After spending most of August and the start of September focussed on marketing, naming, and logos, I’ve finally had a productive two weeks on moving the game forward in both gameplay mechanics and design.

A quick summary of everything I’ve done includes:

• Adding a new “Display Item Request” system
• Implementing a new donation processing and steam clean system
• Adding visual postprocessing effects to give the game a bit more atmosphere
• Developing the level build system with new modular wall and floor components

Display Item Requests

To try and make the game a bit more challenging from a “tension” point of view, I’ve build a Display Item Request System.

The idea behind it is to guide players in adding specific combinations of items to displays in the store, rather than just putting whatever they want on it.

Similar to Overcooked, a ticket request pops up in the lower part of the screen, asking for a display to be dressed with a certain combination of items.

As I’m currently focussing on a Clothes store, this results into a Mannequin Display requiring a specific combination of a “Hat”, “Top” and “Bottoms” with a time limit to deliver such a combination.

However, unlike Overcooked, I’m thinking about having the system act as more of a request. Ignore it, and I’m intending for bad things to happen. However, I’m intending for bad things to translate into “different challenge” rather than game over.

Steam Cleaning

Alongside this requestion system, I needed a way to let players prepare an outfit for a mannequin with its component parts. I also wanted to add a step in the chain between donations and displays to demonstrate a potential complexity hurdle for the player, so it’s not just “Bring item A to Area B”; it has to go through a series of steps first.

That’s why I’ve put together a Steam Cleaner system, where players now construct their outfit on a sort of clothes dolly, then has to use the steam cleaner to clean the outfit before it can be taken off and put on a mannequin.

Alongside the cleaner being used with the clothes dolly, I’m also planning on having it usable with other areas of the store. For example, anything that needs spot cleaning (like a fitting room), requires the steam cleaner, but as you can only have one item in your hand a time, you have to make a decision to drop any item you’re currently holding.

Postprocessing Effects

What I’ve had in my head for some time is, rather than you just playing as the chosen volunteer for the current run, you’re also being watched through an old CRT CCTV display.

That’s why I’ve spent a little bit of time putting in some Postprocessing in Unity to try and emulate it and add a bit more atmosphere to the game.

To achieve the desired image, I’ve added scan lines as a screen overlay, with a series of postprocessing effects including Film Grain, Lens Distortion, Bloom, and Vignette.

I’ve also applied a Depth of Field effect so that the clear area is focussed around the characters immediate area. While not yet implemented, the idea is as you’re walking you start to see blurred action in the distance, tempting you to walk over and pull it into focus, bringing you away from your current task.

Level Building

Since I started rebuilding the game in Unity, I’ve focussed on building large level components in Blender and exporting them into Unity as FBX files.

While this looks great for static level generation, one of my goals for October is to start thinking about how I might tackle procedurally generating the shop floor, so as the player advances in skill, the levels get more complex.

A big part of that is to ensure that individual shop levels can be modularly built, so to that end, I’ve redesigned the level around “blocks”.

Ironically, this is the approach I was using all the way back in January when I first started my early technical prototypes.

It was also the approach I was using when trying out Godot, where I was using their grid map system to quickly build out 3D levels.

I’ve only spent an afternoon putting together a small asset library of “Walls” and “Floors”, but they’ve been highly effective in letting me build out what was an empty level only a few weeks ago.

When combined with the preprocessing effects from before, even with the simple textures and blocks, the games starting to give off the intended look and feel I’ve always had for it.

Bringing it all together

To give a better idea of what’s been accomplished this September, I’ve put together a very small video detailing the progress change in the game from the start to end of September.

What’s Next?

Now that I’m back to working on the game, I have a BIG todo list for October.

Top of my list is to replace my Behaviour Tree implementation. Up until now I was giving Unity’s Behaviour Graph system a tryout, however I’ve recently found out that Unity let the team go who were responsible for it. If it were feature complete and stable, I’d consider sticking with it… but it’s not. Even renaming a class is brittle and requires manual intervention in the graph definitions yaml file. So, instead I’m going to do a technical evaluation of what’s on the market and move over to something that’s a better fit for what I’m trying to achieve.

Speaking of trees, another high priority item I’m going to look at is building out a threat system. Right now, there is little consequence of the player failing an action. I’m intending to change that, so when a player fails to keep up, it causes a “haunting event”. The simplest of implementations for this is my original plan for the lights to go off and have mannequins attack shoppers.

Once implemented, I’m then planning to spend a bit of time balancing everything so that, while still basic, everything hopefully starts to feel like a cohesive experience. This is trickier than it sounds, because one important pitfall is everything starts to become a runaway engine with a player unable to rebalance the game. However, my vision has always been to have “Chaos” play a part in the game.

For Community fans, think of The Darkest Timeline. You nip to the backroom, sorting out the next series of donations for your mannequins, only to come back to half your customers dead and several mannequins running riot in the windows.

From an art perspective, I’m planning on spending a bit of time creating new character concepts. Up until now I’ve been working from a proof of concept cartoon character I designed several months ago. However, my intention for some time has been to take inspiration from old Beano and Dandy cartoons for character creation, especially from the work of Tom Paterson.

I grew up reading the Beano and Dandy’s from the 80’s and 90’s and my favourite strips were always Calamity James, just because of the weird and wonderful details in them. I’m not sure how successful we’ll be at adding that to the game, but it’s definitely a direction I’m keen to try.

Alongside new character art, I’m planning to start creating a narrative outline for the game. Up until now I’ve had a general idea of what I want to do, but it’s remained as a high concept rather than a story. I don’t want to spoil anything by sharing any of my ideas, but it’s something I need to sort out before I can write an effective steam description for the game.

Finally, I’m going to be spending a bit of time focussed on investigating procedural level design. I’m not planning on any form of implementation in October, but it’s an area gap I need to fill, so I’ll be learning and researching on how I could accomplish it within an achievable scope for the company.

With that great big list of things I need to get done, might make sense to wrap this post up and get to work!

So, until next time,

Tom