Warning: the following contains spoilers!

Design talk and February 2024 progress report

Greetings Dreamers hopefully your February has been good.  I've gotten a lot done this month and want to show you some new stuff and explain my process a bit. Let's get started, shall we?

The Horror Nightmare

This nightmare has been hard to crack but I finally have a story outline that I'm happy with. There's been some stuff that hasn't made the cut and that's ok.  Not every idea you have will be good and it's good to give yourself permission to throw stuff away or repurpose the good parts. One of the things that got left on the cutting room floor is the idea that this kid's nightmare was about Death and dying. Thinking back to being that age ( 10 -ish ) I feel that I was more afraid of horror movies and the supernatural than death itself. 

Horror movies and horror media are often scarier when you are a kid and you don't quite get that  Freddy, of the Kruger or Fazzbear variety, can't actually get you. So that's the new theme of this nightmare horror movie and the supernatural!

I scraped 3 different story outlines, two of them became smaller parts of the new story that I'm using but others just sucked.
That meant leaving some ideas behind like one about having a crackpot news channel stirring up panic about a Zombie uprising.

This concept art would have been for a news van owned by an evil news reporter manipulating a narrative in search of ratings. This didn't have the feel I wanted for this nightmare so this will be the first and last time you see this van.

But some ideas could be retooled into the new storyline like the How Will You Die game show.

The finished pixel art didn't stray too far from the concept sketch. 

Because the new theme is horror movies we needed a new location the drive-in theater. They always feel a little outdated and from another time but that's probably because you don't see them very often anymore. I can only remember going to a drive-in once when I was very young and it was a novelty by then but I do remember that there was a cemetery right next to this particular drive-in.  It had to have been a great place to watch a horror movie, being it was right next to a cultural touchstone of scary stories and in the dark of night no less.  

So that's the setup for the horror nightmare, a drive-in next to an old cemetery and a kid who is too afraid of both to escape.

I know I've shown this building in the past as a gas station, but now it's pulling double duty as a drive-in and a filming location for the two films being shown. I'm a big fan of cheezy roadside attractions like the Claude Bell dinosaurs in Cabazon CA so this Dino drive-in is inspired by similar roadway distractions.

I got a very convincing move projection effect working for each of the two screens. If you are new to Game Maker Studio you might not be aware of the masking effect I'm using for the shadow. You can find it here.

Each movie is going to have 3 major locations.

Entering the screen will take the player to one of the three different locations depending on the scene on the screen. Leaving a location will teleport the player back to the drive-in.  This mechanic functions as a shortcut system so the world will not have to be as interconnected with extra Metroidvania-like joining rooms.

Another major thing that got done this week was the gameplay mechanic for the horror nightmare. Each nightmare has a one-off gameplay mechanic that only gets used in that part of the game to help keep things fresh.

In the office hell, we have the copy machine puzzles that require you to "multitask " to press two buttons at the same time.

One-off puzzles limited to a single nightmare are great for building variety and keeping the gameplay fresh, for the horror nightmare I wanted to do something that required the player to clear a blocked path.

I decided to go with a sort of weird puzzle mechanic where you dug up the soil in a graveyard inspired by Dig Dug and Super Mario Bros 2 (USA) but it didn't feel right. The wormy solution  I ended up coming up with was to change your mode of movement by way of a classic Snake game.

This was hard to capture as a GIF. Maybe I'll start doing videos LOL.

Other Stuff

I've also been fixing bugs, writing dialogue, and other small tweaks to the game as needed. One of the more notable set of changes was to make the Tutarial Talk radio more visible and to give it a bit more personality. It also stops animating when you've listened to it already so you can tell if you've gotten one already at a glance.

No, yeah, It's supposed to be sideways.

Well, that's all for now. See you all next month with another update!