Overtime
Overtime is a project I created for my Advanced Narrative Design class in my 3rd year at Sheridan College. In the game, you play as Evelyn, an overworked and extremely stressed-out young woman who is struggling to make ends meet. One day, she comes home to find a strange kid on her couch... who looks suspiciously like she did when she was a teenager.
Beginning Steps
I started off this project with a lot of story planning, I spent about a month just in Miro, compiling story ideas, finding desired themes, and figuring out what emotions I wanted to represent. The story outline went through a few different iterations before I settled on a final theme and began designing characters to fit the narrative. Originally, I was conflicted between making the main character a man or a woman, but after speaking with others in my program and going to workshopping events for feedback, I decided to go with making the main character a woman.
Once the ideating was complete, I wrote an overall theme for each day, explaining what emotions, conflicts, and events would happen in that in-game evening. Language was not finalized at this point, and I used filler names for characters if required.
Making Visual Prototypes
After that I moved away from writing for a little while. I wanted to give myself some time to ruminate and think about dialogue and how these two characters would speak to one another. So, I moved into editor! I started off with a basic world within Godot and began to set up the plugins for dialogue and character movement. I also made sure the player was stuck in a box (There is no escaping). I added some basic shapes to start the living room/kitchen setup as well.
Once the building blocks were laid down I moved into BlockBench to begin modelling all the interior furniture and decorations. I went through a few ups and downs while trying to figure BlockBench out, which meant this section of the project took longer than I anticipated. Textures were not exporting correctly and meshes were saving only as .obj files instead of keeping the .BBmodel file as well, which meant I had to re-do entire models so I could edit them properly. After a long and arduous process of doing everything twice, I finally had all the models finished and ready to add to the game
Finally, it was time for me to get back to writing dialogue, which took significantly less time than modelling and coding. I had figured out character personalities and practiced writing for those characters before going in and writing the scripts.
I got back into Miro and began to write format the dialogue in a way the Godot Dialogue Manager understands, saving myself an extra step later on.
Once dialogue was done I added it to the .dialogue scripts in Godot and set up a actions list to allow dialogue to play out when the player presses the space bar while close to detection radiuses.
Back To Scripts!
The Next Steps
As the semester comes to an end, so too does my current work on this project. Eventually I would love to continue work on this project to add gameplay, better texturing, more polish, and separating the days properly.
Overall this project went quite well! I am happy with the outcome of my writing, which was the whole purpose of this project. Gameplay itself was never the forefront of development, since this was made for an Advanced Narrative class.
Here's a little tidbit of current gameplay!
