2020/04/19 Status Update

In the above photo, there are three different character concept pieces, all done by Zac Bolubasz (@_sneb_ on Instagram). This is the first step towards a full blown character creator that we want to present in the game. We want to provide more options to customize and build up your doctor going forward, such as selecting your doctor's face, hair, skin tone, and more.

From the title screen, you can immediately jump to the credits screen, and vice versa.

Another piece of feedback we received was that players found the protagonist to be their least favorite character and wanted to select a protagonist character that they could identify with. To address this, we wanted to start taking a crack as making a character creator.

In addition, it was weird having the name PROTAG floating around, so to help give players more ownership of their doctor, we added an input for their name. We have already received some feedback about this name not consistently appearing throughout the game as well as a preference to see the doctor reference to as, well, a doctor.

Scene Transitions

In the previous playtest build, we had much choppier scene transitions. This was because the scenes were instantly loading and switch as far as possible. This was rather jarring. As you will see below, we added a faded in and out transition between all scenes. This forced me to improve and deal with a few bugs that existed in the scene-to-scene management, but it was worth it to get this transition to feel better.

As you may have noticed, there is a consistent stripe pattern that is used in various places in the game's UI. This is the result of a few new materials I made with a new shader, that we think add a dynamism to the UI.

Dialogue History

From the last playtest, we received feedback that sometime players would skip dialogue and miss what was previously said. This could happen during pure dialogue scenes or during operations, which is particularly bad if our doctors don't know what operations they should be performing and start trying out various tools on the patients until one works (in game, not real life).

Below is a screenshot of the Dialogue History window in action. To open it, players can click on the History button in the top-left corner. This window contains a history of all dialogue said within the scene, colorized by the speaker who said the dialogue.

Working on this window really forced me to learn more in's and out's of the UI system for Unity, our game engine. This was a tricky window because all of our dialogue could taken up a single line of text or multiple lines. Some narrator lines could take up four lines of text. The solution to resolving this is to have each dialogue entry scale dynamically to the text content within it. And then to have the scroll-able space containing all of the dialogue entries to dynamically scale to them.

The end result is dialogue entries that feel appropriate fitted to their text and fully scroll-able window. What I learned from doing the UI for this helped me greatly to solve and create new, dynamic UI for other parts of the game.

Surgery Polish

A lot went into polishing the surgery mechanics for the game. Mostly tracking down and fixing bugs that existed with individual systems. There is still much more polish that we have to put into this system, but we are happy to share some of the improvements with players now.

Some notes that we received were that some of the surgery tools were wonky and did not feel responsive.

One solution was added random quips to procedures to give some feedback on the operations progress. The list of quips was pretty fun to come up with. But this is not the end of giving feedback in operations; we plan to looking into some kind of scoring systems and with the chapter select, the ability to go back and try to do operations better.

One other thing the GIF above shows is the slower transition from one operation phase into the next. Before, this transition would happen instantaneously in a frame, but now we try to let a phase end, have some breathing room, and then move on to the next thing to let players feel a brief sense of completion.