Now then, the prologue of the game itself is finished. In essence, it was my own way of experimenting with Ink’s interface and trying to figure out how to properly design dialogue and a text-based adventure for this unit.
After some deliberation, I chose to split the UI into two different canvases, one for the text and the other for the buttons. A moveable game object would appear at the end of the prologue, the alchemist’s guide, which details the various diseases the players will encounter and describes them accordingly. I had in mind to inspire myself off of Minecraft’s book, which rendered an additional UI hud that prevented interaction anywhere else in the game.
Whilst that would have been easier to produce, I felt like trying something else, as it would end up stopping the game’s flow and would be less interactive. Remembering “Papers, Please” I examined how the game treated the various kinds of documentation it handed out to the player during the game. Basically, those documents are simply drag and droppable objects that have present features. I chose to emulate that, and have it be an in-game item that allows the player to open and close the book, as well as peruse the various diseases.
Finally, having finished the prologue, I drafted a basic plan of what the first chapter of the game would be. The idea was to have a blacksmith be afflicted by small pox. Using your knowledge of the disease thanks the book, and by speaking with various characters – as well as the disease itself – to determine which kind of illness is afflicting the patient. The drawing below illustrates how players would cycle through dialogue and slowly gather knowledge of the situation before diagnosing their patient.
With regards to progress, things are not advancing as quickly as I’d like. I will likely have to omit a few game features from the final product, but the purpose of the unit, I feel, will be met appropriately. I feel like I’ve only brushed the surface of what Ink can provide, though perhaps I should have started off sooner.