Simon's Raise Devlog #1

After waking up in the morning, I took a look at what Stenor had done, in what was for me, overnight. In the notes he left me, I saw that he had made a notepad for writing the story in game, but I couldn't find it. After messaging him, I figured out that it was because I was looking for another scene, while he made it in the initial scene.

We had also decided that Stenor was going to do the majority of the art in pixel art, and he certainly delivered with a stunning background and notepad design. He made some folders, but before he went to bed for the day, he made some file icons to use in the sorting minigame.

After looking at Stenor's notes, I decided I was going to work on the story. So, I got to brainstorming and came up with the idea that our main character, Simon was going to start out with noble intentions and slowly be consumed by the job forgetting the reason he started working so hard in the first place. I decided to show this by him DIVING DEEPER into his work in hopes of a raise to support his wife and infant son.

The next step in brainstorming the story was to start on the progress. I decided that I was going to start by assuming there were three minigames, and thanks to a suggestion by Stenor, made multiple endings based on how well you did at the minigames. Although, due to some discussion that we had, that may become multiple storylines, depending on which minigames you won.

The next step was working on implementing the story in the game. Stenor had made good progress on working on the notepad. However, it wasn't very clean or particularly futureproofed. As we developed the game, I could easily see it becoming significantly harder to implement the story. To fix this, I spent some time cleaning Stenor's code, and allowing for all parts of the process to receive a message to be displayed, instead of some as Stenor had it. I also made it possible for the story segment to end and move on to the minigame. At this point, I found the quiet of the notepad combined with the visual typing effect a bit unnerving, so I spent some time making it play alongside a keyboard typing sound.

The next step was writing the intro. I'll leave the details of it a mystery to you, so that you still have a reason to play the game, but simply know I think it's interesting.

After finishing the story, I had some time, so I decided to finish the sorting minigame. I replaced the current placeholder file icon with the ones he sent me. Once again, he did really well, with multiple good icons in the limited amount of time he had to work on them.

I had to do three things to finish the file sorting minigame:

•          Fill out folders and files
•         Make a timer, so you can lose
•         Chack if you won or lost

I decided to fill out the folders first, because it mostly involved duplicating Stenor's work and changing some values. The next step I decided on was to implement the winning and losing mechanics, so I could test to see how the story section handled coming after a minigame. After implementing the winning mechanic, I got to testing the story mechanic. The answer was not well. Text from the screen was still there and it would always load the current minigame again. After fixing the bugs in Stenor's code, introducing plenty of my own, and then fixing those. I was ready to make a timer.

After realizing I had no idea how to make a timer display in minutes and seconds, I found a good timer tutorial online and followed it, changing a few things so that it would work with our game. I made it so that you would lose and be moved to the next story section if the timer ran out. I now understand how regex functions in C#, but I still can't write regex, So back to the charts for me next time.  Although the timer was a bit short, it could be polished later, so I moved onto detailing the part of the story I brainstormed for this part.

Because of the work I did earlier on cleaning up the story generator, implementing the next part of the story was very easy, only having to change a few variables to be public.

After that was done, I spent a brief period of time working on a fill in the blank minigame, before I discovered that the only way I could think of to implement it felt a bit too similar to the file sorting minigame and dropped it. Since I was out of ideas, and a bit apprehensive of starting something new before we discussed it, I took a break and enjoyed my day until Stenor could communicate with me to brainstorm some more minigames, which will be revealed in his devlog.

Stenor's profile: Stenor - itch.io