First of all, all art is stuff I found on itch.io (CC0) so it's not by me! It's more fun to develop with real assets while not wasting time creating final assets I'm not sure will make it to the end of the dev or not.

Introducing the project

Since this is my first post about the game (instead of story/art sketches)

Project Purple (codename EPS1) is a linear narrative game where the story is put to the forefront. It's not a visual novel with multiple endings, it's not a classic adventure game with puzzles – rather, it's more akin to an interactive movie. The story is set in stone, but you can explore the world, control characters, choose to go down optional side-paths, and get more immersed in the experience.

The main inspiration is the Ace Attorney franchise (especially TGAAC) as I was always impressed at how engaging, fun and immersive "playing" this linear story was, with just text boxes, bust sprites, and flashing effects. I want to try something similar, where a lot of care is put into sprite animations and presentation of text (and story, of course!). I felt in charge of the story even though there aren't any choices, which struck me.

Let's talk about the vid!

I know a lot happens quickly, feel free to pause to better understand what's going on!

In summary, what you're seeing is the base game loop. The player can move right and left, and interact with things. When interacting, the script for that thing is read, which is a cutscene (display text and animate/move sprites). Then when it's done, it returns control back to the player. Some interactions are like portals which change the map.

The test script is very basic: you have to interact with the "fountain" to be able to return home. You can't enter the "home" map until you do that. If you enter the map where the fountain is, but still haven't interacted with it, you get a hint ("let's go check the fountain!").

I developed a system using Ink as a base, where I just need to setup the Ink script in a certain way, for it to automatically map to everything on the game-side. For example if I want to add an interaction, I just need to create an "interaction" game object in the Defold editor to define its position in the map, name it the same as its section in Ink, and voilà

Anyway, it'd be way too long to describe the system in detail. To summarize, it's very flexible and allows me to create complex interactions very easily, with conditions and stuff. Perfect for an interactive story!

Next up

Version 0.2 will be about polishing the rough edges and finalizing most of the components except the dialogue bubbles. Those are gonna take all of v0.3, since they're the most complex system after the gameloop. You can see they're totally half-assed right now x) I wanted to complete the gameloop first

I still haven't decided on a visual style yet. I really like 2D flat animations though! But, I wonder if starting out with pixel art isn't better for a beginner in animation like me

What I'm really, really excited about is in the sound department… I have recently discovered some very cool but obscure stuff and I can't wait to try and make tracks with it I don't think I'll reveal it until the game is close to launch though…

Tools and tech

Here's what I'm working with:

• Defold game engine – I used to use Godot but Defold is just a magnitude more elegant, performant, and pleasant to use! Also I'm in love with Lua, it's so underrated,,,

• Ink – a scripting language to make narrative games that's suuuper flexible. It's specialized in choice-heavy stories, but works perfectly with linear ones like mine as well.

• Inky – editor to write Ink scripts (what you're seeing in the vid!) and playtest them in real-time.

• Narrator – integration of Ink into Defold. So grateful to the person who made this – I can't imagine having to do it myself, that parsing stuff is so overwhelming but impressive

Phew, I didn't expect this to get this long, but I hope it was a nice read! I might not post a lot but it's just that it takes so much time and energy to do so, and I prefer spending it on actual dev c':

But you can be sure that progress is being made either way! So follow to not miss out and have a nice day :D