Hello! My name is Matt Colón, and I'll be using this devlog to share what my daughter, Eve, and I are building for CGDC Speedgame: Hardmode 2025. The theme is "Hope in the Darkness," so we decided to take on a game idea brought up by Matt_SdgGames on the PxlPug Community Discord server about a hospice for dogs. It provides a space for discussing hope in the midst of grief and loss, but without it being so close to home if the characters were all human.
I am focusing on building the systems and mechanics that we'll need for the game, while Eve focuses on narrative design and art.
Goals
Each game jam I try to learn something new, so this time I wanted to do two things in particular:
- Learn more about Unity UI (it's still a bit of a mystery to me)
- Learn how to read in Twine's .twee files for use in dialogue trees
The latter is so that Eve can create dialogue trees for each dog on each day, and we can import their data into C# objects to display the conversation node by node using a dialog box in the UI. That way we don't have to hard code anything in Unity and can simply read in all the dialogue via .twee files!
Progress
We put our focus on the systems, mechanics, and narrative first to get the foundation laid. After a little over 24 hours, Eve and I were able to prototype the following:
- Dialogue for seven dogs that will be in the story across a nurse's five day shift (first draft of the narrative done!)
- Reading in Twine's .twee files and turning them into C# objects to use in dialogue trees (goal achieved already!)
- Player movement and interaction with other characters to initiate dialogue
- Displaying the dialogue node by node with the player choosing which direction to take the conversation, then returning control to the player once the dialogue is over
Here's a clip of the prototype in action!