Development Log #5

Welcome to Devlog 5!

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Week 6

Hello Everyone! Welcome to this week's Devlog. For this week there won't be too much to showcase as it was just a expansion of the last. This will showcase the last part of the Level Jam, Text.

THEME – Text Based Adventure

RECAP

As a minor recap from the last Devlog, the theme we had was, Text Based Adventure. This game was based on the idea that you get absorbed into this older style terminal computer and have to go on this textual based adventure in order to receive hint files to unlock an arrow sequence to stop the computer from deleting you! There are about eight different levels within this game and from the previous Devlog the last one was the longest of them all. That is where we will begin with this one.

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Text Quest (Zork Parody)

To start off with the last level for the game, Michael and I knew that we wanted to reference Zork for this theme. The backbone structure for selecting the paths was all done by Michael but the background art was mine. We really wanted the sense of a simple Text Based game within our own and what better game to gain inspiration then Zork itself. The main character is shown throughout the entire last level of the game as a background piece where he is looking into another computer terminal. As you progress through the game text that appears on the terminal will allow the player to see exactly where to go and what is contained within the areas the player travels. We also wanted to make it as simple as possible by allowing the controls to just be the buttons and WASD controls to be the inputs that appear as the player's options.

START

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I would like to give a large amount of credit to Michael for the background work on showing the text. This took a long process to figure out because we wanted the text to be a certain size and in order for it to fit the terminal screen he had to plan ahead for where the text will move up to and after it gets to the edge of the terminal it would translate upward as if the screen was scrolling down. After some time of figuring it out he eventually got it to work and it fit exactly what an old style text game was. The next thing was to create the framework for the inputs and that was a lot less of a challenge as we just needed to keep a state of where the player is currently and what options to give the player based on what location he is at. The areas also have objectives. They would restrict or allow a player to continue into a certain location if they had the right tools or items needed to progress.

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ENDING

That is all we had for the expansion of last week's Devlog. To refrain from spoiling the last level we are leaving it here. I hope to see you guys next time! All photos from this Devlog post will be updated in the gallery so be sure to check it out and have a good day!