Project Dreamscape - Dev post 1

Hi my name is Grumfy, and i do game dev for fun, at this moment i’ve started developing this mobile game that’s gonna be “puzzly” story game called for now Project Dreamscape, where you are this young boy named Alex, and Alex get’s stuck in this dream, where he tries to get out of, during his journey to get out of this nightmare he will have to solve puzzles, defeat enemies and bosses and meet new friends. 

So first week of work on the game… Since im programmer and i struggle to draw, I have mostly coded and designed the rough systems that most of the game is gonna have, some systems are missing but some are there, i will have to do some fine tuning and polishing to the systems. Since i struggle to draw, i will of course draw what i can draw on my own, to use as placeholders for now, im paying this Fiverr guy, who have drawn the main character Alex for me, and he have some enemy designs on the way. I will also search on the internet for some decently priced or even free tile sets and other relevant assets that can be used in the game, to get as a good looking game as possible, where im happy too with the result.

During the first week, i put most of my time in movement, to ensure as good of result as possible, since you gonna spend time with Alex during playing the game, i wanted the movement, to be at least good looking system wise and visually, sure i could accept some small bugs, but no major bugs that would make the Alex looks weird and sloppy in movement, so i spent 3 days developing the movement, first walking, then jumping, then climbing, then sliding on the wall, all and every part was slowly implemented where i tried them out to ensure they were at least good enough.

I knew i wanted something like an x amount of hearts for the health system then you need to respawn at checkpoint when reaching zero and continue from there, so i added a health system for the player, also the visuals.

After the health i started on the dialogue system, here i went through two designs options, one where we had 2-4 buttons on the screen and where they were labeled a-b-c-d, then i realized that 1 of the buttons would needed to be a “exit/back” button to ensure the player got out of the dialogue window if needed, meaning i had only 2-3 buttons. This window design, worked but was not enough for me so i came up with another design to ensure i could have more options to implement, and the look can be seen in the video in this post.

in this design i could now have plenty more options to add to the dialogue, meaning the only thing i needed was 3 buttons, one up button, one down button and on accepting the selected button. This will help me in the future when level designing the game, adding npcs and missions, to have the possibilities to have as many options as i want, sure there are a limit maybe 6 options for now, but 6 options is more than needed. 

When the dialogue system design was implemented and i was happy, i started on added something to trigger the dialogue system, a npc and it having it’s own dialogue sequence playing out when the player get’s close and wants to talk/interact. Since most of the npcs are gonna be stationary, i didn’t add any movement to them yet.

Something i added movement to after the Npcs was, Enemies, i added a enemies, the enemies moves and stops and can change direction at random, but the enemies has an interval where they moves between. They wont climb ladders but i think i will implement jumping later, if the player is spotted, but i haven’t added vision yet to the enemies, so they can’t see anything.

After the enemies was added, last bit of work this week i had time with, was that i added the system so you as a player could attack them, but at this moment i’ve haven’t added damage to the attacks yet, so you can only throw these vials that gonna act as projectiles, these vials is thought to be containing some magical powder, and upon contact the vials will break, and the content will burst into a cloud, damaging the enemies in the nightmare, but most of this will be implemented next week.

This is everything i could develop during the first week.