Quick Note: This is our first Dev Diary in a while, but we are setting a goal to do these with more regularity! If you want to hear about them as soon as they go up, join our Discord where we will link them immediately.

Last month we took the game to PixelPop 2019 in Saint Louis which is an indie games festival. You should definitely check it out! It was kind of a milestone for us because PixelPop 2018 was the first time we showed TTR to a large audience and it felt great to see how far we had come in that year. We got to hear from some awesome fans that said they had been looking forward to playing TTR all year and some folks who supported our Kickstarer. Both trips generated a ton of great feedback and really helped us identify parts of the game that work and parts that need some work.

One of those parts that needs some work is definitely the intro to the game and the tutorial. Mainly because they didn’t exist until recently! Our expo version of the game dumps the player right into the end-game shelter so they have access to everything, which is awesome to show off all the cool mechanics the game has to offer, but only if people know how to use them. Building a great 5 minute demo for sim-management games is tough because they often rely heavily on the UI, longer game cycles, and a steeper learning curve than some other genres. Our approach until now has been to verbally guide players through the mechanics until they got the hang of it, but this hasn’t been a great approach for cons and it doesn’t work at all for sharing the game with people remotely. Something had to change.

After returning from PixelPop this year, I decided to shift my focus to creating and polishing the first 30 minutes of the game. In the first 30 minutes of the game these things should happen:

• Establish the story and define who the player is.
• Teach the player how to control their character and interact with the environment.
• Teach the player how meet the basic needs of the dogs in their shelter.

If we can accomplish all three , I think we will have a much more effective demo for people to try the game and ultimately a more improved experience overall as they will better understand the mechanics!

Establishing the Story

A story element has been planned for TTR for a long time but this marks the first real implementation in any substantial form. We want to start out by immediately demonstrating the player character’s passion for dogs. In a town without a shelter, they’ve turned their garage into a makeshift kennel.

We open with the player character bringing home a stray they found in dire straights. This gives us an opportunity to work in some dialog to establish their personality. You’ll get that dog fed and watered, but it’s not long until more strays show up. By the end of this section of the game, they player will find out the city is opening a municipal shelter and is looking for a director to run things.

To give this opening a bit more of a dynamic feel, we are creating an opening cut-scene to give the player some context and a little time to orient themselves to what they’re doing and what their goal is.

Teaching the Player

Conveniently, the methods we want to use to control the camera and scene during story cut-scenes will also work to guide the player through the tutorial! Using the timeline in Unity we can animate the camera, restrict player input, and control other items in the scene. This lets us slow things down and emphasize one element at a time to the player.

Consistently, the two things that most players have struggled with in the game are navigating the queues of items and the player character’s two-handed control scheme. The interactions are proximity based and break down into two categories: Things the player can pick up and stationary things the player can use. Stationary objects can often contain multiple ‘holdable’ items and using those items on stationary items can yield multiple results. For instance, the vaccine cabinet contains several vaccines and you can take those vaccines and use them on the medical table containing a dog to vaccinate them .

So first we teach the player that they have two hands that can contain different items and how to use those items.

And then we will teach players how to cycle through the hidden list of contents of items using ‘Q’ and ‘E’ by guiding them to pick up a specific box of dog food.

There is still a lot of work to be done in this opening segment of the game, but hopefully this opening segment will help acclimate players to the game more smoothly than our current approach!