Deluded Diaries: Roadmap. Polishing

He-hey! We’re back with the roadmap posts where we break down each future milestone from our roadmap!
In the previous roadmap post we talked about the Privacy system—one of Deluded’s key pillars, among other things. So if you haven’t read it, go check it out first.
And today it’s time to talk about the first milestone in this roadmap that probably won’t add any new content. Instead, it will be focuсed solely on improving what’s already in the game—the mechanics, the environment, the optimization, etc. This is important to do before going to Steam to make the game as polished as possible and provide the good first impression on the larger audience of Steam gamers.
This is probably gonna be the loooooongest patch to make because there are so many things to implement and polish before we even dare to step onto the Steam’s realm. Because we know how picky Steam players can be. 😅 
When we’re closer to this line, I’ll probably make a separate devlog about all our plans with everything 100% confirmed. But generally, we plan to fix all the little details, bugs and do a ton of QoL changes to make the gaming experience as smooth as possible.
We can’t say for sure that all of the features listed below will be implemented during the polishing stage. Those are based on your feedback, the team resources and what we, the devs, would really want to see in the game.
So, what exactly do we plan to be polishing in Deluded?
The Must-Haves (sorted by the level of importance):
  • Navigation map
  • Tutorial
  • Player statistics (how many quests you’ve completed, how many trash cans you’ve explored, etc)
  • Autosaves
  • Optimization
  • Difficulty levels
  • Improve UI/UX
  • Create ambient audio (SFX + background music) for different locations
  • Improve clothing system (to prevent clipping in cinematics and add physics to certain clothes where applicable—e.g. skirts, dresses, coats…)
  • Make animations more detailed and improve the cinematic experience
  • Improve textures to unify the game’s visual style and environment, add details
  • Improve accessibility: 
    • Manual brightness adjustment
    • Sound cues
    • Key remapping
    • Dialogue read indication
  • Achievements—the ability to replay scenes you discovered
  • Translation tool or the addition of several new languages
  • Full prologue VO (all prologue characters)
  • Improve the lighting transition between inside and outdoors
  • Remake/refactor mechanics to avoid conflicts
  • Add Inverse Kinematics support
  • Footprints from snow/sand/dirt, as well as water ripples
  • Controller support
  • Butt slap jiggle effect
  • Camera angle switching system for dialogues
  • Poses and emotions system for dialogues
  • Lip-sync to match characters’ lips with the voiceover
Other nice additions (still thinking):
  • Mac/Linux support
  • Steam Deck compatibility
  • Mod tools
  • S**-toys support 🤫
  • Saves compatibility between versions
  • Steam achievements
And many more smaller bug fixes and QoL improvements that have been sitting on our Trello board for too long…

What are your thoughts? Anything we missed that you think is important? Can’t wait to read your comments!

Best regards, 
kufe7