Status Update - Keeping Focus

Hello my MODDERS and MODIFIERS

We have officially entered the spooky month, so I hope everyone is doing well despite all the ghouls roaming around.

Today I wanted to talk a bit about the current status of the new update, and also talk a bit about some game design issues that I faced this time.

How's the update?

Last week I finished all the code updates for 0.5.0, which includes a new event to unlock the store, the store itself, the inventory system, the gifting system, a new minigame, the voice pack system and all the coding related to the Vampire Special Event.

As always, I took some extra time while doing these big code changes to try and make them "future proof", meaning that when I want to add more items in the future, most of the code is already in place and I don't need to rewrite everything.

The Vampire Special Event also needed a big code update, since the idea for it was to not use the usual mechanics of the regular updates.
Unlike the normal MODIFICATIONS, which tend to focus on gradual day-by-day transformations, this one will function more like one long event that will end with a big sexy scene at the end.

This week, after all the code updates were finished, I've started working on the sexy art, and I hope to have it mostly done by the end of the week (while missing the facial expressions and additional VFXs that I normally do when writing).

Focused design

This update had a couple days where I struggled to know what exactly I wanted the special to be like.
I knew how the special would start, I knew the minigame, and I knew the sexy scene - however I couldn't pinpoint how exactly to connect these 3.

Originally, the idea was to make a sort of escape room level, where the player would need to explore a series of rooms and solve puzzles.
I still like this idea - and I'm not saying I won't use it in the future - but when I was doing it, I realized that it wasn't that fun, and I wasn't having fun making it.

I don't really enjoy making backgrounds, and after designing one room and realizing I would have to make a bunch more and add puzzles onto them, made me realize that would take a long time.

And so I decided to take a step back and think - is this what I should be focusing on?
And I realized that no. This is not something I want to be doing, and it's not something that adds that much value to the game itself.

When creating things it's easy to get tunnel vision.
It's something I try to avoid, but it's something that naturally happens.
And when creating things in the way that I do - where I do everything, it's important to be able to always keep this in mind, and try to use the limited resources and time that I have in the most important things.

In the end, I scrapped the escape room element and went which a much simpler game design for this update, that still gives the general spooky vibe I wanted for this update - and I think it ended up being a lot better since it was less over-complicated.

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That's it for now!!
This update became a lot bigger that I originally intended, with all the system updates, the voice pack implementation and the special - but I like how it's looking so far, and I can't wait to share it with you all!!

As always, thank you for your continued support!!
I'll go back to the dungeon and continue filling some blood packs.

Ⓣ