TtEotWaB Devlog 1: Early Development & Original Concept

It's time for the first devlog of my visual novel thing (that's what Itch has been instructed to call it) ....To the Ends of the World and Back!

---

Long story short, it was a pretty average and boring development process. I was busy for the first few hours of the Compo but still had time to check the theme and leave posts and comments, so that gave me some time to generate my idea. TtEotWaB is actually sort of a demo for an existing game concept I've had for a few weeks, so Ludum Dare acted as a way for me to test how it could be built.

The first preview of the cockpit area, before the radar was moved and the windshield edges were smoothed out.

The original concept is a couple of people travelling in a hyperspeed spaceship (multiple times faster than the speed of light) to the edge of the universe. While controlling the protagonist, occasionally the crewmates would disturb them and have some casual talks, eventually becoming friends instead of people stuck in a ~~loop~~ spaceship together. This can be seen in TtEotWaB's story, with the cockpit pilot Grace and her crewmate Andrew having a talk about their motivation to go on the journey: for Andrew, overcoming mental issues, and for Grace, making her promise of love to her girlfriend literal.

The first part of implementing hazards and the character chatting system. At this point the gifs became too big.

The October events start at 5:00 PM (17:00) here, so I got very little done the first day of development. The next day was spent doing much more working on the game to make up for it, and I got about 8 hours of development time in compared to 1 1/2 the first day.

The keypad was implemented! At this point it did nothing but display its tooltip.

Overall, I didn't have as much time to work on the game as back in April, but I've been practicing my ability to speed-code since LD48 and I've become more efficient at Ludum Dare-ing. Of course, that didn't stop the bugs from creeping in!

Stories of the struggle of the last day coming soon in the next devlog!