Everstone Daycare - Progress Report (July, 31, 2023)

Howdy everyone!

As mentioned in the Demo post, I'll be moving my usual updates and thoughts to Progress Reports to help clear up space in the Demo posts.

Thank you to everyone that has stayed so far during this long pause in content. I'm only finally getting through the last few bits of this creative block I'm in and trying to get into a pace that won't cause me to burn myself out or exhaust myself because of having to cram. I'm a little annoyed at myself for being slow to develop a healthy work ethic, even after all this time haha.

To give an update on my status since the last Progress Report, the hot season is finally over and I've secured new ways of staving off the heat and humidity, so I'm very thankful I don't have to fight against heat exhaustion anymore (until next summer at least). Historically, the tropical summer always totally destroys me, and I'll be happy on the day I won't have to deal with them anymore. I've also swapped out the faulty parts in my PC that were causing it to intermittently die on my and prevent me from accessing the programs I needed to work on the game, but there were some extremely unfortunate side-effects that came with this upgrade.

With the upgrade to my motherboard and CPU, I've had to reinstall or update a few of my programs as they no longer recognize my PC as the same one from before. It's not usually any problem, but updating my main art program, SAI 2, has caused all of my .sai2 art files to become inaccessible, even after downgrading to the previous version. That means all the art assets I've made for the game (including but not limited to: All the UI, Sprites for Buizel,Zangoose,Ursaring,Lucario, the Chapter Select background art, all the system screen's background art, etc.) and all my personal art (though not relevant to the project) will have to be remade from scratch if I wanted to continue working on them. This admittedly caused my creative block and lack of motivation to worsen as I tried to recover what I could. The assets already in the game are alright. But once I need to update anything or add new expressions to the sprites, they might look slightly different as I try to redraw them as close to how they were before.

Though in my efforts to salvage what I could, I did learn how to do something I thought wasn't available to me. It seems like every demo, I'm learning more about how to wring more customization out of the program I'm using to create this game (TyranoBuilder), and I've recently discovered how to use custom graphics for the dialogue choices throughout the game, which was a small gripe of mine as I thought I was only limited to the built-in designs provided to me (which has influences things such as the color scheme of the UI). In the future, I hope to push an update that allows us to more creatively design these dialogue choice portions of the dialogue.

With this in mind, I am considering re-doing the UI and dialogue boxes in the future now that I have a better idea on how I want the game to look and feel, and have a better understanding of how to control how the game looks. This wont be done any time soon, as it would be a pretty large undertaking and the current assets still work fine, but with the need to remake everything anyway, I thought I might as well consider it.

In terms of the content that had been added in the current demo, the gist of it is that I've added a few side things that had been planned a few months ago and haven't been implemented until now, and cleaned up the intro in preparation for releasing the free demo. Until now, the intro had been introducing the old UI, which I had been wanting to remedy ever since I added the location bar above the minimap. I've also added a small section to the intro where you're introduced to Lucario and Arcanine, the two winners of the character poll we had months prior, as well as Nurse Weavile, who will be primarily a side-content character. There's nothing more of these characters in the current demo, but you'll likely see Lucario and Arcanine again once the story reaches sections which involve the 'big kid' side again. I've also implemented the Trash Room, with an accompanying scene when you visit it for the first time that introduces you to Trubbish for the first time (with additional dialogue if you've already met him in the Storage Room and vice versa), and the Playground Exit, which connects the rest of the daycare to the Playground.

With those maps finished, there's only 1 last room to draw before Spooky can start working on the finalized versions of each of the room backgrounds. Between that and the UI changes I'm considering, the whole game might be receiving a facelift in the future and finally stop looking as unpolished as it currently does.

Going back to the topic of the free demo, I'm currently in the process of trimming down the current release version to create a version with only the Day 1 content available to release publicly, which I'm planning to release very soon. The reason I'm choosing to do this over just released an older version is that I want the public demo to reflect current state of the game, with all the changes in the UI and the intro content we've made since then (and all the features I added to the title screen that were sorely missing back then). I'm happy to be able to finally share a portion of the work I've been doing after the effective radio-silence I've had on my own personal accounts for the past year.

I don't have a consistent release schedule in mind for the free demos at the moment, with my current plan to just release them once I think there is a decent enough gap between the free demo content and the current demo content. Rest assured, I'll try to make sure the Patreon demos still have a meaningful amount of content exclusive to them.

I've mentioned in previous posts that I've been brainstorming how I want to credit all the Patreon supporters in the game itself without just listing out all the Patrons and possibly accidentally naming someone who would rather stay private. This had been backburnered for quite a bit as I spent my time dealing with other issues first, but I think I'm finally set up and ready to implement it into the current credits page. This will have its own separate post with all the details, but to summarize, I've set up a Google Forms you can use to opt into or out of being listed in the credits. You're also free to send me a private message in Patreon as well if that would be easier. So, please head over to that post (once it's been made) if you'd like your name to be credited in the game!

Those are all the updates I have for now. I hope to get the ball rolling again to earn back the support I've lost during this unexpected hiatus of mine, but thank you again to everyone who's stuck around. I'm more thankful for the lifestyle and freedom this Patreon has allowed me than I'm able to express in text.

TL;DR - I survived my battle with the sun, I lost most of the game assets I worked on during my PC upgrade, Possibly re-doing the UI in the future, Room art updates in the future, Free demo to be released soon, Option to opt-in to the in-game credits added.