Save the World Dev Blog 5 - Finishing Touches and Future Possibilities

Finishing Touches

The final stages of the project have mainly included making some finishing touches to the project. This has involved smaller tasks such as polishing object placements so that the pickup hint UI is fully visible, and adding a flip flop to the below ground music trigger box so that the music switches back to the above ground music when Gustav goes back through it. However, it has also involved some bigger tasks.

One of these tasks was to create the animation for Anala to be asleep until she is spoken to, and then to be on fire until the end of the conversation. This involved some flipbook changes triggered by different interaction points. I also added Anala’s theme so that when Gustav steps onto the island she rests on, her theme begins to play until he leaves a wider collision sphere as he heads either towards Artemis or just away from Anala’s encounter.

Future Possibilities

This final stage of development also involved me trying very hard to implement some features/fix some broken code that would have made the final game more polished. Sadly I have not been able to solve these problems in time for the project deadline and so these features will not be implemented for now. However, I plan on putting some more time into working through these later so watch this space for future updates.

The two main issues I was trying to solve were the Inventory and Journals updating based off of Gustav’s encounters and item collections. For the inventory, a widget slot with the name of the item is supposed to be added to the inventory widget for every item collected. The journal contains four entries, one starting entry and then an additional one for each NPC encounter. All three NPC encounter updates start the game hidden, and are supposed to be set to visible at their respective encounters.

Here is how the completed journal I wrote would look after having each entry added:

Full Journal of Updated Entries

Although less important/noticeable than the previous features, I also would have liked to have been able to include some others. One feature I spent a significant amount of time attempting to implement was to have the NPCs follow Gustav around after being added to his party. However, it has proven to be significantly more complicated to get 2D paper characters to follow the player character than with 3D characters.

I also wanted to create a typewriter effect in the textboxes which added each letter one by one. What complicated this was that my text strings were in arrays, meaning that it was complicated to split each array line into further arrays of each letter at a time.

These features, although not crucial, would give the demo a cleaner and more professional look, and would give them a further relation to the gameplay described in the GDD. I very much intend to put time in the future into attempting to fix the code that implements these features.

The Final Submission

If you would like to see the final submission of the demo, as well as the supporting documents including the Game Design Document and Level Design plan, you can view the page on my portfolio here.