Hope your holiday period was joyous and relatively stress free! We also briefly holidayed and have been back in action since early January - we havent disappeared off the face of the Earth, we promise! After doing an internal playtest, weve been prototyping some new game systems that have changed a few things about gameplay for the better. Were hoping to get a play tester demo into your hands ASAP - we havent forgotten! A lot of cool stuff has been happening in the past two months, some of which we cant talk about just yet, but what has been happening on the game that we can talk about? WELL: In programming/design, we all came up with some new gameplay systems as we felt there were some things lacking in our previous build. We now have a cool new feature called an affinity system, which are choices between objects that you choose in the room which spawn more objects based off of that. These affinity choices also affect the path you traverse in the game - so choose wisely.
Heres a concept gif of the affinity choice that Jasmine has mocked up. Also in programming and design, Julian has been improving the placement system to allow for greater precision in placement (using some linear algebra and vector mathematics) and already things are placing way nicer than they used to be! Zac is repurposing our story-mode editor to handle our new systems and allow me to create our story rooms by playing the game!
Julians crazy gizmos for calculating placements (don't worry they are only for dev debugging and won't be in the final game). On the art side Jasmine is concepting up the new affinity item selections (as they will contain both the key choice and minor items that will swap out based on your choice). Our affinities are Academic/Science, Creative/Art, and Sport/Adventure (all with their own little quirks and additions) so we are trying to make items that match these! Shes also started conceptualizing the final versions of all our rooms based on our whiteboxed layouts - so yes, the childhood bedroom youve seen so much of is likely to have some changes!
Version A, B, C of one of our new childhood bedrooms Which brings us to the story side of things! We did a massive rescope of the story tree at the end of January, trimming a lot of things that werent necessary and picking the strongest story paths to move forward with (thankfully, wed written a lot of different ones previously so we really like where we ended up!). These story trees are a little boring to look at (plus, dont want to spoil anything!), so Ill just share some of the vibes of some of the rooms instead.
References weve pulled off google to inform how to further conceptualise our chosen rooms. Thank you so much for your continued patience and support! Game development is an absolute web of several things going on at once. We have a lot of major beats coming up and we hope to keep you up-to-date with everything thats going on! Everything is cranking up a notch this year and were very excited to share a slice of Momento with you soon. Hope you have a great week ahead of you! Jess and the Momento Team