Minigame & Game Loop Updates
Hey y’all!
(FYI I’m going to be posting updates here monthly, with more regular/weekly-ish posts on the itch devlog—scroll to the bottom for posts)
As I'm setting up for the IndieDevNight at BrookLAN, I was able to scrape together the first playable version of the StressedOut scene for when the player fills up all of their stress meter. Players are only given one stress meter to onramp them into the game loop so getting this scene finished for tonight felt like a very important milestone.
I redesigned the stress mechanic to make the game more responsive to how the player is performing their tasks. The feedback I got in a previous playtest round was that there was no explicit feedback to the player that they were doing something "wrong." Now, when the player fills up their stress meter, the minigame stops immediately. In the current build, the player is sent to the StressedOut scene right away (again since they only have one stress meter to start).
Stress within the game now feels a bit more consequential, which in turn applies a bit more pressure on the player to get through tasks and to “do your best.”
I’ve also officially scraped the dishwashing minigame. Even after doing some prototyping for a big redesign, I felt like the spirit of that game was more based on downtime than stress. So hopefully I can reuse some of the assets from that minigame, but if not, I feel more at peace with setting it aside for now.
That being said, I now have incorporated the Nose Plunging minigame and am almost finished with the Highchair Cleanup minigame after working with my Technical Artist Fabian on getting the core shader/masking mechanic working (I can’t wait to share the work he did on this!).
I can’t wait to share this new build with folks tonight and start another round of playtesting once I’ve ironed out some issues with the game cycling from one day to the next (and I have a really fun idea that I also want to work on for making each day just a little different).
More soon and thanks for reading!