The following content is a transcript of the video.

lost contact devlog 4

I’m working on a narrative-driven, hidden object game about loneliness called lost contact.

Starting with the coolest stuff I worked on this week, I added door animations to the game as well as button animations. Originally, I was hoping to use this to build out the first level in the game – a tutorial level which you can’t leave until you find your ID card that you can use on a door so you can leave the room – and playtest it this week. But, unfortunately, I didn’t plan well enough and the assets for the communication room aren’t quite ready.

Most of the time this week was instead spent on improving the tools. Last week, I showed that the palette plugin I made can be used to set colors on models, but it could also set various PBR properties on our shader. The PBR properties have been refactored to be simpler, to match the understanding the artist I’m working with has, on how PBR properties work.

Among smaller, less notable changes, we also:

• Made standardized color and standardized PBR palettes
• We changed the palette to recurse to a parent palette if a swatch cannot be found
• And I also refactored the palette plugin to use value equality instead of reference equality, and this allowed me to do a lot of simplification to the scene serialization and to the code that tries to guarantee we don’t reuse a unique color reference.

The Godot editor is a bit nicer to look at now too. It didn’t talk long to set up, but if you’re going to be using Godot I recommend spending some time customizing it to your liking. I updated the theme, the font, and I also setup colored folders so it’s easier for me to see what kind of thing I am looking at in the editor file explorer.

That’s about all I did this week. I made some good progress, though it feels a bit slow. The interaction mechanic I need to make one of the levels for the game exists now, at least. I’ll blame it on the holiday spirit. If that statement makes sense to you, that’s because you’re a patron and you’re seeing this video right away and thank you so much for your support again. If you aren’t a patron, it’s been about three weeks since I released this video. I hope you had a good holiday, and I hope you’ll consider joining my Discord server where, if you become a subscriber, you’ll see videos like this right when I make them. I also stream on Twitch four days a week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. And, I’ll see you in the next devlog.