It's update time! Let's discuss what we've been up to for the past few days.
Characters
We've cut our overall story down to a good stopping point for the demo version we'll have done by the end of NaNo19. To keep things simple enough to be able to complete the demo by the end of the month, and because the other characters won't show up until later in the story for the full version, that means we've already introduced all of the important characters that will be in the demo. There will be more characters later on as we continue development on the full version in April, but for now, we've met Haylie, Natalie, Felicity, and Jenna. We thought about doing a character summary and maybe put something together that introduces all four characters in one post with maybe a few extra details about them, but our focus is on the game itself so that'll happen if we have time to. Let us know what you think, and if you'd like to see a little bit more about the characters before the demo release.
Improvements!
Since we've implemented a new gameplay element to the vanilla visual novel format by allowing players to wander around the world via a navigation menu system. That, of course, means more coding and more debugging that has to be done. We've found a few points in the game so far that introduced some stability issues so we have taken time to work out those issues and we're pleased to announce that the game is once again stable.
We decided it was also a good idea to implement a content warning screen players will see before the main menu:
Keep in mind we're not making a porn game, nor are we trying to re-hash Doki Doki Literature Club (*shudders*) we're just writing a game that has a grown-up story similar to what you'd see in a rated-R movie. We want to be up-front with our players, and provide a warning about some potentially triggering content.
Also, Some UI Tweaks got done and more backgrounds have been made!
We tweaked the navigation UI a little bit to make the text stand out against brighter backgrounds, and we're pleased with the results.
We're around the middle mark for NaNo19 and we've still got a lot of work that needs to be done, but we're still confident we'll have a playable demo ready for release by the end of the month. So far it's been an awesome adventure sharing the experience with other developers here in this community, and it's been a huge learning experience for both of us. We're very happy we decided to do this together and we're still looking forward to sharing what we've made with everybody when NaNo19 comes to a close!
Comments and suggestions are always welcome and encouraged, and as always,
Stay tuned for more!
