We are working on RavenHeart Hospital: A Medical Visual Novel. The game is in development and you can get the demo now!

2020/03/22 Status Update

by Zappy on 2020/03/22

Overview

This week we have some exciting news to share with you about art for the game. We also hunkered down and worked on new gameplay systems and music while communicating remotely to help with social distancing.

Goals

Showcase the game

Key Results:

Apply to MAGFest Indie Videogame Showcase @ AwesomeCon 2020 (Deadline: THIS FRIDAY)
Apply to GameScape (Deadline: March 31st, 2020)
Demo at CCBC Tech and Gaming Expo (Event: April 25th, 2020)

A rising concern with this goal is the COVID-19 outbreak and its consequences for large group gatherings and school closures. We are keeping a close eye on this developing situation and understand if some events end up postponing or canceling as a result.

Playtesting

In tandem with submitting to GameScape, we want to build out our pipeline for producing builds of the game and sharing them out to friends, family, and players that are interested in trying it out. As a part of that, we have a mailing list that you can sign up for to stay up to date with future playtests.

Recent News

Line character portrait of Dr. Holiday by Zac Bolubasz (@_sneb_ on Instagram)

Character Art Commission

Note: Added bigger versions of the side images to the bottom of the page

We are excited to have started work with Zac Bolubasz on creating some line drawings for seven characters. We plan to have all seven of these characters appearing in our first episode of gameplay. You can find more of Zac's work as @_sneb_ on Instagram

To help with communicating and establishing the characters' look, we sent over the draft for our first episode script that JT wrote. We also reviewed character briefs in a video call (using Google Meet). These character briefs included many details about each character, including but not limited to: identity, blood type, goals, fears, strengths, weaknesses, and several paragraphs of background history.

If you are interested in how we went about developing our character briefs, you can read more about it in this previous devlog.

Zac came back with Character Silhouettes for the seven characters. We gave feedback on them using Slack, starting a separate message thread per character silhouette set. By breaking down our feedback in this way, we were able to focus on what we liked about a given character's silhouette set and what we wanted to highlight more or tone down.

For example, our feedback for the character Dr. Holiday was to refine the age of the character, highlight the outfit silhouette we saw in Pose 1C as well as explore the hairstyle in 1C more. Additionally, we liked that Pose 1C and 1E gave the character something to focus on, like a tablet or smartphone, and could help convey the character's focus on critical information for patients and the hospital over directly talking to the player's character.

After reviewing the silhouettes, Zac started to drill in and came back with the line drawing for the Dr. Holiday. Overall, we are thrilled with the results and direction for the character. We think that the portrait honestly portrays the character in our heads and our original character brief well. Additionally, we found that some of the details Zac added gave more background to the character and the environment. There is more that we plan to do to refine Dr. Holiday's portrait, but we plan to push forward with visualizing the full roster of characters over perfecting a single character.

Gameplay

I focused on new operations and tools. Here are some of the new afflictions I added into the game: hemorrhages, broken ribs, small and large ulcers. On the tool front, I added a new suction tool to help deal with hemorrhages as well as a tray to present re-aligned bone fragments to mend the broken ribs. I also added an anti-inflammatory syringe tool to address the small ulcers. I want to note that no medical professionals have vetted the procedures in our game, and our focus right now is on fun, engaging gameplay over medical accuracy.

I also added a toolbar for selecting the various medical tools a player can use.

The dialogue scenes now support choices prompted to players for them to select.

Music

JT worked on the first pass for one character's theme as well as a general Hospital theme. We knew this character would need a unique theme due to their persona. JT plans to explore other sounds and themes that we need for the game.

Future Plans

Deadline

We have a deadline this Friday. We are going to be wrapping up work for the first pass of our episode and getting everything in line to submit. This work includes getting some background images for our settings, polishing the UI, dialogue, and overall structure of the episode.

The End

If you have any questions, comments, feedback for me, you can email at zappy@ravenheartgames.com.

If you like this post, you can see more in the Devlog section or check out last week's post

Once again, if you are interested in playtesting builds of the game or future updates, you can click the button below!

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