Game Jam Day 9

Tag: [day-9]

Today we added a win condition (you have to feed the cat) and worked on other polishing and enhancements.

The game now has a title—The Clock Tower—which replaces the development codename Sonic Dungeon.

Win condition

When a player has fed the cat, the game ends. All background sounds fade out and the final song fades in.

The cat is an item that can be carried around like other items. The idea is that you can bring the food to the cat, or you can bring the cat to the food.

Polishing

• Fixed some shortcuts in the puzzle solutions by adding constraints on being in the right room and with the right items.
• Edited room descriptions to match the connections with adjacent rooms.
• Edited text for clarity.
• Added a brief tutorial when starting the program.
• Added a HELP command with general gameplay tips.
• Provided more synonyms and alternative ways of entering commands.

Clock tower bell ringing

We implemented periodic clock tower chimes as background sounds in each of the rooms. This is procedurally generated in a similar way to the radio stations. Each time the bell tolls, it randomly selects from one of four audio files, each of which are a different permutation of four chimes. The tolls are separated by a few minutes of silence. The farther you go from the clock tower, the softer the chimes are.

Windows binaries

Until now we have been running the game with love . in our source code checkouts.

We added makefile rules to generate the single-file package clocktower.love, as well as a fused Windows executable. This required changing how we load modules to load code modules potentially from inside the .love zip file, rather than always from the filesystem. The purpose of the love.filesystem module had not been clear to us, but now we see what it's for.

Play testing

We made a special version of the game to send to play testers that has built-in logging of game transcripts. The idea is that we can examine the transcripts to see what players try to do, to see when their intentions don't match what the game expects of them, and identify commands that should work but don't.

Fossil

For sharing the Windows binaries with each other, we tried out the Fossil "unversioned content" feature. Because it is not possible to undo a mistake with unversioned content, not even the highest privilege level is able to work with unversioned files by default. You have to grant yourself the "y" permission.