sugarmint
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Malevolent Planet 2D Status Update - Better Late than Never
🕑 Added 2023-03-16 11:32:57 +0000 UTCHappy Thursday! I haven't posted a status update in a while, but even though it's taking a bit from my working time it's not nice to not keep you updated on the progress.
I have recently caught some kind of illness/cold which made it difficult to breathe and to sleep which meant that a few days couldn't be used productively for content/coding, only for art.
However, there are some good news as well. I've managed to make plenty of progress on making the inventory system work to some degree for NPCs. This means that I can equip items to NPCs in the same way I can to the player character. The clothes chibi are wearing are theoretically supposed to make the avatar wear the "avatar" version of these clothes, as you can see in the video above.
The NPC in that dialogue doesn't have any predefined/scripted clothing changes, which has the following benefits over the traditional method:
- Less development time spent on sequencing animator play commands to make the avatars wear clothes they're supposed to (or none if that's the case)
- Less development time spent on testing whether I didn't mess up the sequencer commands, because when I use them I can't see the changes in real time, I need to start the game, play the dialogue somehow, navigate to that line and see.
- Bypassed a limitation of the traditional method, which was the fact that clothes wouldn't render immediately when starting the dialogues for the NPCs, which led to them being naked on the first dialogue line or maybe randomly thorough the dialogues.
Of course, these are the theoretical benefits. Practically, I will have to do some work to develop the system further, to equip chibis in the game with clothes, and so on. I can likely save some time by coding the system to ignore the older content, but it's too early to tell.
On the art side, I've drawn a new bedtime scene which was meant to be added at the end of Day2 together with the dialogue that plays which reflects your choices at the end of Day2. At this point however, we can keep it for Day3.
Since I mentioned Day3, I have the following plan to give content more frequently without it being too taxing on my own time schedule:
- Separate day3 into a bunch of small content areas, which you start exploring from the start of day3.
- For every small content area which has at least one static drawing or maybe even one animation, release a timed update to $5+ patrons that comes after some testing to $1 patrons as well.
- Work on incremental additions to content and test these additions as I add them.
This means that you won't need to wait for me to finish day3 to explore the content day3 has to offer. On the art side we're fast, but on the coding/writing/development side we're not so fast.
If I had known unity development can be so difficult for a solo dev because of the bugs you easily cause when using things like a dialogue system, an inventory system and so on, I would've probably gone for Ren'py.
Hopefully there's a benefit to sticking with unity though, such as more advanced systems later on together with the fancy lighting system that make the delays in content worthwhile.
Other NSFW games that use unity out there usually have teams for this, at least 2 coders and one writer. Considering that I have to do most of everything myself, I hope you'll be patient with me as I try to increase the revenue and delegate busy work to contractors. Some people have offered to help me with coding and so on for free, but I don't think it's fair to let people "work" for me without pay.
For the text game, I'm still aware that there's content I need to add in. Scenes Hargan wrote, together with art I need to add to these scenes and testing to make sure content can be reached without dead ends.
Well this was a pretty long status update, but it's been a while since the last one.
Considering development here is crowdfunded by actual people, I believe transparency for development is essential. I try my best to organize myself and develop content steadily and frequently to not let down the patrons without whom I wouldn't have been able to keep development thus far.
