Dev update 08/09

Hey!

Regarding the game, the problem I was having was that I just couldn't get the side mission system to work properly. It was becoming long and tedious and completely killed the pacing of the game.
A few friends helped me test it, and they all agreed on the same thing: it wasn't fun and it made the overall experience worse.
So, much to my own frustration, I had to swallow my pride and remove it from the game. It wasn't an easy decision because I had invested A LOT of time into it. I even paid a couple of artists on Fiverr to help me with the interface and some of the icons. My first major disaster.
The good news is that I've already replaced it with something else. It's much faster, requires less thinking, and makes much better use of the skill system that took me so long to integrate.
All you have to do is choose the difficulty, pick the skill you want to roll the "dice" with, and if you pass the roll, you move forward one space.
It's not as complex as the previous system, but I think it looks much better and makes the whole thing much more enjoyable to play.

I've also decided to add a small animation to all the scenes with the crew. At first, I was only going to add animations to mission-ending scenes and random map events, but I think that even one or two second animations can add a lot of flavor to the game (even if my animations are pretty bad for now).
Obviously, this adds quite a bit of time to the development process, since making a simple two-second animation can take me hours, and rendering them takes even longer. But I want the game to have some personality and not just be a collection of static images.
Maybe I'm being too ambitious, since my skills clearly aren't quite at the level of what I'm trying to achieve, but since I'm making this game, I want it to be a good game.

I'm really sorry I haven't been around much these past few days, but I've had a series of complications in my personal life. The short version is that I was supposed to be hired as an intern at a company, but in the end they left me hanging and I had to go back to working at Burger King. That meant moving house and basically throwing all my plans out the window. I'm not going to lie, it was rough. I guess this is what they mean by learning things the hard way...
Now that things have settled down a little, I'll try to be more active around here.

Remember that I'm still open to suggestions, so if there's anything you can think of that could improve the game, feel free to let me know.

See you soon!