make sense within the confines of our coding expertise but I am worried about the complexity of it.    I also did want to give the option to save and load ideas, but I recently realized that might not fully be possible. Especially due to the fact that saving files for loading later is a bit complex. Hopefully we get a chance to add it in but I'm not sure. Honestly my two big concerns are the lack of people actively doing design work and the potential programming v...

     This week I admittedly didn't do anything. At the start of the week nobody could really make it to the meeting. And over the course of the week mostly everyone was out for one reason or another. And I still hadn't gotten feedback on my lore ideas so I couldn't move forward in that area.    I do have ideas for how I want to move forward with the story though. If we can find a way to add in interactable props I could have the player press something near a prop to read it's lore. Like interactable tablets or holo-journals and things. Just so we don't have to make voice logs for everything.    The other major thing I want to solidify later is the 'main characters' of the miners side of things. I did come up with a good chunk of them, but I want to round the group out some more. Though I am worried that we're now rather late in development so we might not have enough time to do everything we want to.