Dev Update #2

Hello to all of you! I’m David, the lead programmer of the project.

In this update, I will focus on what has been going on in the programming department for the past week. And I gotta tell you it was a lot. We got our first playable version ready for testing and had to perform last-minute integrations for some core systems.

One of the major tasks for that version was, how we would guide the tester through the level, without a developer constantly telling them what to do next. For that purpose, we implemented objectives into the game. However, that was not as simple as it sounds, as we use a tool called Articy Draft (see images below) to create everything related to story content. Articy is essentially a tool to create large flowcharts which show how story events, dialogues, or quests will play out under certain circumstances. The challenge now was to get objectives written in this tool into the Game.

For that purpose, we created hooks into the Articy flowchart, which allow us to get the current objective and display it to the player. When solving a part of a puzzle the corresponding objective gets marked as completed and the display dynamically updates to show the next objective. The successful integration of Articy into the game will allow us to make the world feel more dynamic. NPCs that previously only had fixed dialogues can now react differently to the player depending on the objectives they have achieved so far.

This is it from me for this week. I hope this gave you a bit of insight into the programming side of the project without it being too technical and thus boring to read.

Thank you for your time and stay safe! David