This is the preliminary design for the sleepers (and attachable string binkys). Right now I'm mostly working on character outfits and creating all the base characters, NPCs and the heroes. Because I'm trying to go for realism it takes quite a bit of time because each character essentially needs to have their own wardrobe. With the students/orphans I can cheat a little by having a standard uniform they wear for most of the time which cuts down on some of the work. Each of the adult NPCs though needs to have at least four different outfits with three different color combinations of each of those outfits in order to keep things good and mixed/variable. I'll post some of the adult NPC profile setups next.

I also have a new demo:
http://www.backwater-productions.ne.....binet_Demo.exe

If you move the character in front of the middle cabinet and press the action button it'll take you to one of the Maniac Mansion themed portions of the game. My eventual goal is to make systems like that all over the map, so you could say walk up to the kitchen sink, press the action key and it'll then take you to a more direct, front view of the kitchen sink area where you can move the mouse cursor around and perform various tasks. It's sort of like how in the old RPG games you could do a "search" of any spot on the map you liked, and you could find things, but there was never any graphical representation of that searching process, which is what I hope to cover with my game.

I've also decided to do things a ~lil~ differently than I originally planned, which will equate to less realism, but I think it makes the game play more fun overall. That point being the collection of items. Originally I had intended on a rather complex system involving actual item size, how much a person could actually physically carry and various sorts of backpacks and containers one could get to store more things in, but ultimately, while that idea would certainly add a lot of realism to the game, it would in effect hinder the game play in that it would be a lil ~too~ real, as in, an annoying, cumbersome process of constantly having to go back to some area to drop things off and then having to run back and forth whenever you needed a new set of tools/items/whatever.

So basically what I'm planning on now is just a traditional item carrying load with the ~implied~ but not dealt with, running back and forth. Basically your item list will be like the trunk in your dorm and whenever you pick an item it'll just be implied that you ran back to your dorm and got it. And as such obviously in certain conditions and circumstances you won't have access to your items, which will add a nice challenging layer I can throw in here and there.

So anywho, that's what I'm working on at the moment with the game.