We're still alive

We just wanted to post a quick update on what we've been working on.

Art person here! I have been continuing to work on the overall visual quality of the game with a focus on visual clarity. The layouts of a couple outdoor areas have changed and the current focus is on the interiors of the buildings. We've experimented with different styles over the years and are now trying to finalize the look of the game. Lighting is a whole other thing we'll be tackling soon, once the interior updates are done.

Here's a little example of a before and after, hopefully better!

Hey there! Coderman here. Well, maybe writerman now.

Since the last time we did a little update I've managed to get all the main systems work done and more or less bug free enough that the core game stuff can be played without issue. Since finishing that up, I've moved on to writing intro conversations for the characters.

Before I get to that, though, I wanted to make sure I could work in a format that would let me get dialogue done fairly quickly and flexibly. While the asset we're using for dialogue (Dialogue System for Unity) has YarnSpinner integration, it comes it a lot of caveats that I didn't like having to work around so I wrote a custom parser for a Yarn-like format that I'm calling DSText. The importer for it is up on Github along with an extension for VSCode so you get some minor highlighting support. I don't have time to really support it at the moment, but it's functional even for the more complex conversations I'm working with, so look at it and if you find any bugs, hey! Just fix them. And send a pull request

Alright, the story stuff. That's been a slow process owing to this being the first time I've gotten to focus on the characters in a deeper way so I am spending a lot of time thinking through how they're going to act and respond so that I have a good baseline for character voice when I come back around to them for later storylines and interactions. But that said, it's coming along.

I think that's about it for now. Once the intro conversations are done, we'll be moving on to some other bits and pressing forward toward getting testing stuff out to a select few. We may end up going Early Access so that we can get feedback and important bug testing done with a wider group, but that's a discussion for another day.

And hey, if you want to know about that stuff when it comes along, give the game a Wishlist.