I'm getting closer, guys. I know it's late (and that sucks), but a lot has been finished at this point and I'm rounding the final few corners before the finish line.
So, as I'm sure you're aware if you've been reading these logs, this update is about fleshing out the early portions of the game -- things like the time before Liam's first death and the story before your first awakening ceremony. That means that the actual ceremony will need to be put into the game, which is a slightly big deal for me... I like to make these things grand. That said, I'm holding myself back on the animations... there are only two. One from the inside, and one from the outside. When you go to see the girls have their ceremonies, it'll just be still frames.
So, the temple. It's done, guys. It's actually done. I'm about to hit the button on the rendering for the outside cinematic (the roof opening, and the excess divinity venting into the sky), and the interior cinematic has been mostly animated. I need to finish up Bess's facial expressions and add some blinks, then animate Liam's first-person camera, and I can call that finished, too.
So, what still needs to be done?- There's two more scenes that need to be posed and rendered (Lani falling from a tree, and Lani finding a box).- I need to code in the images for all of the new sprites and conversations.- The dialogue regarding the Temple complex needs to updated to match the new building (and side comments about it being a placeholder need to be removed).- There's some incidental writing that needs to be finished.- There are some bugs from the previous version that still need to be corrected... mostly the issue with the day 1 death not triggering and equipment not properly removing stats when unequipped.
I'm going to wrap this version up and send it over to my testing team once all of the images are in place, which should be the middle of next week. Most of the animations will be rendering out over the holiday break (when my kids are out of school and I can't get much work done), and the final release will be sometime in January, depending on how many problems are noted in testing. Hopefully it goes pretty smooth... there weren't many changes to the existing gameplay in this one. (<-- famous last words)
Happy holidays, guys!