(Yes, I'm still working on this And a lot!) Hey! After countless delays, [the 2022 DEMO Update] thing is finally ready! (You really know you messed up when you originally called it [the 2021 DEMO Update], huh?) https://store.steampowered.com/app/904460/ First, sorry for the lack of updates over the last few months. Trust me, that doesnt mean I havent been working. I invested a great part of this time learning code, creating tools and systems, porting the game to a new version of the engine, and well, doing everything in my hands to make the mechanics and presentation be as polished as possible. (This is going to be a pretty long, boring update note, so please, ignore it now or hang in there with me.) (If you found something weird/broken, please report it to contact@portvalleygame.com, and Ill fix it ASP.)
Okay! About the update itself:
This is an updated version of [the 2020 DEMO]. This means that the puzzle structure and plot are basically the same. However, apart from endless mechanical and visual improvements, you will find 2 times de amount of dialogues, new animations, brand-new scenes, and a bunch of surprises. (I'd recommend checking everything out, just in case) Some things the update brings to the table: [olist]
I decided to port the whole game to a new engine version (not without complications!) to take advantage of some features. This affected performance, but I managed to keep it graphically inexpensive thanks to some cheap tricks. (Actually, the game should load 3-4 times faster now!) This update made possible most things youll see on this list... so Id say it was worth it.
The game uses 3 different techniques to make backgrounds and characters react to lights in a somewhat realistic way. For example, characters and items now drop shadows and are affected by dynamic light sources.
Apart from traditional animation, Ive designed a system that makes characters subtly (or not that subtly) move and rotate their heads/torsos procedurally, so they never really stand still in place.
Making this was not easy. But l really think it gives a lot of life to them, (even if theyre indeed literally just standing still).
The old cursor had 3 animations. The new one over 30, and context-sensitive!
This is, by far, the trickiest thing Ive animated so far, so lets hope it doesnt just break! Heres the map of how animations are linked:
(No, I dont get it either.)
This was a players suggestion that I immediately added because I loved it. Hold click and move the cursor to walk, move it a bit further to run. Easy-peasy!
This is 100% optional and compatible with traditional point & click movement so, dont worry, you can use your preferred movement system at any time.
It now has 6 available slots (crazy stuff!), and it's fully animated and compatible with the mouse wheel to make your life a little less extremely tedious. This means you can finally use the wheel to show/hide the inventory and shift between items! Additionally, if your mouse is fancy enough, you can just use the secondary wheel to shift between items without needing to hover the inventory. (Now, thats convenient!)
Also, every item has been redrawn to fit the new inventory design, allowing for more detailed and interesting sprites.
Not much to say. The old one was incredibly lame, and Ive always liked games with cool menu designs. I tried to make one and this is the result:
Ive been working with a couple of composers on an original, professional soundtrack for the game. In the demo, you will see (hear?) some of those tracks, as well as remastered/cleaner versions of already existing ones. But, of course, this is still a work in progress. (You cant really show music with GIFs, sorry.)
I couldnt find a pixel art font that I liked So, I made one, pixel by pixel, letter by letter.
I called it RedArrow, and its free to use for anyone, by the way.
[/olist] ___
Now, about the game itself
Some questions someone may ask: [olist]
Mostly writing code and debugging. I invested these past few months properly learning code and building my own set of tools to stop relying on 3rd party solutions, as they tended to be buggy and limit the features I had in mind. Unity is not RPG Marker, its a competent 3D engine, and I knew I wasnt taking full advantage of it. Thanks to these tools, things will go WAY faster once the asset creation part is over, which is the longest and most frustrating part. After all, I'm a single person writing, drawing and animating every single thing of this game. (And, for some reason, I do like to animate a lot of useless stuff?!) These tools have completely changed the way the game is built, how characters/objects are animated, how dialogues/texts are displayed, how the camera works, how sprites react to lights, how sounds play, how characters move etc. So, yeah, its a pretty big step up.
Being honest, this demo was never meant to be updated again. Retroactively adding mechanics is never a great idea, and adding tricky stuff like the new character animation engine meant I literally had to remake and reanimate every single character of the demo for every single scene... And that, trust me, it's not exactly easy! Furthermore, this demo update has served as an "anticipated testing phase" for all the stuff Ive been working on. So, if a bug was found, or I wanted to improve/add a feature, the update had to be pushed back, as it wouldnt make sense to update it knowing it was unfinished/buggy or would be outdated in a week. And, of course... There were also annoying last-minute bugs and incompatibility issues with Linux and macOS versions. I finally decided to fix everything, in every version, before pushing any update. And this is basically all Ive been doing, almost exclusively, for the last few weeks. (It has not been fun!)
So, when I released [the 2020 DEMO], I said I wouldn't release any other new demo until the game was finished for a reason: I always invest absurd amounts of time making them! Even if they're vertical slices of the game, I always try to make them feel like "self-contained episodes" with an organic progression and ending. Thus, dialogues have to be rewritten, puzzles need to be redesigned and, of course, additional scenes have to be written in to fill in gaps and provide context. Its just too much work. However, as I wanted to have something new to show you guys, I decided to "just update the already existing demo with all the stuff I had been working on"... Which didn't exactly work as intended, as this probably took more time than making a whole new one!
It's going well! After literal months of stressful debugging, I think I'll go back to drawing for a while and hopefully finish the remaining backgrounds, (which are not that many at this point). But, dont worry, writing code was not all I had time to do: The plot is already written (as are most of the dialogues), puzzles are designed, the "code part" should be finished now (hopefully!), we're working on the soundtrack, and there are just a bunch of backgrounds and characters left to design and animate. (Will I provide anything similar to a release date, then? No! Because Ive already proven how terrible Im at that!) After finishing the art creation part, things should speed up A LOT, as I'll finally be able to focus entirely on scene building, which is what my tools are actually most useful for. [/olist] Oh, and here are a bunch of new screenshots just because:
And, again, please just let me know if anything explodes, okay...? (If possible, notify any bug to: contact@portvalleygame.com and Ill fix it ASAP) Anyway, have fun!
[ 2022-03-07 12:30:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
Okay, this took longer than I wished, but I needed a couple of weeks of just painting backgrounds to recover from the burnout that was releasing the 2020 DEMO.
After seeing some people struggling to get through the second part of the demo, I thought it would be a good idea to take back the old demo's hint system and adapt it into the new one.
So how does the system work?
I dont like boring hint systems that outright tell what the solution is, so this one has little tweak: If you choose to enable the HINTS in the menu, youll find a very special item in your inventory: An overpowered Fortune Cookie (1st half of the demo) or a Hint Phone (2nd Half). ___ Every time you use the Hint Cookie, a clue in the form of a vague cryptic prediction will appear inside.
Every time you use the Hint Phone, you'll make a call to your mysterious partner. He'll tell you about his whereabouts and what he's up to while he waits for you which are of course subtle hints about what you should do to solve a puzzle.
(So yeah youll have to use you brain in order to advance anyway!) If you have many fronts open, its possible that the same hint will be repeated once or twice. If that happens, just keep insisting until you see a different one. But please try to play without hints unless you get too stuck, okay? Thats kind of the fun. Also thanks for playing! ___ PS - Oh, and here are a couple of the new backgrounds in case someone cares about this kind of stuff: (Click to expand)
[ 2020-07-19 16:44:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi. This is the first 'important' update. Probably, the Spanish translation sounds like 'the big feature', but the improvements in loading times, bug fixes and the overall better optimization make the demo much more stable now.
The Spanish translation
It's not just a text translation. The demo has been 'rewritten' in Spanish and many extra efforts have been made to make it as good as possible. Including:
- Manually adding the '' and the rest of the latin characters to the game's font. ('','','','','', etc)
- Making again all the visuals and animations of the UI in Spanish (which uses pictures and not text, so really fun!)
- Making a system that dynamically replaces English graphics with Spanish ones! (I'm kind of proud about this one it's really not that hard, but adds a lot to a translation!)
(*Example of English graphics being also translated. I'll try to keep this consistent with future translations!)
Optimization and screen rations
Sadly, the demo launched with no much time for testing, so it was not possible to properly optimize it or make it compatible with every screen ratio until today! Some of the improvements included in this update:
- Save file loading times have been reduced from 10 seconds to 2.
- The game no longer needs to load the first time is launched.
- No loading times between different sets.
- Sound no longer "bangs" after loading a save file.
- Apart from 4:3, EVERY screen ratio should be now compatible. (And I'm working on the one left)
Bug fixes
Many bugs have been fixed, but the most important ones are:
- Music no longer fails if loading on the second floor of the cinema.
- Car animations are now always synchronized with the police agent's.
- During the battle, it was possible to break the game doing "something". It's impossible now.
- You can no longer take the empty glass with you if cheating (that could also break the game, actually!).
[ 2020-06-28 02:57:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi.
So, I managed to include the old demo inside the new one. Just press Launch the original DEMO on the main menu and yeah, thats mostly it!
Just dont expect anything too fancy. The demo literally closes itself and launches the old one (annoying resolution screen included!). I really tried to properly merge both demos, but that has proven to be extremely buggy and difficult, as many assets share names and they run on different engine versions.
(Also, this way Steam achievements and save files can work separately without messing everything up!)
This is now available for Windows and Mac while I'm still trying to figure out how to make it work on Linux. For the time being, the original demo can be found in the installation folder under the name "[Original DEMO 2019]" and can be played by running the executable inside (x86_64 or x86).
So yeah! Not too classy, but does the trick?
Bug fixes
- While testing the new Linux build I shamefully found that the x86 executable was somehow missing, so I guess some users have had issues trying to play. That should be fixed now. Please, let me know if that's not the case. Sorry.
- Fixed a bug that made it possible to break a puzzle if solving it in a specific order.
- Fixed a bug that allowed the pause menu to be used during an animation where it was supposed to be VERY locked.
___ PS - Also let me know if something explodes.
[ 2020-06-19 14:30:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi! Its been a while. So better have some news, right? Yeah! Development is going great and is getting more and more ambitious every single day. Sadly, I cant share things like a release date yet but I can do something else to let you know how things are looking. Joining the Steam Summer Festival, I decided to take some of the new content from the game (and many hours of sleep-time!) to make a temporary exclusive gameplay DEMO showing some new levels, puzzles, the new User Interface (completely reworked from scratch!), animations and overall look of the game at the current state of development! https://store.steampowered.com/app/904460/Port_Valley/
So, whats this?
- A demo with all-new content focused in gameplay, animations, mechanics and the new UI.
- Should be around 1 hour - 1 hour 30 minutes long? Dunno.
- Most probably a temporary demo. The original one will be re-uploaded after the Festival.
Known bugs and considerations:
As I wasnt counting on making a new public demo until around a month ago, there are a couple of bugs I just had no human time to fix. Sorry!
- 16:10 Resolutions crop the Bottom part of some menus. Its still playable, but yeah, please try to stick to 16:9 (1920x1080, ideally) for the intended experience (pixel art and screen resolutions dont exactly get on well together!).
- The save system is a little laggy on load and may not work properly at some very specific points. I strongly recommend playing the demo straight to the end to avoid issues.
- Only English this time!
- Probably some typos here and there. I hate it when ith appens.
[ 2020-06-16 18:12:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi. Okay, this is something I wasnt really planning on adding originally. After seeing some (many) people struggling to get through the very first puzzle of the demo I thought it may be a good idea to help them out instead of just letting them drop the demo in frustration while cursing me out (this seems to be a bad thing in game development).
- And how does the system work?
Every time you use the cookie, a clue in the form of a vague cryptic prediction will appear inside. So yeah youll have to use you brain in order to advance anyway! If you have many fronts open, its possible that the same hint will be repeated once or twice. If that happens, just keep insisting until you see a different one. I'll do my best to prevent this from happening with a future update. But please try to play without hints unless you get too stuck, okay? That's kind of the fun. And thanks for playing!
[ 2019-04-03 12:33:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi.
You may have suspected something by reading the title, but, surprise [the competent DEMO] is now available for Linux players!
- Okay, so why didnt it happen earlier?
Because of the way I handle some resources and features of the game (including videos and translations), a Linux port always resulted in a sad broken mess of unexpected bugs, compatibility issues and tears.
All those issues required to be identified and fixed one by one, so, with the demo out, I finally had the time (and patience) to make it work. (Or at least that's what I think.)
This was the last milestone for [the competent DEMO] so, excluding probable (*guaranteed) bug fixes I now consider it to be stable and its development finished.
So who knows, maybe expect news soon.
Thanks for playing!
[ 2019-03-23 00:59:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi. Over the last few months I took some decisions that basically changed the core of the game. For good. I think. (and hope.) But that also meant the original Demo was no longer a good representation of the game, and that's why, well That's why I made it again. Forget about the old Demo. That NEVER happened. And say hi to [the competent DEMO]. https://store.steampowered.com/app/904460/Port_Valley/ A demo with more content, new plot elements, improved visuals, and a much (trust me), MUCH better performance.
CHANGES
- Plot and Gameplay -
- 3 main characters instead of just 1. That means 3 points of view of the same day! *
- New puzzles.
- New characters and an extended plot.
- The inventory is now always visible. (YOU WIN OK?)
- All backgrounds and character designs have been improved or directly re-drawn.
- MANY new animations and visual effects. (Who laughs now, Pi*ar.)
- New menu interfaces (They don't suck anymore!)
- New tracks and sound effects.
- No more random FPS drops. The game is now graphically undemanding and could run on a potato.
- Loading times reduced from 5-7 seconds to basically non existent!
- Videos no longer cause problems with low-spec systems.
- Demo size reduced from 345mb to 70mb. That's a 20% of the original size. THAT MEANS I DID MY PART.
[ 2019-03-06 18:55:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
One by one, these unusual "heroes" will be forced to interrupt their boring everyday lives and get ready for action before it's just too late. Work, revenge, political conspiracies, a banana balloon… it seems everything was meant to clash on this specific day.
Prepare yourself to overcome the crossed paths of Port Valley’s singular citizens and unfold an obscure plot that seems to be tying together these apparently unrelated stories.
Key Features
- Three plots, three main characters, three difficulty modes, three mayoral candidates… three chances to unfold a bigger and complex story.
- A renewed yet classic Point & Click interface.* (*May not be that renewed.)
- A humoristic and light-hearted tone with annoying self-aware humor. (Which doesn't necessarily mean this is just a comedy…)
- Active NPCs. They're not just there to give you items. They also have their objectives, which may be more important than yours.
- Annoying puzzles with different ways to solve them. For real.
- A day-night cycle. (This would've been SUCH a big deal back in the 90's.)
- A dog.
The DEMO
- It's an hour-long version of one of the three stories of the game: The Delivery Guy plot.
- The puzzles and the plot have been simplified to fit the new length, but it may work as a first taste of Port Valley's mechanics and characters.
- Processor: 2 GHzMemory: 2 GB RAMStorage: 300 MB available space
- Memory: 2 GB RAMStorage: 300 MB available space
- Storage: 300 MB available space
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