Developer Diary 5 (Patreon)

Design

What I’ve been focusing on the last week has been one of the center pieces of this little game project. The main character uses a mirror to “gaze” at their target and transform them. Initially this mirror was simply a generic prop, which would perhaps have some fancy decorations to spice it up a bit.

The more thought I put into this mirror the more it seemed like it could also play a sort of character role. Since it plays such a visually important role in the game, it would definitely be interesting to make this be a more central part of how the player interacts with the game environment.

I always knew I wanted to use the mirror in the same style as Hearthstone used the concept of a game board as the structure for its UI and that was an aspect that I wanted to mimic. However adding the extra layer of the Mirror having more of a “persona” rather than just being a physical object makes things a bit more interesting.

As the design of the mirror is naturally oval shaped to fit the game screen space, I began thinking how it could interact with what it was showing on the mirror. Initially I had the idea where the mirror would turn over on a horizontal axis (like an IKEA standing mirror) to reveal new information (going from the game menu to the play area, etc)

After I began thinking more on how the Mirror could behave more like a character, the concept of an ‘eye’ came into my mind. While rotation is still a viable method of changing whatever is appearing on the mirror, the idea of it blinking felt really cool to me. There are many kinds of eyes and irises so the design space has opened itself up a bit (I will post some initial sketches on this soon)

Right now I am thinking about some backstory to flesh out some more details on this mirror. I want it to be a very old artifact that maybe the MC doesn’t fully understand.

Engine Work

Work on the engine has been slow. I have tried some initial things, but I feel like I need to take even smaller steps and try to find some early bearing. I need to focus on what this specific project needs, so that I can work towards solving those problems inside the engine.

The goal for next week is to create a button which, when pressed, cycles through different images. That may not seem like much, but it would be a very good first step for me

Thanks for reading and the support!

Alba