Building The Thief Minigame

Hi everybody! Pull your belly up to the bar, and let me get you a drink. Because it’s time for another Innkeep developer update.

Last time, we had a big picture overview of the kinds of things that we’ve had to work on now that we are moving from a prototype to an actual game. Check out that post if you haven’t already to see what we’ve been up to the past year!

Next I think it would be cool to do a series of posts looking at these different systems in more detail. (I’ve already talked a bit about the eavesdropping and charming system before, although I think we can revisit it at some point to show more concretely how it works).

Let’s kick off this series with a look at the thief minigame.

Initial Concept

From very early on in the development process for Innkeep, I realized that you should be able to go into the bedrooms of your guests and steal from them while they slept. To this end, I built out the playspace to allow you to walk into the bedrooms. We have eight rooms along the back wall of the commonroom, and as you enter each the walls fade away to reveal the inside.

(Exploring bedrooms at night.)

I also was quite happy with how the lighting turned out. As you can see here, the player is holding a candle during the thieving sequence, as it’s during the dead of night. Getting cast light to look decent with our 2D space was a bit of a challenge, and there are several layers of tricks used here. It worked out pretty well! It might be deserving of its own blog post in the future.

As for the thief minigame itself, I knew you would interact with sleeping guests to launch a separate window, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it would look like. Eventually I put together a mock concept for use in an early trailer for the steam page.

As you can see, we have a window showing a sleeping guest, and the player stealing different items from different places. Some of those items are hidden beneath other things, like a blanket concealing a ring, or a shirt concealing a chain. We also have a sleep bar, which is slowly depleting. The idea was that once it had fully depleted you’d be kicked out of the minigame (and the room). Items that you steal were displayed in a little box at the bottom of the screen.

In Search of an Inventory System

After this mock-up the design stayed untouched for a while, before I revisited it early this year. Although I was generally happy with the direction, it definitely needed a bit of work. One of the most important things to consider was the player inventory. The little box at the bottom of the screen which I had included in the mock-up was just a placeholder. In fact, until this point, the player had no inventory in general to speak of. All the supplies of the inn are actually stored somewhere physically in the play space. For example, the tankards are under the bar. The firewood is by the fire. And so on. When you grab those items, your sprite actually changes to show you holding them. You can only grab one kind of thing at a time with this system. This was to help give you a more tactile sense of actually being in the play space, handling these different objects. An abstract general inventory