Othermind Update #2: Minigames + Art

Hello there!
Today's post will be about Othermind, although it will be short.

Preface

Quite a bit of progress has been going on, on Othermind's part. Although much of this progress is adding all the maps the game will need, which I won't blog about here because I feel like I'm just going to mention the same things I have elsewhere, I'll mainly talk about another feature which I think will give the game more variety which is minigames. I also have some news in terms of this project's art department, if you want to know stick around to the end for that.

Minigames

In the first Pipe dreamer game, there was a section in a city area where you delivered clothes and food to proceed to the top of the mall and a few other minigames as well in the other worlds. Minigames will be returning in the second game, and I'm planning them to have more variety than the first game. They do use POUCH (which I may write a future blog on since quite a lot of progress has been going on there), to be activated. Thanks to POUCH, it has given a far more modular way to activate the objects that run the minigames which is initializing them through the scripting of POUCH. Once they are activated, they start updating and they have a number. This number is used to determine which state the minigame object is in, for example if the minigame is a racing game, it switches to a start state which sets the timer, then an ongoing state which is responsible for reducing the timer. POUCH can check the number of this specific minigame object to see what state it is in and act accordingly.

The minigame also has to store data on which objects it uses if it uses any, and this is done using custom types which is saved into the file and read by the level loader. This data could be particular names of entities it needs to keep track of like their score if it is a minigame involving competition.

I'm also planning the minigame to also activate POUCH upon what happens when it reaches a certain state.

Art assistance

When I was working on the artistic assets of Bounty Hunter II, there was a lot of work I had to do. I had to draw, animate and implement every single sprite into the game and, as you can imagineit was quite intense, especially for one person who also works on the coding and the level design. Luckily I have a Discord friend called Joe (blog linked with his permission) who I've known for around a year was willing to lend me some of his talents to this project (and maybe other projects) when I asked him. I email him what I would like to have in the game and he usually finishes pretty quickly. When he finishes, I would critique his art and see things he needs improving on, I tend to show him my crudely drawn pictures to show a rough idea on what I would like things to be. I don't really try to be too specific on details, because part of the fun is seeing how he draws things, and as long as it looks nice, it's going into the game. He usually looks up reference images based on my examples and draws his art using them.
He's not going to do all the art but if things go well (which is quite likely since there were no arguments between us), he is going to at least take some of the workload off my shoulder. Although, my main concern is that I don't want to have unstructured communication with him. Because if I just spend a lot of time emailing him, not enough work will go into the game's coding or level design.
Funnily enough Joe did suggest an idea for a boss fight in Bounty Hunter II last July, with art of the boss' face, which I rejected, due to the fact that a lot of the game was already finished, albeit very unpolished, at that point. Despite this, the enthusiasm he had was one of the reasons I offered him to volunteer in this project.
In order to make him comfortable with helping me, I ask him if he's able to manage the workload and if he can't I'll take back some of it. This level of flexibility is crucial to ensure things will go smoothly and to maintain good relations with him.

Conclusion

Sorry if this post has been rather short, but progress is, at least on the surface, quite stagnant due to me just trying to implement levels as well as working on 3 other games, including Bounty Hunter III. Hopefully the next time I update about this game, it may be a bit longer and more about the level design. The next post I will publish will be about the Magnum foundation framework and its components.
That's all from me!