Oct 17: BUG FIXES
Oct 20: Some of my writing involving spy stuff needed to be rewritten, as I learned new stuff about how shortwave radios work. Silly me, I was under the impression that numbers stations worked on FM frequencies. Once I learned more about it, certain scenes had to be rewritten. I know very few people (if anyone) would have noticed or cared, but I would have known and it would have continued to bug me.
Oct 21st-25: Lack of updates are not because no work has been done. Rather, all the updates would sound the same. I've been writing, shoving that writing into the game, and debugging the new scenes from there.
I'm excited for my progress, but a little bummed that it doesn't look like I'll finish both current chapters before the end of the month as I had previously planned. Every scene in these chapters ends up being so much larger than I had originally anticipated.
I'm told that post-mortems usually include a list of five things that went right and wrong each. Let's try that.
This was the number one thing I wanted in the game but kinda thought wouldn't be possible at my level of programming knowledge (basically zero). I'm super psyched to have this working now.
This one was a little more vital but not quite as programming intensive. The Free Time mechanic allows the player to spend one-on-one time with NPCs at set intervals in the story, and to choose which character they spend it with. I go into this more in the devlog.
Rather than just a normal linear story segment, this scenes allow the player to explore an area at their own pace, and discover the narrative in a non-linear fashion.
In addition to the exploration scenes are Puzzle Scenes, where players have to figure out a puzzle before continuing with the story.
Vanelle Marin finally makes her debut in one of the new chapters, which I've been waiting to do for quite some time now.
While I had the rough strokes of each scene planned out long before writing them, the scenes themselves expanded and became much larger than originally anticipated. This led to scenes needing much longer time than initially anticipated to both write and bug-test.
Due to issue one, I wasn't able to reach the planned end-point of this chapter.
Same as the point above, I wasn't able to reach the planned end-point of this chapter.
This is a game jam, so I limited most of my efforts towards the creation of new content rather than the revising of old content. The opening scene is one I am no longer happy with, and will revise after the game jam is over.
As always, these backgrounds and character portraits are scratch graphics to be replaced later.
I joined this game jam without much forethought, but now this is the furthest I've ever gotten on a video game. I'm pretty psyched about the work I've done so far, and plan on continuing this until the story is finished.