sugarmint
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Malevolent Planet 2D Status Update - Merge In Progress
🕑 Added 2023-03-31 12:54:25 +0000 UTCHappy Friday! This one will be short I hope :D
As a sequel of my latest status update, here is what I planned to do and what I achieved.
The latest update which was released to $5+ patrons yesterday because it's supposed to be a timed/testing build release was supposed to include:
- New Bedtime Illustration. It is in✅
- A Solo Player Animation. It is in, part of the Suspicious Grass Quest ✅
- A lesbian animation. It is in, the second animation of the Suspicious Grass Quest ✅
- A bunch of new dialogues. They are in ✅, but the visual layout for the way I present the mystery in the conversation UI is still in progress.
- A new mechanic where your character gets an increase in lust the longer she stays in an area. It is in, and part of the Suspicious Grass Quest ✅
- A minimap. Partially done, more details below ❌
- The NPC Inventory System. Partially done, more details below ❌
On what is remaining:
- The minimap. The system for this is mostly done, I just need to draw a mask and add it into the game. Example below of what it could look like
- The NPC Inventory System. The system is relatively done and tested, at least for equipping to a NPC and to the player at the same time without things getting broken. However, I had to draw up a bunch of versions of our chibis so we'll have an undressed body and separate layers for the clothes which will overlap the character's sprite. For each of these I need to do some manual work that I can't automatize so it will take like 2-3 hours of interrupted work to make every NPC use the inventory system.
Let me reiterate, the NPC inventory system once fully integrated will help me to develop dialogues much faster because I won't have to manually use sequencer commands I cannot see a live preview of to add the right clothes to the NPCs, now they will automatically be added/removed to the avatar and to the chibi.
This was the summary, but even though it can look good on paper I'm not very happy. I'm trying to get a grip over the financial responsibilities I have which makes it difficult to do one thing at once and it leads me to starting to work on something for the game then being distracted by a separate work coding/art contractor job.
I have faith that with more public releases and better advertisement, it'll be easier to hold myself up solely through the development of my game(s) which would allow me to release more content and stability in the game.
If I wasn't so tired during weekends I would be putting some work into reaching this goal sooner, but I think that my sleep will get better soon because of some health measures I've taken (unrelated to anything work related, not burnout).
Regardless of everything, I'm going to prepare the WebGL version of the Medical Room update next week for a public release for this purpose. Maybe more public updates over time will give more publicity to the game and will help gather more support.
In the end I'm grateful to everyone who's supporting me right now and I don't ask more from any of you, it's only a game of numbers in the end because if 1000 people would like my game so much they'd pay the price of a coffee for it per month ($5) that would most likely cover all my expenses and let me focus solely and fully on development.
At the same time to show my gratitude for all the support, I want to try something new in addition to the incremental updates I've mentioned last week.
We'll start with one animation per week. Although it takes more time to write dialogues, develop the content around the dialogues with animations, and test for bugs than the animations themselves I believe it's a good approach to make sure that I'm on track and I'm not neglecting development responsibilities.
In summary, I have a few more days of work to get the suspicious quest release into a proper state then I'll continue with the day3.0 flow update.
Thank you for your attention, turns out this status update was also not short :D Have a great weekend!
Comments
SugarMint
That's definitely possible, for now the npcs having inventories will allow me to automatically equip clothes to their avatars as well based on what the npc is wearing. So far I've had to use a sequencer command to display a shirt, pants and so on and it can get tiring and be prone to errors :D In addition to that the npcs having their own inventory can definitely expand on what gameplay mechanics we can introduce. Let me know if you have any suggestions that come to mind :)
Vevenue
Npcs having their own inventory? Will we be able to trade/steal stuff? ;o
Like for SWTOR reference
