Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2023-03-24

It's Friday again! Time flies when you're desperately trying to finish a game within the next couple weeks.

Above: Save early and save often

This week I lost a bunch of dialogue (but not like a catastrophic amount, maybe a few dozen lines) after my text editing program crashed (which had never happened before). After stuffing my soul back into my body I rewrote the lost dialogue and then drew this picture. Inspiration from hardship! Life imitates art, as they say. Anyway now I'm compulsively hitting ctrl-s every time I write a new line.

Above: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Like I said last week, I'm focusing on writing dialogue lines now, closely following my story outline. My main focus was on phone calls this week, which make up most of the interesting dialogue, I think. Considering Penny is all alone at the office for half the game. The word count has increased by about 7,000 (which is actually a lot...), and I'm guessing I've got about that much left to go. Give or take a few thousand. Which would bring the final total to around 30,000 words? Which according to my VN playtime research would be about 2+ hours worth of reading. Not counting any time spent playing Lumber Lass. So that's pretty good as far as "story content" goes...

Above: Current status of dialogue file

Next week I'll be mainly focused on Tiger-chan conversations, which will make up the other half of the interesting dialogue. Remember when the game was going to just be a short 10 minute story about Tiger-chan?

Well, anyway...

Above: Smart and sophisticated dialogue as you would find in such a smart and sophisticated game as Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines

While writing and testing I found, and fixed, a lot of bugs and added some quality of life stuff I felt like were missing (eg. labeling conversations you've already seen, etc.).

Above: State-of-the-art "checkmark" technology

The main reason I added this was because actions or talking can lead to new conversations or actions being available, so I wanted a way for the player (me) to know if I had done everything that's currently available without having to go into the menu itself.

Above: "new BGs and other sprites"

Drew some new BGs and other sprites. Added a bunch of new sounds.

Above: Me debugging why the capital "U" character is broken in the game

I also spent time debugging why the capital letter "U" character stopped showing up in the game. I fixed it by changing a pixel in the "U" sprite. Probably some weird cache corruption thing. Or maybe a cosmic ray flipped a bit in my computer's RAM. Whatever.

Above: Must be nice

Last week I hoped that "next week I'll be showing off a picture of a completed dialogue script file and many screenshots of funny dialogue. :)" - Well I failed! But regardless, I did make tons of progress, and now it's actually possible that next week I'll be showing off a picture of a completed dialogue script file and many screenshots of funny dialogue :). So here's hopin'.

As for non-gamedev stuff, I kept up with my 3-jog-a-week schedule, and uhhhhh ate a burger? Didn't really do much beyond work, I guess. Oh yeah, I got a haircut too. My hair kept poking my eyes while I was working.

I'm probably going to make some stickers this week so I can finally start doing all the "Marketing" and "Merch Tie-ins". Now I have a bunch of Penny art to turn into stickers, like the lazy and efficient bum that I am.

Anyway. That's another week in the bag. See you next time. Thanks for your support, as always!