The three main focuses of my first set of goals for BYTE’s development are making a rough battle prototype, implementing Yarn Spinner/Ink into the Unity project, and creating a narrative breakdown of all story elements that will appear, including the first stages of scripting the initial scenes.

NARRATIVE:

While I haven’t begun the implementation of Yarn/Ink, I have decided that I will go with Ink. While I haven’t worked with it before, I did not particularly enjoy working with Yarn Spinner in Unity, and Ink looks like it has slightly better Unity integration.

I did, however, get the rough narrative outline more or less set. This demo will feature the story from when Jonathan arrives at Dracula’s castle up until he first encounters Dracula’s vampire brides, which happens about a week into the story. I haven’t begun scripting scenes yet because I am still deciding on a few final details (namely, if I want the story still set in Eastern Europe or not), but the scripting will begin after I deliberate on the last few details for a bit.

BATTLE PROTOTYPE

The bulk of the work this week was done setting up the core of the battle prototype. So far, I have been able to create a grid in the battle scene, where each tile can be either active or inactive, and then I inserted a character that the player can use to move around. The player’s range is determined by a Speed stat on the player’s object.

The mechanics aren’t very in-depth yet, but I wanted to design this system with the intention of being able to quickly add more content to it without too much restructuring/coding. Right now, there are likely a few features that I will either get rid of or not use (i.e. the ability to completely spawn a battle grid at runtime), but I would rather over-plan in these stages than under-plan. Right now adding enemies and additional skills to the player character shouldn’t be too difficult.

NEXT STEPS:

For the next week, I would like to continue to work on the battle prototype, adding an enemy into the scene, and then begin writing the opening scene. Ink implementation will happen later, once the battle prototype is in its later stages.