The following content is a transcript of the video.

lost contact devlog 6

Welcome to devlog 6 of lost contact, a narrative-driven, hidden object game about loneliness. I believe in playtesting early and playtesting often. Even though the game is only about 5 minutes long right now, I’ve finally gotten around to doing two in-person playtests and a lot of really beneficial changes were made to the game as a result:

• A tutorial system was added to help the player learn the controls. It works by showing an animation to the player indicating the input that they can do, if they haven’t done it already. There are three steps to the tutorial: click, drag, and scroll.
• I added a visual aid to show you where the anchor is, so that it’s more clear to the player that you’re rotating around a certain point. This is important, especially as there isn’t an avatar in the game, so without it the player can sometimes get disoriented since they cannot see where they are. The zoom was also updated to use a logarithmic scale instead of a fixed value, which results in more natural-feeling controls.
• Broken drives were added in the communications scene to help draw the player’s attention to where found drives will go.
• And “DNA Drives” were renamed to just “Drive” to reduce potential confusion when looking at item descriptions. Although DNA as a storage format is a theoretical storage format that I’d like to exist in this setting, describing it in a top-level description combined with most people’s unfamiliarity of the topic can lead the player to think that the DNA aspect is more important to the story than it actually is.

Aside from playtesting, new features were also added.

• We’ve got three new rooms. There’s the station center, the storage room, and the elevator.
• There’s visual feedback for when the card is invalid for the door
• And now there are transitions between scenes, and a simple system for preventing previously collected items from respawning and previously seen cinematics from replaying.

The game is starting to come together, which is really exciting. You can start to explore the station, going from one room to another, and we’re approaching the phase where we just need to start making all of the content that goes into the game. In fact, the last major pieces of programming left are the dialog system and inventory ui, both of which I’m hoping to get done over the next two weeks or so. After that, I’ll mostly need to write dialog and assemble scenes, and Tanuki will also be helping me out with that.

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. If you aren’t a patron, I hope you’ll consider joining my Discord server. I’ll see you in the next devlog!