hi everyone!! its been a long month ..
before i start, i want to remind everyone i launched a patreon discord last month !! so far i believe most of you have joined but if you havent yet i post a lot about the game there and am always willing to answer any questions about it so consider joining its been fun
https://discord.gg/DWpfMjdFxr
otherwise ill start with the big stuff this month !!
the main focus of my work this month has been overhauling the games map art and making it feel much closer to my initial vision for the game, ive already worked on a solid chunk of the prologue and hopefully i can keep making headway on that front going forward
heres a video briefly showcasing what ive done so far !!
you may have noticed that the only dialogue i showcased on the bus was just placeholder stuff, ill go ahead and say now that this will be my main focus as of this month !! i want the bus interactions to be incredibly indepth to help introduce the player to how the game will handle consequences and condition them to think before they make choices
as an example, in the initial build of the bus i had a huge dialogue tree involving care, you could either annoy her by telling her not to smoke on the bus (causing the rest of her interactions to be more aggressive towards you) or give her a lighter if you found one in your house earlier which would cause her to speak more amicably towards you
thats not all though, i also had every dialogue option account for every other dialogue option you chose, so if you told her not to smoke on the bus and then asked for a cigarette she would be confused and infuriated by your contradictory behavior (for the record, this is very outdated dialogue, darek would not ask for a cigarette ..)
the main point is that i want the bus interactions to feel incredibly natural instead of just being static repeating dialogue that feels robotic and immersion breaking, so i want to spend a lot of time making sure i get those right
look forward to a little showcase of that next month!! i might post a bit about it in my discord as well :03
lastly, i wanted to mention that theres some new music for the game thanks to my super talented friends !! a lot regarding that has been going on behind the scenes but i wont go further in detail until theres more finished stuff to show off
check my soundcloud if you wanna take a listen !! and make sure to check song descriptions if you like what you hear and want to see more from my friends as ive linked their preferred platforms
naturally, the new maps and all of their little interactions was a pretty big undertaking for me, so it took up most of my time this month.. hopefully as i get more practice i can make them faster and will have more time to work on other stuff
anyways, heres a couple smaller things i got done on the side:
you may have noticed this in my prologue showcase, but the game has proper fullscreen support now!! i tried my best to pick a resolution with minimal subpixel distortion as that was my main reason for not implementing it sooner, its still present unfortunately but it looks much better than its original implementation and the nice little border surrounding it looks nice so im happy enough with it to stick with it .. it also makes any gameplay footage MUCH easier to look at, super sorry that ive only been putting out like 480p stuff on youtube for so long because wow that was bad ........
besides that, ive also redone some minor graphics, notably the little character opinion change notification:
the previous graphics were sloppy placeholders, so im very happy with these !!
unfortunately, thats about all ive got this month .. sorry its a shorter one, as i said a lot of work went into the map stuff so i dont have as much to show off as id like, hopefully thats okay
look forward to finally seeing character dialogue next month, and remember to join the discord if you havent!!
thank you so much for your support as always and i hope you all look forward to whatever this month brings!!