Everstone Daycare - July Demo

Howdy everyone!

A little late, and a little quiet, same as last month. I got a bit carried away again and consumed with working on getting everything ready. I apologize for not being able to keep my promise of giving everyone an update during these past 2 weeks. But it's here! And it sure has a lot of writing!

This demo is definitely a lot chunkier than I anticipated, and even with the script mostly finished (I've had to add a bit more writing to fill in a few holes), the total word count for the new content is the largest that I think I've worked on so far (if you count every related to content that isn't part of the main "story" such as optional dialogue for characters in the rooms). I've added more than just the continuation of the story as well!

The backend stuff that I said wouldn't take too long to finish ended up also being a lot more difficult than expected. It seems par for the course for me to underestimate the amount of work it is to wrestle with this program I'm using and to design something easy and clean for me to use (especially when I seem to end up making a new one every other month). But these new additions will definitely make it easier to add more content in the future and scale up as more events, scenes, and variables are added.

I'm a bit excited to show everyone the content of this demo, but first I should list off what I've been working on in the past 3 weeks and all the new content that's available to play.

Here's a list of the more backend-ey stuff I've been working that won't be visible in-game but is otherwise important to the game and how easily I'm able to implement new content in the future:

Completely redid how rooms and doors work.

• Each door now has its own variable that allows me to control whether its open, locked, or blocked by an event that can be adjust on a per-event basis (something I should've thought up a long time ago and should make it way harder to wander off out of/into a room when it's not intended).
• Moving between rooms now calls a function that checks the state of both rooms before moving you over. This means that checking if an event will trigger when entering a room is done on a separate file (instead of being checked inside the file of the actual room. Basically just allows me to separate those two functions cleanly) and I can more easily set up events that only trigger if you enter/exit the room from a particular door.
• Created variables that control where each character was located in the map rather than determining whether a character would be in a certain room based on the time of day or at a certain stage of an event (Again, something I should've thought of much earlier.) The way I was doing it before was a little messy and I was expecting it to get even more messy and bloated once more content is added to the game. Each character would have to be checked for each stage of each relevant event they were in to determine if they would appear in a room.

Refitted the Patrol system to work with the current map. 

Was a little more annoying than expected since the Patrol Demo maps were intentionally very bare and the map was made for it, but it should be working fine now.

I feel like I spend too much time re-doing something backend related to make it cleaner/more efficient every month. The way it currently is is definitely more preferable than it was initially (It's all a new learning experience for me.), but a large portion of my time is being spent on this. At some point, future-me will have an extremely easy time adding new content in a timely manner once I have this all ironed out and in a place I'm happy with.

Here's a list of all the new content that's available to play in this demo:

The Nurse Buizel and Nurse Ursaring cafeteria highchair feeding: Available after getting the 'Good Ending' when betraying Ekans. Click on Nurse Zangoose (who is now watching the room after the events of the previous event), and ask for a make-up meal for the lunch you weren't able to finish earlier.

Meeting Nurse Haunted and sneaking out of the Nap Room: Occurs immediately after 'The Nurse Buizel and Nurse Ursaring cafeteria highchair feeding' (these two are actually one long continuous event.) Watch Scyther sacrifice his dignity for your sake and sneak out and finally steal Buizel's schedule.

Nurse Mew now occupies the clinic during certain times of day: You won't be able to easily pass through the clinic anymore now that Nurse Mew takes her rightful spot lounging inside the clinic. She's not the most concerned with you sneaking around and will even answer some pressing questions, but if you annoy her enough, she's happy to just keep you out entirely.

You can now attempt to just walk out of the front door: Walk to the front Entrance for the first time to view an event where you attempt to just leave.

The nurses now occupy the office at certain times of day: Not technically available during this demo as the currently available events intentionally suppress these from appearing. But they're there! And you won't be able to walk through and touch their stuff willy-nilly anymore.

Made a check to prevent you from inputting a blank name: Fairly tiny, but I thought I should mention it anyway. This also allowed me to make new responses or changes based on what your inputted name is. I might have more fun with this later on, such as making comments when inputting my own name or possibly even something that will affect the game at all (unlikely.).

With that out of the way, please enjoy the demo! I appreciate everyone's feedback and criticism. If you have any recommendations, comments, bug reports, or other ideas, please feel free to comment below or send me a private message! As always, if you're stuck at any point, please reference the walkthrough below!

Install Instructions

As before, due to the increasing size of the project, the file will now be hosted on my itch.io page for the game [password: haunter72022]

Please extract the game folder to your directory of choice, and then run the 'Everstone Daycare.exe' file within to play the  game. Enjoy!

Please note for the Mac version that this is not a signed app, so you may encounter an error  when first trying to open this program. Please follow the instructions  on this support page to work around this.

Walkthrough

If you're stuck, please refer to this document: Everstone Daycare Walkthrough

Disclaimer

Any saves carried over from previous demos might cause issues when playing through them in the current demo. In the event that any flags, variables, and other data were changed in a scene after you had completed it already in your current save file, you might not be able to access the new content. Creating a new game file is advised.

Bug Fixes:

Resolved the issue causing text to randomly turn light blue. (This was the result of a setting in the program to change the font color to light blue when it had already been read, which wasn't working properly with how I've set up the game.)

After re-doing the rooms/doors, all old instances of being able to exit/enter rooms during certain events unintentionally should be fixed. (Please test this and prove me wrong!)

Known Issues:

The delayed text scroll beeping is still present in the Mac version. We're still continuing to investigate and find a solution.