Working away at getting the demo gameplay polished and working, still lots to do but I’ve just recently started working out of a dedicated space so that should really improve the pace of development.

The past few weeks have been spent focusing on the game’s dream sequence gameplay as well as adding some visual polish to the early demo gameplay.

New Art for Stanford Executive Office

This is where the demo opens and you get your assignment to head over to Japan. The goal was to go for something that felt slightly oppressive and also gave the player a very clear navigation tutorial (The player only has to walk in one direction and use the ‘interact’ button to progress the sequence). Art is still very early, there will be more clutter and detail added to the office area.

New Art for Shogetsu Grand Hotel Lobby

The Shogetsu Grand hotel is the first environment you visit after your meeting at Stanford Investments. Again, still very work in progress, but I think the overall layout and color scheme is there. I still need to figure out what the centerpiece (The yellow square) is going to be and the perspective on the couches feels off…but perspective rules for the art in the game overall is still a bit wonky.

New Dream Sequence UI

The dream sequence has received a ton of updates over the past two weeks. Mostly I put in placeholder art and animations so I could get a better sense of the gameplay. As well as refining the animation system so it’s more modular and robust.

On top of that, I spent some time working through the dream sequence’s UI layout. Since the game doesn’t have any tutorials it’s really important that the flow of events in the sequence is as fluid and natural as possible. To help with this I drew out maps of where the eye goes during the dream sequence gameplay and then rearranged the layout so that the player’s eye had to move as little as possible to get to the next relevant element gameplay wise.

Eye Flow for Original Layout:

The player’s eye has to travel quite a bit around parts 5 and 6 then again at 9 and 10. This makes the flow of information confusing to the player.

Eye Flow for New Layout:

The player’s eye ends up having to travel much less and the amount of back-tracking have been reduced. The Animations have also been updated to indicate the direction the player’s eye is supposed to move. For example, in step 5 the PWR LVL indicator moves to the right, which is where the player’s eye is supposed to go next.

As a result of these updates the dream sequence fights are feeling much better grounded and less abstract.

For Next Update:

Art for Drinking Sequence

Art for Hotel Bar Environment

Art for Drug Dealer’s Hotel Room

Post dream sequence transition implementation

As much else as possible!