Leadwerks Game Engine

Hello and welcome to our weekly dev blogs!

In the second edition we’ll be going what makes Shine tick, what you do in it, what makes it flow and how we got there.

Please take notion that the game is still very much a work in progress, most if not everything you see here is subject to change.

Now, needless to say, since Shine was thought of from the ground up as a point and click game, we had to had specific elements of the genre in the game. Things like inventory, dialogue and the fact that you can click everywhere are all present in the game. Although…it started looking like this at first.

The thing is, we had to plan things very carefully, Shine thrives on it’s atmosphere and weird world, so we had to make sure it felt right.
So we made gifs, lots of ‘em.

This was one of the first gifs we made, to see if our idea actually worked before making the prototype. It kinda did, the feel is almost there, sure it didn’t have the pretty art it does now and it wasn’t a game, yet.

So we went to work. Started making more tests and more scenes and more tests and more scenes and well, you get the idea.

Then it started to look a bit more like this:

Much better

So, after we got the feel of the game down, we needed a way to make dialogue that would benefit everyone, let me remind you again that these things need planning otherwise they just wouldn’t work.

So I made flowgraphs.

That’s just a simple dialogue that was in a early prototype, so no spoilers or anything there <3

With a clear workflow for how to plan dialogue we moved on to what you see inside the game itself at all times.

Take a look at this screenshot...

From that screenshot you can take away 2 things, the UI of the game is always hidden, and that pickaxe is definitely an item.

We don’t want players to spend hours looking for items, the game has a heavy focus on narrative and characters, puzzles and enemy encounters are just extra flair to make the game less repetitive (We’ll talk about those at a later date).

So where is the inventory of the game? Well, it’s right above.

This is by far the best spot to have the inventory without having an actual menu for it, we want the experience to be seamless, this is the best way we found to not break gameplay while still keeping your items “in front of you”.

Lastly, the dialogues, they’re a pretty big deal like I’ve mentioned before, so how do they work?

Well, exactly how you’d expect them to, either you or a character initiate a conversation and depending on what the character says you’ll have a few choices.

Some of the dialogue will change character behaviour, not all, but some. The game does have multiple endings after all.

There you have it, some of the mechanics featured in Shine and how we tackled them. Hope you enjoyed!

Next week, we’re talking about game feel <3

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