GBAGameJam2021 | Making a game for the Gameboy Advance
Day 74
Unfortunately I haven't had much time over the last few weeks to work my GBAJam2021 entry. And I realized today that the deadline is approaching very quickly.
In the last post I talked about how important narrative was to me in this game.
I decided to add stone tablets dotted around the level that the player could stop and read if they wanted.
But I wanted it to be interesting. If people want to read they read books, but we are playing a video game here.
To spice things up I decided to make up a language for these ancient people. I wasn't going to go to Tolkien lengths, instead I made a set of symbols that could directly map to english.
Simple yet effective. This meant that I could write my text in my map editor (Tiled) and simply swap the tileset to "translate" the words.
I ended up making this kind of into a minigame where the player has to tap to focus in order to hold the translation steady.
Hopefully this makes reading a few short lore excerpts a tad more interesting.
It also gave me another idea. I figure that after seeing a few of these, the player has enough information to be able to decode these messages on their own.
So in one place in the game I have tucked away a hidden message on a broken stone tablet that can't be translated. The player will have to grab a paper and pen, then use the previous tablets to solve it.
This is optional of course, but for the eager this is an extra challenge.
I know this is a pretty small update, I am trying to get back into the swing of things and spend more time on this project. Next up I will be adding a boss!