Everstone Daycare - Progress Report [April 17, 2022]

Howdy everyone!

I just realized I hadn't made one of these in a while. It's been a bit since I've posted something, and there have been a few developments since then so I thought I'd go and report them, and ask everyone's opinions. I'll try to list them down in order of importance.

1. The writing for this month's demo has been taken over by Spooky

Originally, I had been working on the story at the start of the month, with the intention of completing the first draft before moving on to the non-writing related work I'm in charge of. With how slow I usually end up writing, and the amount of other work I had still planned to do, I felt a little stretched thin. At least for the next demo, Spooky will be taking over for writing, and depending on the response to the next demo, it might or might not become a more regular thing. For now, it at least allows me to start testing all the additional fixes and features that I had planned to work on that I had been putting off, some of which I will be listing down below.

2. Most fixes to last month's demo have been completed

As stated previously, the content of the previous demo was released in a rough state due to being coded in in a rush to release it before the end of the month. I have since go back and redone some of the writing, including removing the parts where your character speaks directly in the text box and turning those sections into dialogue choices, similar to how it is in the demo. This was initially an experiment to see if people preferred that style of writing, but based on the results of the poll I posted regarding it, enough people preferred having exclusively dialogue choices to represent their character's speech, that we will be using that style going forward.

I've also implemented all the missing sound effects that I was not able to include. It's a minor change, but something I regret not being able to add outside of the Garchomp CG scene. Several sound effect volumes had been adjusted as well, as I've gotten a comment that the ones in the Garchomp CG in particular were really loud.  I've also added Nurse Buizel's theme into the intro somewhere, and am planning to add it in more in the future as Nurse Buizel get's more scenes revolving him.

Lastly, I added an option to skip the intro and go straight to the playroom. I have been considering adding a prompt before every CG scene giving a content warning and a decision to skip or not, but the content present at the moment seems tame enough that something like that probably won't be needed.

3. Difficulties reproducing and fixing reported bugs

After releasing the previous demo, people have been finding bugs that are causing their games to freeze or softlock that I've been trying to find for the past few days. Unfortunately, even given the instructions on how to reproduce them, we aren't able to get them to occur them every time, sometimes even a similar big occuring at a different part of the script. I have gone over my code and there doesn't appear to be anything different between how I implement most lines of dialogue in both the parts of the script that are bugging out and the ones that arent. Most of the time, when something occurs, redoing the section or resetting appears to fix it.

I'll continue to investigate to try to find a solution, but it's possible that this might just be the program I'm making this game on showing its limitations. The game itself gets very wonky at different points when using the [AUTO] button to fastforward through text, and that's an issue with the program itself, and I'm beginning to wonder if some of these bugs are the same way.

4. Designing features and mechanics - Nurse patrols and a logbook

One mechanic we have discussed that we wanted to include in the game, but haven't gotten around to deciding on how it will be implemented and where is nurses patrolling different rooms, adding a sense of danger or urgency to sneaking around. We've discussed and argued about the different ways we wanted to include this, and I'll probably be spending some time seeing which ones we end up implementing. This will probably have its own dedicated post later on once a bit of progress has been done with testing. The wetting/messing status will also probably tie into this system, making it harder to sneak around if you're not squeaky clean

As for the logbook, this one will mostly be for fun and most likely not have any major gameplay implications. The idea is that you have a record of all the characters you meet, including a small description of them, and possibly tracking your current status with them. This one is a lot lower in the list of things to do, but was one of the features Spooky specifically requested me to try to include.

5. Other developments

Two last developments I wanted to report but I didn't think needed their own section are that Tennet is still busy with finals, so music production will be paused for a little bit, and I've experimented with adding a line of code that pauses the [AUTO] button fast-forwarding after every set of dialogue choice.

Regarding the latter, I've received a comment saying that they'd like to have it added in case they miss anything because of the fast-forwarding. By default, fast-forwarding should not go through any dialogue which you haven't seen before, however I understand the concern of wanting to be sure. I tested skipping through the intro with that line of code added, and it ended up being annoying to go through, having to click [AUTO] so often with how frequent dialogue choice prompts appear. I'll get some more responses to this before I decide to shelf this idea.

And that should be all that had happened since the last update. If I missed anything, I'll make sure to update this post and notify everyone of any changes. Thank you all for your patience!