0.2 post release review and plans for the near future
Hey everyone, I've decided i'll make a review post about a week after each update, discussing and commenting the work i've done, what needs to be done next and sharing insights.
Car and Navigation
0.2 introduced a more extensive navigation system, now that you can use the car and that the campus is no longer the only place outside of the house some kind of navigation menu was needed. I tried to make a world map, but ended up disliking how much clicks it took to do basic things such as going to campus every day, since it's something that needs to be done often making it quick and responsive is a priority. I also needed clarity, using just symbols to identify places was confusing. I ended up going for a selection menu, it only requires 2 clicks, one on the grass/driving wheel and one on the destination, plus i added a skip car scene to make it even faster. I might add some more visual flair at some point.
Dates
You can invite Alice to the lake whenever, there isn't much to it since there are no relation levels yet. I want to implement a calendar to make managing dates easier, it could also help to manage time in general and things like scripted events.
Interactive scene
Thanks to the experience of the first scene i was able to make this one more refined and add some more stuff.
The hand variant when Alice does it by herself looks great, there are 3 possible locations (bedroom, living room, car), different clothing (shirt/bra/naked for the upper and shorts/panties for the lower body) and the sound meter.
The scene is also less demanding resource wise compared to the first one so it will run smoother on older devices.
Sound meter and context for the interactive scene
Currently it works as follows: If Claudia is in the house she will have a 1,5% probability every second to hear something when the noise is above 65%, increasing to 6.5% when the noise gets above 85%. If she does, a dialogue from her will appear on the screen and you have about 30 seconds to exit the scene before she gets there. If she isn't home she might come back after a few minutes, which will be announced by the door sound (lounder if you are in the living room) and a dialogue, after which the usual rules for when she is at home apply. She won't ever show up in the first scripted scene when she's away the entire night, or when you are in the car.
Also if you don't do it with Alice for a few days in a row she might come to your bedroom when you go to sleep.
You'll eventually be able to get caught by Alice while you're with Claudia or others. The plan is to have different levels of "surprise" depending on the relations you have with the girl walking in. She could already know about it, be suspicious or clueless, that would cause a different reaction.
Art stuff
I made a few artworks to go with the scripted scenes as well as a few chars (character art in the background). They were all about Alice except the one with Claudia entering Bob's bedroom. I plan on following the same pattern in the next updates.
Technical stuff
I have a programming related background so this part of development is easy for me, most of the programming work was for the car/dating and the new interactive scene.
For 0.3 i need to rewrite a few systems to give myself more flexibility and reduce the chance of bugs, mainly the one managing when and where characters spawn. There are other improvements i have planned but they are not very interesting to talk about here.
I also want to start using git, until now i was simply making copies of the project which is not very professional and might create problems down the line, it will also be easier to archive older versions as backups.
A rough list of things i want done in the next few updates are:
- The fixes mentioned above
- more save slots
- relation levels
- calendar
- proper inventory/notes UI
- stats
- money
This wraps it up. I'll see you when more progress on 0.3 are made.