Friday Rambles And Game Dev Update 2022-03-17

Wow! It's Friday, again! The march of time sure is inexorable!

This week was busy, as usual. I went to the doctor about my neck thing, and he said I'm A-OK as long as I fix my damn posture. I think I fixed my posture and I'm feeling generally better now.

The big change I made last week is paying dividends. It's so easy to make progress now! And it looks neato.

I added a "Think" action for when Penny's alone with her thoughts. I hope they don't get too dark.

Below: this was how my dialogue flowchart looked like before the "big change last week", at the point where I gave up and was like, this is not manageable:

What it looks like now:

Seriously, it was so difficult to find things in the first go around. To put things in perspective the entire first picture contains the same content as the top left corner of the second picture. Each box is a "node" and without some kind of location based custom menu system (that I made last week) it becomes a complete mess of jumps and menus implemented through the scripting language itself. It became impossible to add or remove things without having to fix a bunch of other nodes. 

I imagine it's doable with better organization, though, but I like this new way better already so *shrug emoji*

The entire right side of the second picture is what I still need to finish as far as dialogue goes. The story outline has been done for a while, so it should just be a matter of squeezing all the talking-text juice out of my ripe brain-fruit. Wish me luck.

Moving on... This week I finished off all the menus and system stuff that every game needs.

Made a title screen. (gif above) Now it's a real game!!! The logo floats up and down. All the buttons work. You may have noticed it's using the same pic I drew last week. I liked it enough to put it in the game and it fits. I drew the damn art, why the heck not put it in the game???!!

The obvious thing here is the title screen being different depending on Penny's status in the game for the current save file, and I might do that if I have time (i won't lol)

Added 1920x1080 windowed resolution setting in addition to the original 1280x720 and fullscreen options. Exciting!

Added exit button confirmation dialog. And with that, all the buttons in the settings screen work. Neato!

The settings menu is pared down to the basics for the title screen. Will be adding bonus content and stuff to use the blank space on the right. It'll probably be the very last thing I do for the game before release.

Added some decoration to the save menu. Also, added a delete button.

Delete save slot confirm dialog. Wow! So interesting! Adding delete functionality took me all day! It works just fine though.

Ain't the prettiest, but I think I'm done (with the menu stuff) now. Finally. I'm just going to use this stuff for every game I make from now on and never deal with it again. But also I think it doesn't look that bad...

Oh, yeah. This was supposed to be in last week's update but I had completely forgotten I added this. It's the dialogue history screen, except it looks like a terminal window! It's a throwback to when games had "boss buttons" that you could press if you were playing the game at work and needed to quickly pretend like you were doing work. Anyway, it's just a fun easter egg that none of the productive and professional people playing my game will use, because they're too busy being productive and professional to play this game at work. Right?

I also worked on a bunch of dialogue and story stuff, most of which I won't be sharing here today. But it's the most important part of the game, after all, because without the story stuff none of all this menu crap even matters.

Working on this particular story about Penny, I've found I have a bunch of other stories I want to tell, so I might add them as free DLC later if the game does well. (Stories from other characters' points of view, like what's Skye been up to during all this? Why is Hana so cranky? What about Salaryman?). After all, I spent all this time building this framework, it'd be a waste to just dump it after one short story!

Hopefully the game will be playable in the next two weeks (looking promising?), so I can submit my build for approval on Steam and deal with final fixes and stuff before my planned release day (4/11, probably). After that I'll be starting my "marketing push" where I make a new trailer and all I do on twitter and insta and patreon is talk about how the game is coming soon and you should all wishlist it. Which kind of sucks because it's embarrassing feeling like I'm begging people to play my game lol I wish I could be cool and be like "yeah buy it or not, whatever" but it's kind of become the trial run for making this my livelihood so it's a bit nerve wracking. Also it's scary putting my writing and art and soul out there for all to see, but it's not like I haven't already been doing that with my comics and zines and stuff I guess...

anyway

I love writing up these blog posts, because it gives me motivation to get stuff done to show off here, lol. During the course of the week I put in blank spaces in a Patreon post draft where I want to put in a screenshot of something I completed, and then I make sure to finish that thing by Friday. Hopefully next week I'll be showing off a picture of a completed dialogue script file and many screenshots of funny dialogue. :)

Yeah, that's it for the week. Have a good weekend! Thank you for your support, as always!!!