Devlog #06 - Characters & Achievements

Welcome to our latest devlog for our open source fantasy point and click game, Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy.

As always, this is more of a quick overview of key changes we've made since our last devlog, so let us know if there is anything you want us to take a deeper dive on or if you have any questions.

In today's devlog, we'll talk about some of our new characters, updates to our contacts system, implementing achievements, map updates, and some other refinements.

So let's dive right in.

New Characters

We've had placeholders for some more characters in the game for a while, but we've finally got them all in with their proper art and animations.

Here you can see Billy, just chilling on the town fountain, eating his popcorn.

And here is his older sister Tilly, too, showing off her magic wand.

We've also added in Ahri, our cheery but busy diner owner.

We have more characters implemented too, but we think it'd be best to leave those as a surprise for the final game.

The characters and animations bring a lot more life to each scene, but what we're most enthused by is the personality each one will have when you meet them on your quest.

Contact Updates

To further emphasize the characters, we wanted to expand on our simple notebook contacts to allow each character to have a few fun facts you can learn about them.

So we updated the notebook contacts and the styling to better support this, and you can see us here unlocking a new fact, getting the new toast message, and opening up the book to check it out.

We really liked the new style changes here, and decided to bring those to the rest of the notebook too.

So here you can see the new style for cases.

And sketches.

And our save stats, and other stats too.

We even updated our licenses and credits scene.

Achievements

As part of refining the notebook, we decided it was time to add the achievements section.

So you can now see your earned achievements directly in the notebook.

We also wanted to setup for integrating achievements on Steam. Luckily there is the GodotSteam add-on to make this as easy as possible.

GodotSteam didn't only help us with the integration of achievements, but also with other integrations such as opening the store page from our demo.

To do this as cleanly as we can, we made a steamworks file which handles using the GodotSteam plugin, and an integrations file that wraps that and any other potential integrations. Then our code throughout the project doesn't need to know anything about what integrations are being used, or if they even are.

Map Updates

We also wanted to finalize the notebook map. So you can see here that we have updated icons for both the village square, and the meadows, and also added cleaner buttons for waiting or ending your current day which better match the existing styles of the notebook.

Other Refinements

Lastly, we just wanted to mention a few more brief refinements to help smooth out Aster's journey.

We wanted to be sure it was always easy to see characters in any scene, as they often move around at different times of day. So we update the character shader to keep them bright at night. Even if it's potentially less realistic, it helps them be a lot more visible, which is important for players.

We've also setup an initial pass at a new travel information system, which shows you what time of day it is and where you are when you arrive at a new location, to help keep people clear on their progress through the time loop.

There is still some animation work and edge cases to sort out, but we think it looks pretty good so far.

Having big things like the characters, notebook polish, and steam integration in are all a big relief at this point. It can be hard to know how well you're on track in game dev when there are so many unknowns at various points in the project. But that also means it feels particularly good each time you knock another one off the list.

Is there anything from our devlog you'd like us to take a deeper dive on?

Let us know in the comments!

Until next time, keep creating good.