You follow Victoria, a college student as she struggles to get by during the housing crisis in Ontario. A wide variety of characters to interact with in this visual novel that informs the player about an issue that is felt across Canada.
Since the team decided it was best to tell the story in a visual genre, we
decided it was
best to use Fungus, which is an open source tool that
provides a robust dialogue system and character portraits.
I was able to pick up Fungus relatively quickly and was able to start
manipulating the tool
to the needs of the project, such as changing the layout of the default
dialogue box, changing font size, changing the dialogue box background, etc.
Since Fungus is a visual scripting tool, there are a ton of nodes (called
Commands) that
prove to be useful during development. There were also some variables I created
that I
needed
to change using the "Change Variable" node would make the exisitng tree very
long and
tedious to deal with. Thankfully, Fungus allows users to create their own
Commands in C#,
and so I created a bunch
for certain aspects in the project that I needed to keep referencing (such as
changing the
Academic, Mental Health, and Money values).
This project allowed to collaborate with others for an extended period of time
(2 semester)
which at the time was the longest
I would be undertaking a project like this.
I learned how to function in a team, how communicate requirements across
different
disciplines, and since it was a small team of game designers as well,
how to participate in discussions respectfully and how to critizing points and
provide
feedback.
Even though this experience was short lived compared to the length of an AAA or
even indie
team would spend together, I think I still learned some valuable
experiences about collaborations and I was able to transfer some of these skills
into
capstone.
The UI of One Month at a Time has gone through multiple iterations, with each
iteration
addressing a problem with the previous version. Most of these iterations
worked to improve the readibility of the icons so players can recognize what
each bar meant
without having the need to TELL the players directly and clogging up
the screen with more text.
One iteration of the UI introduced visual feedback by highlighting which bars
would be
affected when the player hovers over an option. This allowed players to gain an
informed decision on what their choice affects. This was later polished by
adding fades
ins/outs to the colour and deeper saturation if the option affected the resource
greatly.
Below, you'll see the multiple iterations the UI design has underwent and the
intent of each
iteration that the solution tried to address.