But Then I Made a Devlog

When I first pitched this concept to my instructor, I wanted to explore the themes of loss, grief, tragedy, and hope. He told me to go for it, and that he also wanted to see me work on it as my Master's Project. I wasn't sure if I could it justice, and I still don't know that I have, or will. I know that this project is near and dear to me, but I also have a lot of emotion tied up in what it represents. I cannot fail to deliver a quality experience, because I feel like it would let my community down.

I want players to get to know us, to understand what we went through. I want players to read our stories, and be able to feel the emotions we felt. To that end, I decided I wanted the player to be an outsider, someone who comes in to help, and through helping, becomes part of the community themselves.

This game is so far outside of the realm of games I play, that I didn't even know where to start. I looked into Twine, but I couldn't get it to work with Unity. I looked into other, and eventually landed on Yarn. Yarn is built like Twine, but specifically has YarnSpinner, a plug-in for Unity. Yarn allowed me to create narrative in a legible format and include variables in that narrative to control the flow of the dialogue. It took me some time to get a handle on it, because until this last week, it was in Beta, and there were no tutorials.

Once I got that done, it was a matter of creating a world, putting characters and objects in it, and creating the interactive parts. I ran into some hiccups here and there, but it went fairly well. I picked up quite a few assets here and there, and paid about $100,.00 US for them. There are quite a few features that I did not get in, but that is the life of a game developer!

Look forward to more later.