Initial Build!

Hello!

The initial prototype build for Cooped Up! is now live! Since it is a prototype, everything is very buggy and looks atrocious, but I am currently working to fix this! I made this build in a week, so uh oopsie.

For anyone who is not my professor or one of my friends, I'm surprised you found this game! I'm so sorry about its current state T_T. I hope you come back at a later date once I've completed everything  and made everything work and look like an actual game.

How the game came to be

The initial idea for Cooped Up! was an egg-laying game. After some brainstorming, I was able to come up with the idea for a casual, business simulation game.  The  median salary of an egg farmer is ~$36,000,  and being raised in the United States, having the motivation to make money be paying off medical debt, made sense.  Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of making games very silly, so the game later evolved to include story elements with the chickens and landlords. I find creepypastas and internet lore very interesting, so I came up with the idea that the chicken you communicate with, Spongy, would operate similar to those creepypastas. Spongy got her name from an SCP, SCP-3620. Cooped Up!'s Spongy is very different in that she is intelligent and doesn't infinitely generate pieces of her, but I felt the current lore of the chickens and the loan sharks would still feel fitting to name her that. 

Physical Prototype

Playtesting for the physical prototype was mostly to check if the game was enjoyable to play and the progression system was fair. Randomly drawing a card and then stressing about if you have enough money to feed your chickens isn't exactly "entertaining." After some tweaking with how reputation affects egg and chicken prices as well as adjusting the time it takes to travel and complete tasks, the game became more enjoyable from a gameplay perspective. Players mostly enjoyed the story elements, however. At this stage, there was not specific dialogue, but the absurdity of some of the events made it entertaining.

Digital Prototype

As you can see, the game is still in this stage.  The purpose of this stage is to continue to ensure that the game is somewhat enjoyable as well as fully flesh out dialogue options. Hopefully, having the game handle calculations for players will make the rules less confusing since players don't have to keep track of how many days have passed, what their reputation is with each faction, and how much money they have on hand themselves. The tables made playtesting more easy since the players didn't have to compute the equations themselves, but the number of variables players had to keep track of was still overwhelming. Once I get the very major data bug resolved, then hopefully this issue will be completely removed from players.

Known issues and other things that need to be fixed/updated:

Data between scenes

• Data does not transfer between scenes. This is the first thing that is going to be resolved because it is impossible to progress the game with this issue. 

Handling Exceptions

• Currently, when the player inputs an incorrect data type (string instead of an int or the like) or enters a value that is not valid for the task they are trying to complete, the game will throw an exception and will likely crash.  I plan to write code to handle these issues without the game going kaboom.

Events

• Not all the events are actually implemented. The events that are supposed to occur every few days are not appearing on the specified days. This is partly because of the progression issue.
• Characters sometimes do not show when they are speaking. For some reason, only one character be able to show their associated image during an event scene.
• There is a problem playing the dialogue. For some reason on some occasions,  players have to repeatedly press "f" to progress to the next line of dialogue.
• There is a bug where players can see the </i> at the end of italicized lines.

Visuals

• I know they are uh...minimalistic, but my friend was kind enough to offer to make some official sprites for characters. Unfortunately, graphic design is my burden, so the color scheme on scenes looks abysmal.

Audio

• Currently players are left with the sound of their own thoughts as background music. I am not a musician nor do I have any musician friends, so I will be searching for free audio I can use for the next build.

Anyway, it is currently 3:45 AM and I am eepy so i go honk shoo now goodbye