So, I've posted a couple of times here about dipping my toes back into some simple pixel art, and starting to draw some weird planetary landscapes, etc. But this weekend, I also put the work into actually creating most of the functionality for my next small adventure (ok, it's sort of a visual novel with a lot of stats and such)! I'm using Yarn Spinner and Unity again, because of course I am, and it's starting to come along as a prototype!
I really can't hype Yarn Spinner enough. The tool is very easy to get up and running, and it's allowed me to start really playing with a lot of fun logic and dice roll mechanics (which are all weighted based on stats.)
In the game, you are a... space paramedic (write what you know? Or write what you know plus what you think about all day? Something like that). A horrific radiation storm befalls you, and it's up to you to help a couple of survivors try to get to safety, while one is severely injured and all of you have radiation exposure (there's a simple but omnipresent medication stat that ties into this).
In the game, you basically choose one of two builds for your character: they are a field training officer (basically, a teacher, so they are used to working with others in difficult emergency calls), or a loner (who is used to working in this weird environment and knows its quirks). There are two further stats that you build upon, based on your decisions and weighted dice rolls under the hood: team rapport (which tracks easier for the teacher), and working with what you've got (which tracks easier for the loner who is used to improvising).
It'll be a short experience, but frankly longer than... any other tiny game I've made, at 10-ish minutes for a full playthrough.
I'm tinkering with the idea of bringing in some other mechanics here, or sequences with other mechanics, but I'm having so much fun with STAT LOGIC that I may just keep it purely VN in terms of interactions.
One hilarious thing I keep running into is my own weird level as a developer: there are some things that I think should be EXTREMELY HARD AND COMPLEX that I have basically nailed on the first try (writing all the command handlers for my yarn scripts: I thought this would take hours and hours and many tries)... and yet the absolute simplest things evade my understanding sometimes. I'm still having a very hard time fully understanding how to... unpack a prefab and re-build it properly without completely screwing it up, so I can work with one object's font. I may just be getting the default behavior there, friends, and that'll just be fine, lol.
But on that first note, I'm creating a little "dashboard" so players can keep track of all their stats as they play, and those update in the UI as soon as they update in the Yarn script. None of this is final, it's just my little prototype! But the text is updating when it should, and the strings are showing up, the numbers are adding up, and the booleans are working! I wanted to throw a party for myself this afternoon.
But again, I'm really having fun, and learning, and hopefully I'll have something to share in the not-too-distant future.