The following content is a transcript of the video.

lost contact devlog 7

Welcome to devlog 7 of lost contact, a narrative-driven, hidden object game about loneliness.

One of the ways loneliness really affects me is the home that I live in. Put simply, I have too much space. I live here by myself and there is more space in my living arrangement than I know what to do with. I’m quite aware of how much more better the space could be used if more people lived here as it was originally designed for. I want to make this sense of excess space a really important aspect of the game, and one of the ways I want to convey this in the story is by creating a very large space station for you to explore. I want you, as a player, to feel the same kind of emptiness I do when confronted with such a large, underutilized space.

Of course, I wasn’t able to create all of the rooms for the station this week, but we did add three new rooms: The hallway, the study, and the activity room.

In order to connect all of these scenes so they can be explored, the transition system was refactored to support elevators and stairs. It’s quite a feeling to explore all of the rooms together, and I feel excited to see the rest of the station get made.

All of this additional space doesn’t really do anything gameplay-wise if you don’t have something to do with it. One of the things I want you to look for are drives that have recorded conversations on them for you to listen to. So, I’ve implemented a basic system for reading the drives that you find.

I also want to make the game as diagetic as possible, so to keep you trapped in the expansive space station, the dialog system is displayed in the world on screens using the code from devlog 5 instead of in an overlay like in the prototype.

I’m still streaming development of this game four days a week on Twitch if you’d like to come by to see how it’s doing. And, if you’re a patron, thanks for your support once again – and, sorry for releasing the devlog so late. If you aren’t a patron, I hope you’ll consider joining my Discord server. I’ll see you in the next devlog!