Like, Scoob, I Think We're Cutting It Alittle Fine! [21/08/2023]

 Folks!

Over the weekend it was my 21st birthday! Shaaaaa shaaaaa~~~!!! (cheering) And for that reason I gave myself the weekend off for party planning and subsequent party recovery. I had a wonderful time and I love all my friends very much. 

What I do not love is learning that all the semester dates in scheduling chart are wrong! So, actually, NEXT week is playtesting! Now it's atoth a-go-go time.

What we have here is the makings of a new level! Finally! It's the roadside stop where Cliff meets Naomi, and the two go for a walk to find gas at a nearby station. This is a rough, rough greybox, however from it I did learn how to sculpt with brushes in Maya, something I actually did not know was possible until now (doh!) More to come, as you can attempt to see in the sketch, is the rest of the road, set decorations and texturing, and the different camera views which will make use of forced persperctive in order to minimize on creating new geometry.

As you can also see in the above screenshots, major changes have been made to the look of the UI and to how dialogue works. That's all thanks to the marvelous James! He's been hard at work making important changes to the dialogue system so that it can now have customised dialogue choice buttons depending on choice requirements, multicoloured text, and also fixing the bug that caused mutliple dialogues to play at once when standing in multiple trigger colliders. Rounds of applause for James, please! This should, if playtesting goes well, mark the end of my constant need for his help, since I think this dialogue system is now pretty much infallible.

You may also notice another thing different about the UI design; the PM is gone! What was once PM has now, finally, been replaced by individual character relationship metres, in classic visual novel style! Now you can build relationships towards specific characters and potentially unlock content reserved only for them and their "routes". UI is going to be overhauled in a very major way soon, so enjoy some concepts!

Next week is playtesting, and there a couple important things I need by then. One is completed dialogue trees and events within the Den so players can explore and discover on their own without me needing to be over their shoulders. Two is the inventory system and item use needs to be fixed, but this will happen when I meet in-person with Masaya on Thursday. Three is that the Roadside needs to be decorated and beautified very much. And four, I would like to have a rough-out of Lang's model done by the end of the week. Perhaps modelled but so far untextured, and maybe unclothed. Also, if I have time while screwing around and being bored, I want to illustrate Langs final portrait icons, which I have already started. UI, for now, can remain in sketch phases.

I also need to devise a playtesting questionnaire. In this, I want to include questions about rating UI design sketches, asking what players want to see from the rest of the story/what they think might happen/what they are interested or invested in so far, asking if the controls and game-feel is nice, and also judging how they feel about the characters. All this will help improve the game going into the holidays.

Much love, and godspeed to me!

- Monkeydog