Hey Ohio!

So! Here I am, writing this weekly blog with the pressure of knowing that I can’t possibly write something better than last week Noah’s blog….

But I will try my best!

I know it’s a bit of a cliché to begin like this but, what a week! We thought that last week was quite intense, well we were wrong. Of course, being the last week of the project made things even more stressful. But in the end, we ended up creating something that surely satisfies the entire group. Of course, there’s still some details that we couldn’t implement in time; but the game is playable, and we are really happy with the result!

Enough introductions now! Let’s talk about work!

Let’s start this weekly blog from the weekend…

To really understand how we managed to achieve our objectives during the week, we first must talk about the work we did during the weekend.

The weekend was pretty much all about structuring. Both narratively and technically.

In two days, all elements of the narration were completed. From the general overview of the setting, storyline progression, characters lore and, finally, the most complex work on the writing side: dialogues! The core of our game. The most difficult aspect of it was conveying the character’s personality through their words. We had to think “what would this character say in this situation?” or “how would this character react to this decision?”. Giving our characters a clear personality was the key to provide the players a way to further connect with the story. Something to note is that this task has been helped by the character design, which gave us a visual interpretation of their personality. Once again, this is a way to celebrate the character designers of the group!

So, we found ourselves with all these design / narrative materials… How do we bring them to life? That’s a good question! An equally good answer would be (please Noah don’t kill me if I get this wrong) scriptable objects! Our awesome coding department (yes, here at Ohio Solutions we have a coding department) was able to create a functioning object structure to implement our endless material in no time. Not only that! Since our story has multiple outcomes and multiple branches, we needed a way to show the right scenes at the right time. For that, a Visual Novel Manager was created. It’s its work to determine the correct flowing of the story. Really an outstanding achievement here at Ohio Solutions!

With all this material, and the addition of several new visual / UI elements, we were ready to face the last week!

Wednesday, the deadline is right around the corner!

At this point, we had a solid coding structure, a lot of visual materials and a complete narrative. Implementing all this will surely be easy thanks to our organization! Right?

…

No.

Or to be more precise, yes; but we had a lot of material to implement. And when I say a lot, I mean it.

And that’s not all. Although the story flow was already tested thanks to a software called Twinery, we still had to implement the branching in the Visual Novel Manager. Once we realized the amount of work we had to do, we immediately divided the tasks and started adding all the contents in the Unity project. This process took us the entire day, but in the end all the sprites, UI elements, scenes and dialogues were in the game. There was still work to do on the scene management, but a great step ahead was taken.

Meanwhile, our incredible design department (yes, we also have that) was working on animations. That’s right! We wanted to include a set of animated sprites in the game, to definitively give life to the characters!

Thursday, playtest time!

Until Thursday we saw playtesting as a distant element taking place on the horizon. There, at a safe distance from us.

And then it reached us.

Playtesting is difficult. Not only because you must take note of everything the players say, but especially because it’s the first time that we had to show our results to someone who’s not part of the group. It’s that time where you hope that yours and the entire team’s expectations won’t get crushed. In fact, playtesting was stressful for this exact reason. But also, extremely useful! The feedback we received has been crucial to taking the next decisions on the development. Some comments we received confirmed our doubts, some were completely unexpected. Overall, playtesting was an interesting, although scary at first, experience which immediately made us work on correcting the final details.

After that we started preparing ourselves for the grand finale: the game presentation!

Friday, time passed so fast!

Can you really believe that three weeks have passed? This project was quite a rush, but I feel like I’ve worked with my group for years! And it all came down to this final day.

First, we divided our tasks. The presentation needed some polishing, while new test builds needed to be created to complete the final details of the game. We were in a rush, but we managed to include what we wanted in the project.

We presented our game (with a fantastic Ohio Solutions splash screen at the beginning) and got interesting feedback.

We still had time to polish the game and the contents, and so we got to work. The branching system was finally completed, including the introduction and ending dialogues, days transitions, choices transitions and even a title screen. Some sprites have been improved to look even cooler, and terrible text errors have been corrected.

And with that, we conclude our project.

For now.

Ohio Solutions still needs to find solutions!

This module was wonderful! Creating our very first game has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done! The entire group was satisfied, but it’s not over yet!

There’s still some polishing we want to do. An introduction sequence and adding sounds are only a few of the many steps we want to take next. But who knows, maybe we could go even further!

More stories? More characters? More unique events? Dialog options? Minigames? Different endings?

Some of these ideas came from all the feedback we had!

So, stay tuned, because Ohio Solutions is still working!

Now, I would like to thank some people:

Dragica, Madlaina, Tobias, Sebastian, for the precious help that you gave us during the project, and for enduring our intense conversations!

All the playtesters, for the helpful feedback we received from all of you!

Marco (concept art, UI, backgrounds), for the outstanding creativity with the sprites that gave depth to the world we created!

Lendi (character design, sound), for the creation of a super expressive set of characters and for working even in difficult conditions!

Noah (programming, code structure and implementation), for the incredible effort of putting all the designers work together and give life to our game!

And well, me (research, story, dialogues), for not being the procrastinator that I usually am.

That said…

Ohio Solutions stellt keine Fragen, sondern Lösungen zu Verfügung. Und mit diesem Schlusswort…Bis nächste Woche Leude✌️