Development Overview – Beginnings
Exploration
One of the most important developments early on in the project was the idea to use fog-of-war to obscure the environment as the player explored. Through playtesting, I discovered that this mechanic helped the player feel that they were uncovering the unknown, which greatly improved the feeling of exploration. Though it was a challenge to get the math and programming to work correctly for tiles of differing visibility, prototypes were promising, and the final system was worth the effort.
Another important beginning stage of the development process was ensuring that the map itself was interesting to explore. The map went through one major redesign, with additional tuning required to clarify the terrain and improve the feeling of exploration. I added higher-fidelity sprite art, additional points of interest, and adjusted the frequency of the small lines of text that display as you explore.
Dialog
To finish the Spring 2023 semester, I spent some time proving the dialog system by writing some dialog for a major NPC the player will encounter in the game. I use a text editor called Ink that allows me to write branching dialog responses. While it proved challenging at times to integrate Ink with Unity and display text without major errors, after a few weeks of work, I was able to create the result I was looking for.
Rieson Blumer 
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