Mostly under-the-hood things again for this week.  Saving and loading work and I have the mess hall put together.

Looking back at the checklist TODO:

    Title Menu + New Game
    Game Over
    Inventory / Forbidden Geometry
    Save / Purgation Ritual
    PDA Battery
    Dialog or static comic cutscene?

Completed Items:

    Pause Menu with Quit / Load / Quest / Options
    Player physical changes
    Dialog overlay (pause for input)
    Page read overlay
    Choice Dialog
    Slime Enemy
    Scene and Level Transitions
    Whiteboxing Levels for Docks, Cold Storage, and the rest of floor 1.
    Story beats for floor one.

There's a lot still to be done and I'm not particularly happy with the overall level of polish, but I'm still moving forward.

A New Project in Progress

Now that Blueberry Bushwhacking is wrapped I've had the opportunity to start on The Veil Commission, a game inspired by SCP, Control, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill.

“Congratulations and welcome to Veil. We’re a family here."

Veil is everyone’s favorite megacorp. They do everything you could possible need: medicine, manufacturing, scientific research. Rumors of their involvement with the occult are unsubstantiated.

The game is narrative focused with very little to no combat planend. The player will need to search and find things and solve puzzles.  It features weight gain, inexplicable energies that cause you to get fat, inflation, and possibly monster pregnancy.

I’ve been taking passes at this game on and off for a few months and wanted to finally start talking about the design process in the open, now that my other game is all shipped.

I have a lot of the foundations ready. Player movement feels okay. Stamina works. The player will burst if they get too filled. You can pick up and read logs, take items to unlocks paths, and so on. The story is sketched out, but I’m going to make changes depending on how a lot of things feel.

I really want weight gain to tie into the game mechanically. The plan at the start was to have the player use the Purgation Ritual sites to save and to convert their fat into energy that they can use to power assorted occult things like the lantern. This seemed like a nice way to force people to walk the razor’s edge: too bit and you’ll burst, but you still need to garner the attention of things that will fatten you so that you can get paracausal or paranormal energy from them.

New Game: Blueberry Bushwhacking

Blueberry Bushwhacking received its final release this month after a year of effort.  The game is a simple survival game, mostly text, but with some accompanying visuals.  It contains blueberry inflation, regular inflation, bursting/popping, male and female inflation.  Male and female inflation can be toggled off, as can the skin coloration tint.  Playable on Window, Linux, and the Web.