Log entry: day 76
At 14:02 I played the start with the beacon and wrote to the flight engineer: "Better already. But…" Thirteen remarks followed. Before that my daughter had played the same start and said that nobody reads the text.
The camera came first: "I'd try replacing the camera with a GTA style, so when we get close we look over the shoulder, sort of." About the screen full of icons: "Look at the screenshot with a PILE of everything on screen: the curtains icon, the 'nobody's watching' one, and the hint with the letter E for standing up. Just a nightmare!" And about the start: let it be at the rules board, facing the main atrium, with the things lying nearby instead of in a heap.
On Saturday the flight engineer built the over-the-shoulder camera, the arrival at the rules board and a sandbox: toys fanned out across the hall, two and a half meters apart. The chair got the verb "sit": E sits you down and E stands you up, so there is nothing to relearn in the classroom. I picked the pointer from three variants: a solid drop with a golden silhouette of the thing.
Start at the rules board
Against the mess on the screen the flight engineer added a hint director. It decides who speaks right now: a lesson, a voice, a key, the beacon or a line. The senior one stays, the others fade and come back in turn. Learned keys became small, the coins on the panel appear only after the vending machine, and a taxi is taken with an explicit E.
On the J board the first board builds up in steps, and a "close" button appeared in the corner.
Quiet on the screen
Log entry: day 77
On Sunday at 7:23 I played again and sent ten remarks. The first: "The girl standing in the hallway is scary." About the camera: "It's totally impossible to play like this. The eye view was better." About the things: let them be part of the surroundings, not thrown around on purpose. The ball can stay.
At 13:01 came praise: "I really liked the 'sunburst' effect, where to go, with the circle and rays. Just top!"
The camera went back to the eye view: the head is hidden, the hands and the held thing are at the bottom right. The flight engineer had also managed to build "from the eyes with an offset", and I rejected that one. The settings got a "View" slider from 60 to 100, 80 by default.
A clean start: the girl in the hallway, the chair and the basket are gone, and only a ball by the wall is left. If the player does nothing for eight seconds, the beacon calls to the door of 1A.
The eye camera and the clean start
Log entry: day 78
On Monday at 18:04 I wrote: "What if we do without these tutorial bubbles altogether. We're already doing the onboarding decently, pointing at the clues and so on. But it needs to be more detailed still."
The flight engineer removed the words. The primer is now pictures: a mouse with gaze arrows and the keys W, A, S, D. The keys have no captions, every verb has one picture, and the torn scrap of the register is shown as a silhouette of the thing. The hero's thoughts and the students' jokes stay silent until the first prank is found, and after that come no more than once a minute. For a player who stands still and does nothing, the beacon now calls with a sound from the side of the target.
No words
Meanwhile the Steam preparation went on. The icon became the duck deputy head on a yellow plate. If a video card can't handle the game, a gatekeeper meets it with a message in two languages. Shader baking is in the presets, the build goes without the MCP bridge, and a check script for a rented Windows PC is written. The game has not run on a real Windows machine yet.
The old branch from October 18 got merged along the way: chair legs behind the backrest, trouser legs level with the pelvis, the rocker chains separate from the shorts.
Small things on the way to Steam
In the evening at 21:11 I wrote that I needed to read Jesse Schell's game design book and "Kill the Dragon", because "I feel like, well, it's boring, my game and mechanics aren't new". The flight engineer went through the first ten minutes of the demo with Schell's lenses: three holes and five ideas. I took three. A stranger's wet trail in the hall from the restroom to 1A. One quiet glitch on the first counted prank. Stone faces: three seconds after a find, the class silently looks at the scene of the case.
Log entry: day 79
Tuesday, 57 commits, the most of the week.
At 9:54 I wrote: "So, it hit me: I need to focus on the idea of the game, taking the cunning fox as the base: we collect clues, work out the culprit. And push in that direction, no need to pile on parallel realities and the rest. Let's leave that for part two of the game altogether."
The realities are switched off with one switch, `Reality.enabled`. The code is intact, and the demo has one school.
Then I agreed to all seven improvements. The "no" clue now stands third or fourth and is needed to leave one. The deadline bites: take a clue and a day passes, and you may make one mistake. A failure gives a new case, not a dead end. The week is shown as dots by the clock, five of them, Monday to Friday. The trail in the hall and the wet footprints of the flood have one tread pattern.
Of what was proposed, I did not take the composite sketch, the alibi, the melody and the sketch hand. "We're not taking the alibi. And the melody either", and about the hand: "it complicates too much". About the heavy clue: "it's a laugh, we need to chew on this idea."
I also asked for the ticking of a clock while the timer runs. The school got 19 new sounds: a desk, cabinet doors, a locker, a door, a window, a valve, paper, chalk, cloth, a radio and footsteps with variants. The wall clocks now tick once a second.
The case as in Outfoxed!
At 15:16 I wrote: "I don't like the mention of 'nobody'. It really gets to me. But overall this, 'In a school where nobody notices anybody, someone invisible is pulling pranks. Only another invisible person can find them, and to do that they'll have to prank the same way', looks like the very essence of the game." That line became the base. "Nobody" was removed from the rules, the icons and the interlude. The stickers now begin with the word "Forbidden", the rival is called the Prankster, and at the end they say: "I didn't think you'd find me."
The board got circling instead of crossing out: my daughter wanted to mark the ones who fit. The player circles a suspect with a red marker, and the number shows how many are circled. Shift also got a primer step, "run". The "nobody's watching" window opens 7.8 seconds after sitting down, where before it was 13.6. The new prologue was rebuilt with the caption: "Forbidden"? So somebody already has.
The prologue without "Nobody", and running
Log entry: day 80
At 6:49 I played again: "Playing got a lot easier. The onboarding is getting cooler." And two remarks. The teacher saw me at the curtain, then I went to arrange a flood and it failed, and the beacon still called to the tap. The closed curtains did not restart the film.
At 15:49 I wrote: "We need to make the first mission super-mega-simple and easy to pass, to the point where we can work out who it was from just one clue. It's done on purpose, to teach the player how to play." The clue is a lollipop, you look who has it, "hop, that's it, case solved". The second thought: a fight like in Mortal Kombat, the player on the left, a shadowed unknown on the right. Round after round. And the prank is bait: you did it and left, and after you somebody else did the same and left a clue.
The flight engineer drew a mockup, and I chose frame 1 from sheet 1. Then came the logic. The case now goes in three rounds with one, three and four clues. There is no two-clue round: with two clues the draw is unfair. The deadline is this: you hand in on day one, three or four, and the reserve of mistakes is 4, 2 and 1. A clue over a thing is now shown by a sign, "it was after me", instead of the hero's words.
Rounds
At 21:06 I looked at the cover: "Why are you using some old player skin instead of the one I play with?" The flight engineer had taken a drawing from the mockup for the card. Now the hero is shot by the school studio from the real model, "Clipper".
Log entry: day 81
On Thursday at 9:00 I launched the game and wrote nine remarks. The prequel now irritates me and is out of place, and I don't know yet how to redo the script for the new approach. The "Fight" screen disappears too fast, I didn't manage to read it. "Minimal captions are needed after all. For example, it's unclear that running is Shift and forward. We need to draw the Shift key plus the W key, for example equals run." The trails from the door are not needed now. What to do with the register is unclear too, and here an idea came to simplify: just let it be thrown out of the classroom. "When I finished the case, I don't understand what to do next."
Here is what was done in the day:
- The prologue film is switched off, the video and the code are alive and will do for a trailer. A new game opens with the round 1 cover, which holds for 4 to 8 seconds.
- Running is shown with the keys Shift and W and the word "run". The game no longer shows the trail in the hall, the code is still there.
- The register prank: carry it out of its classroom. The drawer is removed from the steps. Take the register and the "sunburst" calls to the classroom door. Carry it out, the case is counted, and the "sunburst" calls to the key J.
- The verdict is now "point at the prankster". "Hand over the card" and the token are removed. When one is circled and the clues are collected, the "sunburst" calls to close the board, then to the circled one in the classroom, where a finger is drawn on E.
The register and the verdict
The "eye" dial was lying: the timer showed that for the third time nobody was paying attention to me, while the teacher had seen me take the register. At 12:32 I wrote: "I don't need the count of how many people are looking at me for now. It's unnecessary, there's no use in it." The flight engineer removed the open eye and the number. The bubble is now drawn only when no adult sees the hero and the window is running or promised. A remark for a taken thing is raised by an adult, not by any student.
Log entry: day 82
Friday. There is nothing new in the main branch since the morning. The game waits for my playthrough: the first round, the register out of the classroom, the verdict, the cover and the dial. What I say after that will be in the next entry.
Where it came from
My thirteen remarks from October 31, ten from November 1 and nine from November 5, with screenshots. My question on November 3 about what is the main thing in the game. The breakdown of the first ten minutes with Schell's lenses and the breakdown of the case as in Outfoxed!. The line about the essence of the game and the round cover I chose from the sheet.
The week in numbers
- 168commits in the main branch
- 57of them on November 3
- 13remarks on the start on Saturday
- 3rounds of the case: one, three and four clues
- 800 of 800fair draws on four clues
- 19new school sounds
- 7.8 secondsthe "nobody's watching" window after sitting down, was 13.6
- 1,161commits in the game since day one