Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2024-11-01

It's the first Friday Rambles of the penultimate month of 2024. Old.

Real Life Stuff

I ate a burger today. It helped offset a stressful week. Had stuff going on every day, which really cut into the work time.

Game Dev Stuff

Just working on this, as usual. I don't even know where the time goes. I've been writing words and making progress, probably, but then a week goes by and I'm wondering how the heck I'm supposed to finish this in a reasonable timeframe.

Anyway, I played through the game from start to finish (well, at least to the ending, which isn't written yet), and started working on the revisions. Feels like the skeleton is done, albeit some of the bones are in the wrong place, so I moved them around. The pacing seems better now, at the cost of the game becoming a little bit more linear... I still think it's a good tradeoff, and there's plenty of secret side paths you can take if you're into exploration.

I do think I'll be able to finish the script by the end of this month for sending out to translators. Hey, that's what I said last month!

I added even more indicators to make it easy to see Penny's status. Now she will comment about being inspired in the phone screen as well.

Here's a minor but also kind of interesting change. The English text of the game had a different look for when a choice option was being selected than the other languages - ie. the text would gain a border and turn into an ugly bright blue color. I changed it to gain an arrow bullet thingie instead, to match the other languages.

The reason I did this was because for some reason the spacing between the letters changed (probably because I upgraded the text display library and forgot to set some config) and looked bad when the choice was being selected. But I think this new look is better anyway. The reason it wasn't like that in the other languages in the first place is because adding a border to a bunch of Asian language glyphs looks horrendous, and in hindsight, does for English too.

For reference this is what it looked like before. Eaugh.

I have some planning done for the set pieces that divide up portions of the story (ie. the rpg mode segment), so I'll be working on that a bunch next week. I still need to flesh out one or two parts of the main storyline, and write the ending (which I also have an outline for already), and then finish up side story stuff. But the end is in sight.

I also did some fixes for bugs found during testing. Small stuff, like audio playback issues (which never were a problem before but... new runtime new bugs, I guess)

The End

Mostly story writing stuff this week. I felt like this week was way shorter than last week, but I think the fact that last week's ramble was like 3 days late has something to do with that. I'm gonna do more story writing stuff next week, and probably the week after that, too. And then maybe I'll be able to do some artsy stuff after we start the translation process for the script, which means I'll have more interesting things to show. Assuming they're not spoilers of course. Which they probably will be. Oops! Anyway, thanks for your support, as always. See you next week!