It’s been a week since I introduced Project Subterranean to you, so I figured I’d give you a little bit of an update on how things are progressing and what our plans are.

*“Soon” can refer to 6 months, a year, or an eternity.

Kalle, our lead programmer, has been to Italy for a few days, so we haven’t really been able to start working on any major features yet. However, I think we’ve made some progress anyway - if not at least with the theoretical stuff.

Windows build

First of all I’ve managed to kind of get the Windows executable to work. There are still some issues to be worked out, but at least it compiles and can be run without it crashing. I’ve managed to run it perfectly on some machines, but I’ve gotten one report saying that it was missing both some of the levels as well as the icons for the inventory. I will look into it, but it’s not one of my top priorities right now.

Dialogues

I have also submitted two patches to improve on the handling of dialogues. You can now choose dialogue options by pressing the number keys on your keyboard. Also you can now skip single dialogue lines by pressing the left mouse button (space to skip the entire dialogue).

Saving

One extremely important feature that we’ve begun drawing the blueprints for is the save feature. When making an adventure game you can’t really expect the user to go through the entire thing in one sitting. So far we’ve figured out what we need to save, and one possible data format and method of data serialization that we could use. Since the game is open source, there’s really no point in trying to obfuscate the save files all that much (to prevent cheating). Because if the user is hell bent on cheating, they could just edit the source code directly. With that in mind we’re probably going to go with a simple XML-file, and use the Pickle module to serialize the data. Another option is to use one of Pickle’s binary data formats to make it harder to cheat, but we’ll see which option takes less effort for us to build.

Object animation

We’ve just begun working on animating objects (objects could be anything from items to NPCs). The engine kind of supports this at the moment, using states, but it still needs a lot of work. Right now we’re trying to make it so that any character that is talking will use its talking animation if one is available. Currently we’ve only managed to either get the character to always talk or never talk. But we’ll probably figure it out soon enough. The next step after that should probably be to allow characters other than the player to walk around the screen.

Planning

We have kind of decided that after we have fixed up the engine we’re going to build a single chapter of the story and then release that. By doing so, we would be able to get some kind of feedback from players before we’ve built the entire game. Of course, we also just want to get something out there to show to the world as soon as possible - but that’s just a bonus!

The first chapter

Kalle has written a sort of outline of the first chapter. Of course it’s just a draft, but at least it’s a start. Basically our story revolves around a young man working as an office grunt at this huge multinational. It’s not clear what the company does, but it is however very clear that no one likes it there. One day our hero’s fascist boss comes barging in to his cubicle, screaming about some report that was supposed to be on his desk several hours ago, and that he now has 15 minutes to finish it - or he’s finished!

Naturally, our hero has absolutely no idea what the report he was talking about is, or that he was the one supposed to do it. In order to find out what it is, he has to help his co-workers, a fairly odd collection of characters, with different things such as talking to people, playing mini-games or fetching items. With the information he gets from them he manages to piece together what the report was supposed to be about, and heads down to the basement to go through the archives - looking for more information.

As he steps into the elevator and presses “down” there’s a brief blackout and a weird sound. Our hero tries to calm himself and shrugs it off as “nothing”, until he sees that the Current Level indicator has already passed 0 and is now increasing on the negative side of zero. “W-What is this?!”, he cries in agony as the elevator picks up speed, continuing to rush downward.

Chapter one ends with a blackout and a loud crash.

If you want to read a more in-depth description of chapter one, you can head over to the manuscript proposal page on our Wiki.

For more information on Project Subterranean, you can go to our Wiki at github. The source code is also available at our github page.