Incubus Island Report #1

Hello. I'm often asked for the status of Incubus Island, the sequel to Incubus City. Gotta admit, it's been slow - far slower than I'd have liked. I originally wrote out a lengthier explanation for this, but it wasn't that interesting, so to sum it up: Various pressures from irl took time away from certain personal projects, Incubus Island included.

Things are changing a little bit recently, and I'm likely going to be able to start shifting focus back II. I think starting April 1st (no foolin') I will begin setting monthly goals for the project, to help motivate me to get back into the swing of it, and also perhaps inspire me to start thinking ahead and planning better. If I fail to meet these monthly goals you, dear reader, are granted license to mock me for it.

Anyway, for now I'll tell you about one aspect of the game in the works:

Hinge3D

I made an 'exploration system'. This is actually something I've been doing on and off for a long time - about a year maybe? It's essentially a '3D' first-person dungeon crawler 'engine' I built into Twine.

The intent of Hinge3D is for explorable areas to be easily made using a fairly intuitive map system, which I'll talk about some time later.

I was very unsure about sharing an image of it, both because it might give the wrong impression of what kind of game I'm making and because I'm not fully certain of its inclusion in II vs some later project. Plus, the ceiling graphic looks shit.

Well I'm 90% certain I will use it. This system will have multiple potential uses:

1) Investigations: Some scenarios will have you play a 'detective' in either a formal or informal sense, looking around for clues and make sense of a situation. I think doing this in 3D environment might be more interesting than the crime scene house thing in IC for example.

2) Break-ins: Remember how the IC title screen showed the game's protagonist sneaking into a house at night and yet the game included no such scenario? Well I have plans to actually make that part of the game this time. You'll be able to sneak into homes and steal stuff, find sleepers in which to sow your seed, and even complete espionage and assassination jobs. Sneak around a dark house and try to evade security systems, unwanted encounters with residents and so on.

3) Exploration: This game won't be a dungeon crawler, but this element was clearly inspired by those types of games, and could be used as such. Just imagine places like the dungeon in IC, except instead of a countdown to race against, you have to contend with guards to fight and other obstacles. Since combat system is up in the air, but the game will include some, just not at launch. (I've built two combat systems in Twine already - one I posted here ages ago that had sprites and simple animations for JRPG, the other for a silly non-porn game that I may post eventually.)


Well that's enough prattle for one day. I'm going to try to make one more patch for IC closing off a bunch of minor issues before the end of the month, then on the 1st post some sort of goal. (Probably something along the lines of exhuming II, which I left in a messy transition state.) Anyway, bye.