Week 4 Development Update

Today marks the end of week 4 of development on Project Tilly. This week was a bit of a quiet one for development, mainly due to a lack to free time to work on it as life took priority. I have managed to get a little bit done as well as begun organising the plan for the demo level & what I need to make for it.

Interactables

The main system worked on this week is the interaction system. Its not a finished system yet as I’m still working on how this system will work with others in the game. I do now have an idea of how I want it to work. But it’ll rely on the a few base scripts being made correctly first which will be next weeks goal. Currently I have the selection side of it done with the hit object stored in a object that I can reference to any script easily, I’ve added a little UI to show the name of the selected item, but next week I hope to have it also display options here as well.

Items

Items are a bit part of the game as they can trigger memories, journal entries & bring the environment to life. The flat level will have plenty to interact with, the idea being you can mess around with it if you wish and move most of the object in the scene around should you wish.

Inventories

Player inventories are a little extra I wanted to add. Now in a game like this, it isn’t essential but I wanted the player to be able to equip for items like the headphones and gain a bonus from doing so. So for instance, the headphones when equipped and in use reduce the stress and or anxiety level of the main character a little which may help the player progress through a section that they cannot traverse otherwise. There will be more on this in a future week where I work on the player stats and mental health mechanics.

Project Planning

The last little bit I’ve done this week is organise what I need to do into tasks on Notion. If you don’t know what Notion is, it is a great note taking software that is very flexible and can be used in a variety of ways. In this case I’m using it to write down my plans for the game and organise the tasks I need to complete on a kotoban board style layout with both status and priority sorting the tasks into a neat order for me to look at. Each tasks is its own page which I can add to with to-do lists to breakdown each task and and references I made need such as articles or media which may help with the task. I’ll be using this throughout development as I create the game.

That’s about it for this weeks update. I know last week I said a build would be around week 4-5, that is looking a little less likely with next week also having a few life events taking up the little free time I get during the week. Due to this I’m aiming to just get the systems for pickup up items and dropping them sorted, if I get that done early in the week I’ll do more on the inventory system along with any other outstanding tasks.