I have an amusing anecdote that I feel reflects a lot of what makes video game development fun, interesting, and difficult.

We're going to be solving the issue of "how does the player make a choice during a dialog or interaction?"  Pause for a moment and decide about how that should work.  We can probably agree on a high level that there should be text shown to a player and two or more options to select from.  The details are what we care about, though.

Do we pause the game while the player is thinking? 

If no, how do we handle enemies attacking the player?  Do we pick a default option when they're attacked?  Do we close the menu?  Do we prevent enemies from attacking the player?

If we pick a default option, what if that option is a bad one?  Our writers need to remember that the last dialog option will get picked if the player is attacked.  What if the choice is one of immense gravity -- a one-time event, like "take or leave the source of immense power"?  Should we still decide for the player?  Perhaps neither and we close the menu, but if we close the menu, what if the dialog is at the end of a cutscene or exchange?  Sure, we could just resume the dialog from where we left off, but if the player is broken out of the exchange then what if the character offering the choice dies while the player is in combat?  So let's force the player to go through the dialog again.  I hope you don't re-check that the player has any quest items because those might have been removed during the dialog. 

Perhaps that all sounds too complex, but if we prevent enemies from attacking the player during a choice, then you had better remember that, because you've got a bug in waiting.  Fallout happens to have such a bug.

Or perhaps you want to avoid all that headache, so you decide to pause the game.  I personally think that's reasonable.  I have a state in my game for paused that gets set when the pause menu is up or the main menu is showing.  Sounds okay so far. 

We pause the game and wait for the player to pick one or the other.

I have only one pause state: the game is paused or it's not.  I don't have a 'paused in menu' and 'paused while making a choice' as separate states.  This means when the player pauses the game to change their controls or volume settings...

Our pause menu pops over the dialog menu.  More importantly, though, the game unpauses when the player closes the pause menu, as it should.  So we could split the pause state into 'paused waiting for selection' and 'paused waiting for menu', but hold on wait, what if the player decides to pause the game in the middle of making a decision and save it, then loads the game?  Now we need to remember that a dialog was open and the player was in the middle of a choice.  I hope you have everything saving and restoring properly and that you have a good way of triggering events.

Or maybe you did.  But I hope your choice menu was expecting not to be preempted:

So let's take the easiest thing: the player can't access the pause menu while and popup menus are open.  I hope you're not expecting to use the multiple choice menu to enable and disable the pause menu, because if a story trigger preempts the closing dialog (like a scene change) then your player won't be able to access the main menu any more.

Ultimately, the solution in this case is to have the pause menu check to see if there are any option menu or pause menu popups visible before it will allow itself to pop open.  This does put a dependency between the two and makes the code less trivial, but it's the least messy option I've found.

Still busy with work, so not a lot of time. I have started working on the Lobby and Offices, and as a distraction started to fix the animations that looked really bad. I picked up a cheap pack of motion capture animations and, while I’m mostly happy with them, the idle animation is very masculine and interacts badly with the animation system.

(See attached animation.)

Note how the player, when they get fatter, has something of a stammer with the left leg forward. I liked that the old animations didn’t have that as an artifact. I might try to work around it somehow, but I think I need to be focusing on pushing the gameplay forward.

I have also a small idea for an Anomalous Object:

[spoiler]
VAOID: 12345
Aliases: Unplanned Office Snacks, Surprise Snacks, Who Brought Snacks, Wandering Food
Tags: Non-hostile, corporeal, potential-memetic-comonent
Description: A tray of small office snacks that appears to manifest just outside the fields of views of observers. Subjects coming within 2m of VAOID#### report finding assorted pastries, cheeses, and candies in their hands. Subjects will unwittingly consume said snacks, only for their hands to be refilled. Some subjects have reported being unable to put down the snacks, consumption being the only way to empty their hands. Subjects have limited dexterity until said snacks are consumed. If subjects leave the vicinity of VAOID#### it does not pursue. The snacks produced by VAOID#### appear to adhere to most dietary restrictions. Experimentation with mutually-exclusive dietary restrictions is pending.

I haven’t decided if it would be too annoying to prevent people from using doors until they eat the food that appears in their hands.
[/spoiler]

I've finished blocking out a dialog system that I'm happy with.  One more thing to check off list.  Save and load game are also finished, if not yet integrated into the pause menu.  I'm going to finish off the office and reception areas, which should be sufficient breathing room to start peppering story fragments inside.  After that I'm going to start looking at any missing or empty-feeling mechanics and start doing some rudimentary polishing passes.

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.