Conviction Chronicles blog post #7 - Prologue/intro and other events

 I ended up focusing more on the intro aspect of the game, but I did add some other aspects to the general day part of the game, to spice things up.

Store Specials:

When enabled, there is a chance for the main shop to get a random event, sometimes this changes things up where a Life Saver can be used as currency. Other times only specific items can be gotten from the item pool based on some category, and sometimes discounts or paying more for the chance for more items.

Since they start after the player has spent some energy, and they have an increased chance to happen the more the player takes actions and days when they didn't happen the day before. It forces the player to actively know the world is being dynamic around them even when they are extremely laser focused on themselves instead of the actions of everybody else and the world around them. I had a weird mental problem with making the day to day events feel fresh due to how repetitive it can become. Having the AI being dynamic with the player needing to spend their time carefully to watch the AI and to interact with them is good, but it needed something more with the world also being dynamic, and this works well due to it also impacting the AI's actions.

Auction

This can be enabled/disabled, but a random day a contraband auction happens and laptops in the dorm rooms are used to access it. The AI and the player has to choose to play it or not and the contraband is shown and bet upon anonymously. It shows how may people entered during and afterwards and the auction keeps going until everyone else folded. Then whoever wins gets the item. A big part of this shows how I need to get better sprites for icons, since they have to be scaled up. But it's something to add some spice to the gameplay and more to think about, since it's much harder to happen on faster games and since it's random, you have to keep it in mind when managing money.

Game settings

This is basically a menu to set how many days a game will last and to enable/disable certain features to spice the gameplay up.

Character Select screen

The character select screen showcases some animated portraits of the cast, and selecting one will show off the special ability with another check if the player wants to choose them. The code for this is interesting, I might backport it to Throne Requiem to improve the class select screen so it's a little better.

Prologue

This is much more gritty than the main game will be and it's short, playing through it myself took 30 minutes to an hour and it's main focus is to give an introduction to some of the cast, mainly Tina and Jack and with giving them more development where their true colors can be shown.

Tina is the protag here and she is kidnapped by some organization for a game. It starts off with her analyzing her room and discovering someone calling them her sponsor in her mirror. The setup is fast and it goes over 5 days in game, and I've tried to make each day have some sort of major development for good pacing. This is meant to be a tutorial, so many aspects of the game are taken from context in the prologue. The crafting system is inferred for a murder weapon for example, along with a trial to showcase some of it's mechanics in a crude way. Ideas like airvents being used for traveling and not knowing who killed who is also very important.

I made it extremely up in the air who killed Liv, compared to it being directly due to Lucius. This is to showcase more aspects of the game and to destroy any trust that may be building between the characters. The order of the characters deaths also changed, mainly so there is much more up in the air when the player is doing certain actions which gives more depth to why things happen. I tried to write it so anybody outside of Tina could have easily killed Liv along with having the motivation.

I'll go over some new characters introduced, most of them are side characters that have little relevance outside certain main characters.

Sam/Emma

Sam is someone in the prologue, where her fate is very unknown due to how she "dies." But Emma is a much older version of her and this was done with rewriting Emma to be a better character with more dynamics. Since Sam was friends with Alexis when they were in school.

Liv

Liv is meant to be more emotional to showcase the events in the prologue feeling real, and she isn't on screen for that long. She is in Lily's intro where Lily actively implies she knew of the game in the prologue and forced Liv to play in it. But this was to showcase how unforgivable of a monster Lily actually is to the player.

Lucius

He more represents the selfishness of humanity, originally the murder of Liv was going to be directly from him instead of up to interpretation. But I decided against that, since it would have been narratively the same thing as implied rape, and some of the dialogue wrote for the trial of her murder was more sexual where it had the chance of being offputting for people playing, so I decided against it.. Instead what is said is more up in the air of what happened with Lucius forcing Liv to his will for the vote.

He still has that same feeling of showcasing how much he fucked things up, as he single handily makes it where it's impossible for everyone to be saved. But it's subtle instead of direct the overall implications.

Character intros

Once selecting a character, a small cutscene for them happens to give a small background in a short amount of time before the main intro. They are meant to give some info to set them up along with their struggles.

Sub intros

Depending on the character chosen, they are put into one of three locked rooms with 4 other characters, and it's a tiny showcase to the other 4 characters in the room with what they are trying to do and how they speak in such a situation. No names are exchanged, but it allows a smoother introduction.

Game intro

This has everybody in the cast introduced overall with Bianca introducing them to the audience on screen while describing the rules of the game.

The main idea is one of the characters is a mole, this role used to be the mastermind, and if they live to the final day, everyone else will die and they will live. If they are dead by the time the final day comes, then everybody on the final day will become free.

I did this since it makes it more more realistic for everybody to be distrustful of each other and to have reasons to kill outside personal reasons.

The trial/court room was made for this intro. I have to make some code for the camera movements so it's more like danganronpa's trials, but it showcases everyone well enough. The textures for the podiums needs more work. I went with a more cathedral look like Danganronpa V3, it also aligns very well with the idea of everybody being prisoners trying to showcase their innocence. 

Anything else?

I'm going to have to start making the character AI soon which is going to take a long time due to all of the smaller things they should be allowed to do. I might take a day off from working on this game to improve Throne Requiem's class choice selection so I can use that for games like that in the future. But once the AI is introduced, then I can easily make a good steam page and link a good demo. 

But I would have to pay more than I've ever done so for for steam capsule art and a temp trailer to make sure it gets good traction, since in general this is a longer game that requires lots of effort to do.

The AI in itself won't be hard to make as long as I keep everything into consideration and to make things modular for the random personality selection, which shouldn't be too annoying. But it will take some time.