Week 6: Why is Everything Falling Apart

The Problem

So…. I realized a flaw in my research, a little too late.

See, originally I planned to complete my research using four total games, two with different endings and two without. And that was going fine until last week, but then things just got a lot harder this week.

This is something I probably should have noticed earlier, but the games without different endings have a different theme than the ones with different endings. If you’ve been reading my blogs on Ruina and OMORI, you’d have noticed that both of them carry a similar central theme: coming to terms with whatever happened in the past and being able to move on from it. Because of this, it makes sense that they had different endings. You either succumbed to the past or were able to move on, which is why there were good and bad endings. In OMORI, Sunny would either acknowledge his traumatic experience and tell his friends about it, or he’d succumb to OMORI and leave his life behind. In Ruina, Angela and Roland both had to choose to let go of their revenge in order to reach a happy ending, otherwise one of them would end up dead by the hands of the other.

But thematically, the other two games without different endings are sort of different. Both of the games I was going to review for this segment, To The Moon and Spiritfarer, have a common point: they also discuss moving on from the past, but instead of having individuals actively choosing to move on, it centers around resolving the regrets of the dead. In this scenario, having different endings doesn’t even make sense. The dead are not the ones making the choices, since they are unable to interact with the world; instead, it is a proxy of sorts resolving their past for them. In that case, these regrets are something that *must* be resolved, rather than something that only *can* be resolved. I probably should have specified more about the specific themes of the games I wanted to review when preparing for research, but it’s a little too late now. Also, this doesn’t even cover how hard it is to find opinions on the inclusion of different endings in games without multiple of them (believe me, I tried).

I might either find a game with similar themes as the previous two to continue my research on next week, or I’ll just post my research conclusions in my next blog post. We’ll see.

Game Mechanics

Now with that out of the way, I can finally talk about what our game will have. Basically, the game will center around our protagonist Raven as she explores a dream-like world in her own mind and remembers memories that she tried to suppress. As the player explores the world as Raven, more hints and details about her should be uncovered. How we plan on going about that is via a journal entry unlock system. By interacting with things present in the dream world, different journal entries written by Raven in the past will be unlocked. These will range from simply picking up certain objects in the overworld to entering different areas with conditions fulfilled to pseudo-combat encounters with different monsters that originate from Raven’s insecurities. Which journal entries are unlocked will alter the course of the story, as my research so far has shown that people do find storyline changes due to choices more engaging. As such, I’ve started working on implementing some of these mechanics into the game so far.

Progress This Week

Besides the whole… research disaster thing, I mainly spent my time working on coding journal unlocks. First off, I had to create a journal menu itself, which involved some messing with UI. Then, since Isabelle already got a dialogue system working, I modified some code to make it so that once a dialogue option is chosen, it unlocks the journal entry, which then reflects on the journal menu. I also had to rework some of the data storage system for this, as I had previously written a bunch of methods made for modifying a data storage object attached to a game manager, but it was impossible for them to work since it had no connection to the actual data storage. This was a dilemma that I spent a while trying to solve… only to find out that moving the methods to a different class was all it took. The pain.

Also, because the data storage values are updated after choosing the dialogue option in question, now the barrier that the dialogue option unlocks stays removed even after leaving and returning to the scene where it is located. In addition, since Isabelle finished the starting cutscene, it now actually shows up when you click on the “New Game” button on the main menu, rather than teleporting you directly into a game stage.

Up Next Week

I talked about how we now have stored the data of whether or not a dialogue option has been chosen, which means that even after leaving a scene the game still remembers the option you chose in that scene. However, as of right now, it only stores whether or not the correct dialogue option was chosen, and not which dialogue option was chosen, which is something I plan on changing. For that, I’ll have to look into using C# methods in Ink, which is the dialogue system we are using for the project.

I also plan on expanding the journal menu, as it currently only displays two pages of the journal as a base. I want to implement an option to flip pages in the journal and move to display other entries besides only two.