When version 1 was released, the game was essentially a repetitive point and click. No story, no goal, nothing. For the Game Jam, I wanted to expand Terrys Papers into something more than just reading a few documents. After a long brainstorm session between Vimii and I, we had written down a giant list of the ideas we wanted to implement before the jam was over. So much so, we were worried we'd run out of time. As I'm writing this (a few days before the jam is over) we've improved the game more than I could have expected for a months worth of work and there's still a few more things I want to add before submitting. This post will outline some of the new mechanics added to Terrys Papers as well as the many challenges we went through creating this version.

After coming up with the monstrous list of ideas, I needed to prioritize things. Some things needed to get done and moved to the top of the list, others were moved to the "Ideas" list as they weren't necessary to what our goal was for this month.

My first task was to rewrite the core mechanics of the game. If you've read my post in the WAYWA channel in Discord, you'll know Terrys Papers is not only my first full S&box project, but also my first C# project in general. I've been developing for years, mostly modding games with Lua, website development and a few other random languages here and there, but this was a massive learning experience for me.

I can assure you, this projects code is not organized, not efficient and would probably make some more skilled C# developers vomit, but I learned a lot during this and plan to implement better practices in future versions/projects.

The first version of Terrys Papers was simple, move man to location, show objects, listen for left mouse input and ray casts. Nothing incredibly intricate, but it needed some cleanup, rewrites and polishing. I started by ripping everything out and re-adding what was needed and rewriting what needed it. This was a bit of a tedious process that took a few days but it was worth it.

As I said before, the game in it's first version had absolutely no goal (aside from getting to the top of the leaderboard). So what other way to keep players interested than some LORE. We spent a few hours coming up with the backstory of this game, from the different events to the different characters and more. The story is something we feel will give the player a goal, something to work towards aside from just "how many days can you last?". The story expanded over time, changed and even took a crazy turn as the month went on, but this gave us a structure to stick to.

I have never developed a game with a story before, but this part was incredibly fun to work on. The game features quite a few different events, some being main story events and other being random events that have don't change the course of the story. All of these different events check for specific days, specific conditions, RNG and so much more. It was tedious to get every event in and working, but it was such a good feeling seeing it all come together and work in the end.

I won't talk much about the specifics of the story, I'll leave that for you to play and experience, but I do want to talk about the main mechanic I implemented to help immerse the player into the story, the phone.

The phone was one of the first new additions I made to the game. This phone would be the main source of story telling, so the different events, main or random, would all be funneled through the phone. I would've loved to add characters the player could interact with and maybe some more cutscenes, but right now we're a one developer and one artist team so we made do with what we had.

I also wanted to make sure we had ways of bringing in player input. We started off by just making some on-screen UI that would show when it was time for the player to make a decision, but it always looked a little out of place. When we added the Computer, which we'll talk about later, I had to sort out how to allow the player to use their mouse to interact with WorldPanels. This took hours of troubleshooting, but when I was finally able to get it implemented, I switched the choice UI to display on the phones UI instead. This made making choices feel much more immersive. There are a ton of different choices you can make all resulting in different outcomes to your game, for better or for worse.

The Computer was one of those ideas I had further into working on the project. It allowed us to separate some mechanics like the music, database and tutorial book to a place that would make a little more sense. I was a little concerned that it feel clunky or out of place, but after sinking into debugging some issues with interacting with the UI, I felt like it made complete sense and fit right into the game.

The ability to look around was not a thing during version 1 of Terrys Papers. In fact, it wasn't a thing until a few days ago. Giving the player control of the camera was yet another one of those late additions to the game that I felt made the game a little more enjoyable and less "locked in place". This required me to rewrite a few things I had JUST finished, but in the end having the ability to look around gives us room to expand and ultimately feels more freeing to the player.

There is SO much more I could talk about, new features, the animations, the mapping, the art, the many many rewrites blah blah. But- I'll save those for you to discover and enjoy.

I spent hundreds of hours this month working on this game and Vimii left the country for a few weeks for vacation so a whole lot of work was pumped out of my fingers these last few weeks, well over 400 commits to the games repo from 1 person.. I am genuinely happy with how the game is in it's current state.

I want to give a massive shoutout to some friends that helped test this version of Terrys Papers.
- Prior (Helped more than I can thank him for, the game would probably have 10x the amount of bugs if it weren't for him testing)
- Geo
- UrgentPie
- thepitski

If you do play the game and enjoy it, please let us know! Leave a review and thumbs up the game! If you find any issues or have any suggestions, feel free to join our Discord 

Enough yapping!
<3 Dimmies & Vimii