Big progress on my indie game – finalizing the plot backbone, adding whole new game level, and getting Unity standalone working!

Game Design – rethinking the story structure

I hit a major writer’s block on the game story and flow and went on a bit of creative hiatus to break from my loop of thoughts, and remind myself what I really want the game to be. After several re-writes and discussions with a writer friend on Postmortem: one must die, I think I finally figured out a good story-backbone to drive the experience forward. Still a few things left to be figured out, but at least I got a “spine” to work from.

I’ve also used this time to work on additional background research, reading up on Polish and Slavic folklore. Lots of preoccupation with death, and people becoming different forms of (mostly evil) spirits depending on how they died. Fun stuff.

New Game Level

So with a cleared focus, I added a whole new level to the game, biggest and most complex yet. After a whole week, some 23hrs sunk into level design, lighting, and texturing, I got me a whole new level!

I still need to add more gameplay stuff like vents, patrolling guards and items, but at least the level is fully structured and playable!

Unity 3D Standalone Build

And I spent most of my Monday debugging and rewriting chunks of my code to get the standalone build of my game working properly! It worked great in the Unity Editor, but using custom assets (like graphs for convos and quest logic or localization files), they were not getting bundled quite right and failed to load in the build. But that’s all fixed now, YAY!

Next Week’s Goal

Now that I got most of the areas and characters in, I want to put in all the plot items and finalize the quests progression. Basically, make the game playable a-to-z, even if I’m missing a few pieces inside. The sooner I can get there, the sooner I can start alpha test of the game.

I also need to start working on full in-game UI and some developer tools like a console and log for that too.