A month or so ago I also played the Sputzna beta and finding out that it wasn't going to be finished was kind of depressing to me. Now what I'm making isn't meant to be anything like that but I did take some ideas and there is a spaceship and a planet.... so I guess you could say that the idea for this level wouldn't exist without this level. But the thing about Sputzna that fascinated me most was actually the way that Farik made it so you could actually operate the computer to look at your mission briefing or whatever and I decided that it was a wonderful idea and way to convey a lot of information at once in a game where dialogue needs to be very short to fit well and cutscenes that convey information may end up being jarring or ignored because you end up feeling so impotent about the way they convey information.

So throughout this level there are many computer terminals that will shift to a separate screen that uses a custom object overlayed over Juni and to simulate the screen flickering, it's basically text on a monitor that it switches to when you press down on a computer terminal but the fact that an object can also be animated gave me the idea to make it look more realistic or at least more visually interesting, I make each terminal custom object two images that loop between slightly brighter and greener text to a text and background that is duller simulating screen flicker.

Anyway, down to the guts of the idea and I won't go into too much detail about the story itself but rather how the story will unfold, or how it can unfold. On my last level I had to use different areas or endings to recontextualize the journey to mean something different by having different endings but this time I'd rather it be a linear story with different endings and different locations based upon what paths you take or what things you find. So the level will have branching paths that lead to different endings and different areas depending on what you find or where you go.

Also, for a while I was doing different things to try to understand how to implement an animated intro sequence/title screen. First I created an animated background as a custom object that scrolled through stars and looped that and put a custom object that was the game title slowly fading in over that, and both of those worked surprisingly well. To get around the fact that Juni is invisible I made a third custom object also on the top layer that would wait until after the title loaded then a little blinking down arrow would appear and blink until you went to the next screen, sort of like a press start type deal. Well, long story short I opened up Shipwrecked and looked at how cutscenes were managed in that and my brain kind of exploded in a moment of dawning "duh".