dev twiter

hi, did you know that me and my friends have spent the last 8~ years working on this video game???

it's a queer detective dating game called: ShelfLife: Art School Detective and we recently released the demo on Steam!

you play as Johana, a NB art student looking to unmask the mysterious ART KILLER that’s terrorising your campus!

befriend and investi-DATE 9 potential suspects while trying to solve the case

ALSO! use your psychic powers to astral project into ~The Artworld~ to discover secretz

we'd love you to give the demo a go, tell your friends about it & let us know your thoughts <3

thankz

This is my newly-implemented objective tracker! I received feedback during the playtests with my friends that the first area was quite big and hard to navigate, especially understandable since the first person you talk to is the only person that gives you any instructions on where to go. Previously, I had an animated little tile on the minimap, but this was only visible if you bring up the big map (which playtesters weren't familiar with), or you were close to the goal anyway, at which point it was a straight line to reach it.

So I implemented a system where certain objects can flag themselves as goal tiles, and even have in place multiple chained markers. There are two components to this system, the more complicated viewport marker, and the super easy minimap arrow pointer. I struggled immensely with the math to translate a 2D grid into a pseudo-3D projection, and my code is VERY ugly, but it works which is the main thing...

The minimap was far easier to program, with the only minor headache being that if the goal was off the minimap, show an arrow pointing in the direction of the goal. And by the way, it's apparently canon now that each tile is exactly 1m by 1m. Please please don't ask for a toggle to swap to imperial! If you do I'm just going to replace 1m with 1ft and call it a day!! Actually, it wouldn't be much work at all to then multiply the number by 3.x, now that I think about it, hm.

I only have a few goals planned, mainly for the tutorial sequences, as this is still very much an open-ended exploration game. And for those who don't want any markers at all, I've already got a toggle in the options to remove them completely!