Minigame & Game Loop Updates

I was able to scrape together the first playable version of the StressedOut scene for when the player fills up all of their stress meters in prep for last night's IndieDevNight at BrookLAN. Players are only given one stress meter to onramp them into the game loop so getting this scene finished for sharing the demo felt like a very important milestone.

I redesigned the stress mechanic to make the game more responsive to how the player is performing their tasks. Several playtests shared that there was no explicit feedback to the player that they were doing something "wrong." Or rather the player could get stressed out, but that it didn't really impact the gameplay very much. Now, when the player fills up their stress meter, the minigame stops immediately interrupting whatever task the player is performing. In the current build, the player is sent to the StressedOut scene right away--again since they only have one stress meter to start--and they're asked to perform a breathing exercise to recenter. Completing this task then gives the player more stress meters to fill, and in future builds will allow the player to go back into the minigames.

Stress within the game now feels more consequential, which in turn applies more pressure on the player to get through tasks and to “do your best.” It also introduces the core mechanic or "managing stress" between performing tasks, getting stressed out, and reaching downtime scenes where you can recover stress meters. This needs a bit of configuration on the back end so that the architecture of the game loop tracks 1) How much stress the player has 2) If the player can continue their day and 3) Give the player opportunities to recover stress during downtime.

In a somewhat unrelated development,  I’ve also officially scraped the dishwashing minigame. Even after doing some prototyping for a big redesign, I felt like the spirit of that game was more based on downtime than stress. So hopefully I can reuse some of the assets from that minigame, but if not, I feel more at peace with setting it aside for now.

That being said, I now have incorporated the Nose Plunging minigame and am almost finished with the Highchair Cleanup minigame after working with my Technical Artist Fabian on getting the core shader/masking mechanic working (I can’t wait to share the work he did on this!).

I can’t wait to share this new build with folks tonight and start another round of playtesting once I’ve ironed out some issues with the game cycling from one day to the next (and I have a really fun idea that I also want to work on for making each day just a little different).

More soon and thanks for reading!