June and July Progress

Lots of progress these past month and I'm starting to work on actually promoting the game. As part of that Hearth & Holmes is going to be a part of Telltale’s “Choices Matter Festival” on Steam.

Telltale has a great legacy of making and featuring wonderful, story-driven games and I'm delighted to be a part of it. They'll be posting updates about the festival on their Instagram & TikTok. It starts August 10th.

I'm going to drop a new trailer with more material from the game and very fun voice acting when the festival starts.

In the meantime, here's other stuff that happened:

JUNE

• Wrote and implemented 'The Cold 2'.

• Fiddled a bunch with how new options are presented. It's better now.

• Wrote and implemented 'The Cold 3'. This involved finding sound effects for Watson playing the violin badly.

• Wrote and implemented The Cold in nighttime conversations.

• Wrote and implemented 'The First Problem'.

• Contracted voice actors for new trailer.

• Agonized more than I needed to about voice actors for new trailer.

• Planned Irene's social sequence.

• Wrote Holmes & Irene duet.

• Found images for Irene concert scene.

JULY

• Remade the trailer. It's funny! It will be released with a festival in August.

• Wrote and implemented Irene's concert mystery.

• Added downtime socialize action of attending concerts.

• Implemented theater shop where you can buy music.

• Fixed error where making someone relationship 0 makes the game upset.

• (I understand game. It is upsetting when Irene and Sherlock fight. It still needs to happen.)

• The Irene social plotline is now complete!

• Update end-game logic so that the title screen changes based on your ending.

• Wrote and implemented the Confrontation with Moriarty. It is huge.

• Adjusted learning page so that Holmes doesn't read when obsessed with hunting Moriarty.

• Added difficulties: Immortal Legacy, Durable Detective, and Consulting Detective.

• Fixed some issues with the Save/Load display.

• I am now running through entire game to see how it hangs together, fix issues, and get sense of how to bring everything together in final case.

• Adjusted pattern of when time passes so that it's a buffer between scenes with dramatic tonal differences. (Going right from PTSD nightmare to cozy downtime was weird.)

• Added a books inventory you can check at any time.

• Started process of upgrading to stable version of Naninovel 1.21. God preserve me.

• Wow. That was a lot easier than I expected. Only one 'the game doesn't work anymore' bug that it only took a day to fix.

• Moved all of Watson's nightmares to the main background area. No more compartmentalizing for the doctor.

• Fixed error where displaying backgrounds sometimes flickers to other backgrounds.

• Fixed reference error where executable backgrounds were red blotches.

• Fixed error where title screen was loading unevenly.

• Fixed error where animation was stuttering. It turned out I was reorganizing Holmes' library once every half second. I don't need to do that.

• Oh wow. That made EVERYTHING better.

• Hid Quickload more thoroughly.

• Went through images and audio, removed everything I wasn't using, and organized and compressed things.

• Fixed error where pressing enter kept triggering random buttons.

• Fixed error where books weren't refreshing enough. (I overcorrected from twice every second.)

• Made sure fast forward stops before we pick books.

• Added a note in settings to remind you what difficulty you're in.

• Updated emotion logic to make sure the cusps are consistent and adjusted it to make it favor the most recently changed stat.

WOOF. That was a lot.