Devlog 1

Due to the nature of the game, the movement is kept very simple. What's more important with the movement system (and something that can't be fully implemented until the level blocking is done) is the interaction system. The house is technically still in 3D space, and doors lead to places behind other rooms. It's also easier to keep the NPCs moving in the collision boxes to make AI simpler, and to keep space consistency. This will be achieved by having three layers of collision layers - some rooms are on the same 'Z' depth and can be conjoined. The door can switch the collision layer of the player, and nodes can also switch the collision layer of an NPC as well as the current room (which can be a string tag). The current room can be used to determine what objects should be visible, and it only has to check that on player room changes - not that there's a significant performance cost, but it's worth making the effort. We can't just use layers, because we don't want to see the bathroom for example in a bedroom.

Currently, there's only this movement: https://imgur.com/a/t0b7AwF (note: itch.io can't seem to upload this video despite supporting the format.) It has a bit of weight to make it fast to move, but still realistic. This is important for a game where responsiveness may be a very important factor, however it should still feel realistic. The scale isn't properly decided yet however, and will likely be adjusted to better fit the characters.

Beyond the scope of movement, there have been some other developments in the game. Responsiveness (as aforementioned) is an important part of the game, and some thoughts have been given to how I may implement that (as well as general visual clarity). Doors will be indicated by a small gradient, or potentially some other visual motif, to help players identify where the door is. This can also be shown by a 'see interactables' power, as done in Disco Elysium and many other similar games to this one. This is potentially easiest to implement as a shader, however shaders in 2D are a little more difficult to implement (although they shouldn't be, Unity just makes it seemingly harder for no reason.) Audio will also be important in this aspect, as small sounds to indicate when something is selected helps massively to let the player know they can interact with certain objects. There's not going to be any music for immersion reasons, so sound effects have no risk of being drowned out. Visually, I'm also going to add a scrolling texture on the top and bottom black bars to show the intensity of the movement (or just to add visual interest).  This helps with negative space, and is an easy way to stress out the player. Parallax backgrounds will also be used, because of the use of pre-drawn backgrounds. Parallax is perhaps best used in Hollow Knight, where it makes the game feel more immersive, although that game also has a lot of interactable objects to also help with that aspect (and I guess when this game is finished, it'll be very similar in that aspect.)

I was originally intending to have a little more done, however coincidentally all of my VMs were broken - and paint.net doesn't work on linux. However, I should be able to at least quickly draw out the rest of the room layouts, and hopefully finish them by either this week or next week. There's little else to show - but the fundamentals of the game should be finished relatively soon.