Jesse Lozano

hello again. man this month went by quick! makes sense, it is the shortest. but, really, size doesn’t matter, its quality, and February has been a very… interesting month for Stillness.

How has the Month been for Stillness –

February has been surprisingly productive for Stillness, despite school’s ever growing workload. The workflow issues still persisted this month, so the Conversation, Thoughts, and Progress systems have all stayed untouched since first made, and thus not really integrated into the game up till now. after having finished the tasks I set form myself last month, I began tackling those major issues.

The GDD for the project has continued to be filled out, mostly on the narrative beats, but also filling out more mechanical data as the phone system and other mechanical details that hadn’t been updated in months.

What I said I would do (and did it get done) –

• finish laying Out Phone UI white boxes (complete)
• fix UI states to close certain UI states when 0thers open. (complete)
• Integrate Editor progress with my build (complete for what was there)
• look into set up & data for other phone screens (complete)

What got done-

so, last we left off, we had a phone that looked like this:

And now, it looks like this!

On top of adding some icons for better readability on the phone, the UI whiteboxs for all the buttons (save for the options app) are done. Additionally, half of them have their basic functionality up and running. Those being the notebook, photo, task list, and home screens. The home screen was finished last month, but the other 3 were done this month, using the same basic framework.

The 3 apps are for, in order, the notes the players collected, the CG’s they’ve unlocked, and a list of tasks they are currently having to do in the game. All of these apps were pretty straight forward, resulting from a list of items loaded from a json, with a lock/unlocked status, and then whatever made each app unique.

Now what these apps still need, beyond visual polish of course, is to integrate their unlocks with the make progress class, allow easy expand-ability on the designer end, and some form of quick access for when a new item is unlocked.

the color’s are temporary, and I only really picked colors to give it more life. might do some A/B testing with the Phone having color or not. Also, there is the little tab at the top of the phone, providing details, like the day of the week, the phone’s battery power, and how many day’s into the project its been. currently all really aesthetic, given that the game doesn’t really have a full day in yet, but its there and it functions.

Now, moving onto workflow, expanding the Unity editor has gone underway as well. As mentioned last month, my friend and Tools programmer, Daniel Ospina, has agree to assist in expanding the editor to fit Stillness‘s needs. Unfortunately, Dan’s ability to work on it is much more limited than my own, due to life conditions on his end. Because of that, and the fact that workflow issues were becoming the biggest hurdle in-front of the game at this moment, I decided to take another crack at expanding the editor myself!

So in terms of editor, two new things were added. The Call Object script (which is a router for the custom Event system I made, allowing redirecting events and useful when several events and scripts were chained together) was modified by Dan to allow for multiple setups of call object within 1 script, removing the need for me to have multiple Call Objects on a single game object. The other was the Thoughts editor, made by yours truly.

The Thought Editor, was made to (finally) improve the workflow of, and finish integrating, the Thought System into the game. The Thought System, one of Stillness‘s most unique gameplay mechanics, is a system to where the main character’s thoughts can be collected and used to solve puzzles, allow greater player agency in conversations, and effect the main character’s mood. I had designed and developed the basic framework for the system to run and function months ago, but lacked any easy way of adding new Thoughts into the system. This lead the system to be, while functional, turned off in all prior playtests, and early puzzles modified to be solvable without this system.

Now that an editor is up and running for this system, the thoughts can be fully integrated, and move forward getting playtest data on them.

additionally, a few other systems got refactored this month. the system for showing and displaying the CG’s was refactored to allow them to take up the full screen (an ability missing due to other images not needing that functionality), and the UI for the Inventory system was reworked. This is how it looked before:

And here it is now:

the placement of things were reworked so the name and use button of the Inventory were on the bottom, that way when the player presses use, this happens:

In some bug testing I was doing, I found potentially intractable items were being blocked by the full Inventory HUD, and the player could not easily re-position themselves to easily use it. So, I redesigned to UI to remove that issue entirely. We’ll see what more comes up in testing.

on the UI though, the 3 main sub menus of the Phone, Inventory, and Thoughts were all fixed to prevent 2 or more being open at the same time. Rather simple fix.

Time Spent –

unfortunately, I forgot to clock my time until about halfway through the month, so I can only really spit-ball the first half, in terms of work.

• laying out and setting up all the Phone UI (whiteboxes and code) ~8hours
• reworking the Inventory UI ~30 minutes
• making sure submenus were all open-able at once ~ 30 minutes
• Making Thought Editor (this one I did clock) – 6 hours

What to do next-

Ooooh there is plenty on the docket now. now that I know I can whip something up for Unity Editor extension, there are plenty of minor sub-systems using Json for data storage that I could easily integrate now, those being:

• Dreams
• Notes App
• Images App
• Task List App
• Items that are pulled from Json (combined stuff mainly)

the conversation and progress systems I’ll still leave up to Dan, given that both of those need a far more detailed Node editor. But beyond the editor and workflow needs, there are a few other stuff I wanna hit:

• Redo the Choice UI layout (on further viewing I don’t like how it looks, and it feels off)
• Re-integrate Thoughts into intro puzzles where needed
• begin remaking and working thru an art asset list (have an old one from last year, with like 1 thing left on it I haven’t done)

Closing Notes-

for next month, I’m shooting to be in a position so that April and/or May I can begin doing some serious playtesting, beyond my own internal bug testing. That means the month of March is getting the build ready, and doing some obvious edge case checking on my end, and getting the all the currently entered puzzles to be up and running again. Basically,  I plan for March to be the buffer month for me to get my shit together on a work/testing cycle, of which I’ve kinda been lacking up till now.

also, of note, the first week of March, I’m off to GDC, so really, I have more like 3 weeks to get this allotted stuff done. Wish me luck! :3