Prototyping (devlog #1)

I’m trying to get into good habits by writing these - I’m starting my second ever game, Detective Tabby and the Killing of Jane Doe! It’s going to a be a short point and click visual/novel murder mystery, hopefully with multiple endings. It’s much more ambitious and I’m not following a tutorial this time, so we’ll see how it goes.

So far I have a moving character, a dialogue manager, and and interactable NPC and item. We’re in the first week of development so I think this is a pretty solid start. I also have a little loading screen that spits out randomised fun facts between scenes, which was totally unnecessary but I like it a lot. The characters are all currently placeholder PNGs from Pixabay, I’m in the process of designing the characters and finalising the style. I’ve made several backgrounds, but I might change them later on because they’re pretty ms-painty right now lol.

I’m also hoping to make an inventory system where you can show characters evidence, but I have No idea how I’m going to do that as of right now, hopefully it will come along in the future ^^; currently I’m in a spaghetti mess of dialogue system events. Really need to stop being cheap and buy a proper system on the asset store but right now we’re doing it solo. I have a txt file that holds the definition for each event so I don’t forget and that’s helping a ton.

Next on the list is to design the characters, make a start on the script proper, and to work out how I’m actually going to sort which dialogue the characters say in each scene. Currently I think there are going to be global variables that trigger new rounds of dialogue, but who knows who that will work out, haha…

Wish me luck :)