Wow! It's been 3 years since the last update! To me, that's kind of crazy...

I would say "Hello nonexistent readers," but apparently our past devlogs have over 100 views each...? Um, I don't know if that's real or not... But if you're reading this, thank you!

So, after yet another failed game jam (that went so poorly we didn't even upload the game to itch), we decided to finish a previous game! What a relief this was to me, someone with many in-progress game projects already...

Three days ago, on Sunday, we decided to try to complete Return to Reality, our most-finished game. The goal is to finish in a week, like a proper game jam. I think we can really do it this time!

Unfortunately, a lot of the team seems to not be communicating as well as they used to. I guess they're busy doing summer things or preparing for college. In any case, I made sure to assign the most important tasks to people I trust to complete them! There are at least three people working on finishing RtR, but a lot more who said they were interested.

That reminds me--on the side, I'm also working on finishing up another game we started making over the spring. Only three people from our team actively worked on that one, but it was a small enough scale that it'll probably be done soon!

Anyway, here's what we've been doing so far for Return to Reality!

Day 1

On the first day, we just met up to decide what we were going to do. At that point, we hadn't figured out whether we were making a new game or finishing an old one. Luckily, one of our members wanted to finish an old one, so hopefully soon we'll have less unfinished work on our plate.

I then started doing some organizational work, like assigning tasks and explaining what Return to Reality is to our new members. I also had to figure out exactly what still needed to be done. Luckily, during the original game jam, we'd used a spreadsheet to organize all our progress, so this was relatively easy. 

And that's about it!

Day 2

The most important thing to occur on this day was the writing meeting. We had two main things to figure out:

1. How the ending cutscenes were going to work. This impacts programming as well as art. It was unclear how much would be drawn in vs. programmed in, or where the cutscenes would even occur.

2. Whether or not to include MC monologue throughout the game. The ending cutscenes involve the MC talking to themselves, but it seemed odd to suddenly start using monologue at the end of the game. While Return to Reality doesn't exactly have a story, adding monologue could also help develop and clarify the dream/nightmare/fears themes. So, we decided to add a bit of monologue to the start of every level. It wasn't very complex; we just took a few minutes to come up with a line or two for each level.

After the writing meeting, I communicated the decisions to the programming and art teams. Then I assigned more tasks, merged an old Level 5 pull request into our develop branch, and began working on porting the game to Godot 4. I think the previous version was made using Godot 3. A lot of scripts didn't run due to changes in GDScript, but it honestly wasn't super hard to fix. I didn't finish porting the game, but I did get every scene to run!

Unfortunately, while doing so, I discovered that the game's code is... well, abysmal.

Surely I knew that enums are numbers and I could just add/subtract them and use clamp, or something...

By the way, this code is copied in two separate places. Modularity? What's that?

There are also individual scripts in every level that all handle player death, but in slightly different ways. So, in some levels, the screen will fade to black if you die, and, in others, it won't. Pretty cool.

And of course, there were three separate scripts for the nightmare fuel, two of which did the same thing. One of them just changed the tiles into scenes with one of the other scripts. I got rid of that, and if there's time, maybe I'll refactor all the other code, too...

Day 3

This was yesterday! One of our artists started storyboarding an ending cutscene, and also made an album cover for the game's OST!

Meanwhile, I continued porting the game to Godot 4. My biggest tasks were fixing tilesets and getting the menus to actually respond to user input. The tiles had lost their collisions and, in some levels, disappeared entirely. Fixing the tiles was a bit of a hassle, because it seems they had been implemented as 40 separate tilesets with one single tile enabled in each.

I'm not sure if this is because we were very silly or because Godot 3 implemented tiles differently. Anyway, I changed it to only use one tileset with all tiles activated. I also set up autotile, which I remember we couldn't do before!

Now I really just need to fix that bug with the fade to black!

Thanks for reading! Hopefully we'll be able to finally finish this game soon!

~Cierra O. (Producer)