I’ve spent a couple of weeks on this now, and I’ve got the bulk of what needs doing out of the way. It’s nice to work on something I know I’ll finish soon for a change!
As a comparison, here’s the first room from the original Flash version:
And here’s the same room from the remaster:
Or this:
I’ve kind of incorporated the new Clarence sprites into the game - with a toggle for old/new graphics - but haven’t drawn all the frames yet.
The original game had a lot of signs that you could examine to read silly text. I had a better idea, though: I’ve replaced them with slugs, which function the same way (they’re immobile and show a dialogue box when interacted with, though - unlike signs - they have a simple idle animation).
Many of the signs’ dialogue is written as if someone’s talking to Clarence, and there’s a line in the intro about him collecting slugs that only got referenced again once during the date (from what I can recall). So him talking to these ugly creatures that he imagines talk back to him - they’re his only friends - feels more amusing to me than them being inanimate signs (though the idea that his house would be full of such signs is silly too; who wrote them??).
An idea that occurred to me while writing most of this post a couple of days ago, which I haven’t implemented yet but might: Maybe interacting with these slugs would add them to a collection viewable from the menu? They could each have nicknames and everything (that one’s called Sluggles, for example).
In the original, the in-game achievements were depicted as doughnuts (as seen in the screenshot above), because I suppose I thought “he’s fat so he probably likes doughnuts, like Homer Simpson”, or something? So I’ll probably replace those with (differently-coloured) slugs too.
Most of my time has been spent on minor but important technical things. The text in those popups is created using custom sprite font code, rather than the Unity standard for text (TextMeshPro objects); that took some time to get right. I still have the original font file CBC used (which I made using an online tool called FontStruct), but rather than using it directly, I referenced it to draw pixel letters in a spritesheet, and changed some in the process to make all the characters the same width and height (plus I made some other aesthetic tweaks). Technical stuff!
I did some work on a title screen, with this wiggly text from the original (using the original letter sprites). The original had Clarence endlessly running through town, though I wonder whether to change that to something else that’s more fitting. Unsure.
I had to recode how saving and loading games works, and how save slots are displayed. The original only had three save slots; this has six, and I could easily increase that.
I’ve been working on the in-game menus, and revising how those work. In the original, pressing ENTER brought up this:
There were five pages: this screen, work tasks, flirting advice, facts about the girl you’d found, and a map.
The new version looks like this currently:
It’s clearer now what the relationship is between those ‘you currently’ phrases and the items you can collect. Each one’s influenced by whether or not you have two or three items, so the items are now next to the phrase they influence.
Also, in the original, you could collect a hamburger, but it had negative effects on two of the states. And you couldn’t ‘un-eat’ it to undo that. I think I’ll revise that so that if you do collect it, it gives Clarence a heart attack and he dies or something. That fits with the original idea without ruining anything gameplay-wise.
This menu screen would also serve as a task list for the current level. No point having a page for work tips always viewable when that’s only relevant for level 3.
So there’d be five pages: the current level’s tasks, tips you’ve collected, dating advice you’ve been given (you can only get this on level 3, though, so maybe I’ll limit availability to that page until then), global achievements (shown as slugs), and a map.
The map wasn’t especially useful in the original, so I’m looking forward to improving that.
Another change: In the original, the girl’s personality was randomly determined at the start of the game, and in each level you could collect 4 ‘Personality Tips’ by interacting with laptops.
Now, each level has four voodoo dolls which you can stomp. Doing so causes the girl to post to a social media feed which you could scroll through in the menu:
More interesting, I think, than the page of cold statements in the original. I’ll keep the same tips (and resist the urge to rework them knowing what I do now about Psychology) - I don’t intend to massively rewrite the date at the end of the game - but I will need to write these social media posts to replace the bland “She’s rather into COMPUTERS” etc while conveying the same information.
With other game projects, I’ve usually begun by eagerly and enthusiastically implementing all the mechanics, but my motivation has run out before I can add all the content necessary to make it into a full game. With this, almost all the content’s already there (levels, music, etc), so once I finish the mechanics - and I’m almost at that point after less than two weeks - I’ll be pretty much done. Which is a nice change of pace.
I started writing this post a couple of days ago, and had some whole second half where I talked more about mental health stuff in response to comments on the previous post. I wrote a lot, though, so I’ve decided to split that off into another post, which I’ll hopefully post in a couple of days! Post the post. Yes.
I like the idea of slugs instead of signs. And the changes do look like great improvements. Glad things are going well with it. I await the game with excitement.
Also, I am finally starting to recover from illness. Be nice to work on my project again.
One last thing. I mentioned before that I once made a game with Alora Fane: Creation once (Made for my nephew and having him as the main character) and never got around to making the second part (but I will). The first part is playable and finished. I was wondering if you would like to play it, and I can send you the file.
I love the changes! An idea for the hamburger might be to add some sort of reference on the date level where the ladyfriend would say if you order a steak for example, that "at least it's not as greasy as a hamburger, which might give you a heart attack or something!"
Not sure about turning Clarence's room pink. I agree it fits better, but the room had a nice contrast that you can easily recognize the characters moving around; and the pink might throw that off, unless it were a really pale shade of pink. Maybe.
The social media feed looks like it fits better in the 2020's. It's kind of crazy how social media in 2010 differs drastically from 2025, considering it's only 15 years apart. Speaking of social media, what if the "menu" was instead changed to "phone", and going on the menu would be the equivalent of just checking your phone? That would update the game to be a bit more modern, I think? Maybe you can even technically pull up the menu/phone from the date scene, but each time you do the lady friend complains about people being on the phone and not paying attention to the people in front of them, and the relationship-o-meter instantly goes down at an increasing rate each time you check, and maybe the third time she gets suspicious that you've been stalking her!