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Everstone Daycare - Patrol Demo (June 2022)
🕑 Added 2022-06-16 01:36:03 +0000 UTCHowdy everyone!
I apologize for the long, long, long silence up to this point. You all deserve an explanation and this is in no way me trying to make excuses for myself, but is mostly an admission of guilt. I’ll add a line break at the bottom if you’d rather skip over that stuff and just read about the demo.
Last month was a really rough month for the 3 of us and resulted in not being able to release a demo due to my attention being pulled away from making the patrol stuff and helping Spooky out with writing the next section of the story. Usually, Spooky is in charge of making most of the art used in the game, but as I wanted to focus on something non-story related (figuring out how I wanted to make the patrol system and how to program it in), I asked him to get a head start on the next bit of story so that we had the writing and the art already prepared by the time I finished. With our tasks split, we went on our way and other than meetings and the times where we had to get input from one another, we worked on what we said we would.
When I had received the first draft from Spooky, the story was a fair bit bare and needed to be formatted in a way that I could easily read and implement into the program since at this point he’s not familiar with the program I’m using to make the game in and had not written much for the game or in general. This ended up turning into me rewriting nearly everything he had written, which took up the remainder of the time I had in the month and pulled me away from doing anything related to the patrol stuff.
When I returned from the family affair that had me traveling and out of commission for 4 days near the end of the month, all the art and writing for the next section of the story had already been prepared, but it still required me to implement stuff that I was supposed to been working on in the patrol demo. So, I immediately got to work trying to push this patrol demo out as quickly as I could, thinking I should be able to release it in a reasonable amount of time since it’s contents would effectively be a small maze just to show off a single system.
As usual, it ended up being a lot more work than anticipated due to the way I set up the demo requiring me to not only program in the system itself, but also set up all the rooms, write a bit of dialogue (include the dialogue for being caught by the nurses that will be used in the main game), make a few new art assets, etc. that costed me a fair bit of time on top of how long I expected to take. Still, I powered on thinking that even If I were a little bit late, it would be fine since I would be finished and basically buried myself in my work. Day after day, I stubbornly kept pushing myself and convinced myself “I can finish this today”, ultimately neglecting communicating with everyone because I wanted to push myself to finish the demo as fast as I could.
In the end, by focusing so much on trying to get the demo out asap at the cost of everything else, I neglected an important part of my job, which is communicating with all of you on what I’m currently doing on and that I’m still actively working on the game, its story, art and everything else. Communication has really been a weakness of mine during this project, especially when I get so consumed by what I’m doing (whether it be writing or programming a demo) that I stop informing everyone of what I’m working on in a timely manner. I hope to not make the same mistake again.
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As for the demo itself, this is just a short demo to showcase how the patrol and stealth system will work. I’ll go into more depth about how the stealth system works and the ideas we went through while making it in a follow-up post.
To give a brief explanation of the patrol system that I had been talking about all post, the ideas is that as you sneak around the nursery (or in this case, the maze) when you’re not supposed to, there is a chance you might bump into any of the nurses as you move from room to room. Naturally, being somewhere you’re not supposed to be, you get a quick reprimand and are sent off to time-out (the actual in-game repercussion is that you would either fail that part of the story or skip to the next time segment.) Naturally, I had to write out all of the dialogue for when you get caught by each nurse for this demo, and the same dialogue will be used in the actual game once it’s been properly implemented.
I didn’t think that I would be able to best show off how the system works using the default Everstone Daycare map, so as mentioned earlier, I made a completely different map (a small straightforward “maze”) to help demonstrate the system. I’ve turned it into a little minigame where you go through the maze and collect 5 different collectibles to open the exit door and win. It’s hopefully not too difficult, and will clearly demonstrate how the system works without needing to go into any outside material to understand it. If you have any comments, suggestions, or criticisms, please feel free to tell me privately or in the comment section of this or the next follow-up post!
I ended up having a little bit of fun with the theme and setting of the demo, but I do have to emphasize that everything in this demo is non-canon. Any resemblance that the setting and characters have to any other pre-established pokemon-based ABDL daycare/pokemon center-related institutions and their nurse staff is completely coincidental. Seriously though, it’s a little bit weird and hopefully it doesn’t inspire any weird ideas about the main story itself.
This is an admittedly tiny demo, but was necessary to be able to do the next segment of the story (though I did get carried away with a few things.) Speaking of, immediately after, I will get right to work on implementing the next section of the story as all the assets needed are already finished. That, plus fixing all the bugs in the previous demo, re-doing as few bits of code/dialogue that I feel need changing, as well as adding a few new bits of dialogue to flesh out the world will hopefully not take too too long to finish, but seeing what happened with the patrol demo, I’ll still make sure to prioritize not keeping people in the dark. Ideally, I’ll get it done by the end of the month, but depending on borked my current code is, it might take some time to un-spaghetti it and make it easier to implement stuff in the future.
The filesize of the game has also increased to the point where I'm not able to directly upload it to Patreon anymore (Patreon only supports up to 199mb file size uploads), so at least for this demo, I've had to upload it onto my itch.io page. Hopefully this isn't a big inconvenience for everyone.
Without further ado, please enjoy the fruits of my labor and I apologize once again for the delay and the lack of communication on my end.
Install Instructions
Please head over to my itch.io page to download the newest version of the game! (password: everstone2022)
Please extract the game folder to your directory of choice, and then run the 'Everstone Daycare.exe' file within to play the game. Enjoy!
Please note for the Mac version that this is not a signed app, so you may encounter an error when first trying to open this program. Please follow the instructions on this support page to work around this.
Known Issues
- The beeping sound effect that plays when dialogue is rolling is extremely delayed and is playing incorrectly for the Mac version. This might be an issue with the program itself rather than something I can fix.
- The font color changes to blue randomly when interacting with an npc or object. Switching rooms fixes this problem.
