Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

Another critical goal has been achieved for Long Live the Princess this week, and progress was made with the graphics for Supermodel. Let's cover these two games individually:

Long Live the Princess

With the animations and images finished last week, I could focus on the code this time. My first goal here was to handle the infamous Fairy Queen vision puzzle, one of the most notoriously common places in the game where players get stuck. 

The original version of this puzzle came about in an unstructured, somewhat haphazardly planned way. The vision itself had to be defined in one of the earliest versions of LLtP long before the puzzle was fully developed. As such, I didn't put too much thought into it, instead making sure that the original vision would support multiple interpretations without thinking too hard about how that would translate to gameplay. 

The result was that, once I returned to the vision to create a puzzle out of it, the sentence I had initially made didn't really work very well. I eventually found five parts of the vision that could be replaced by the player in an attempt to figure out alternative interpretations, but it never felt right. What was supposed to be a puzzle challenging your logic instead became an exercise in semantics (who cares if it's "a" or "the" in the vision?). I knew that even before I published that update, and reactions from players only served to reinforce that feeling. The puzzle needed to be reworked, but I had no time to do so back then.

Until now.

Both the vision and the puzzle have been completely reworked. The vision still fits in one line of dialogue. It can be interpreted similarly with the same results, but it now reads very differently. More importantly, the five pieces that can be swapped during the puzzle are now far more concrete, no longer relying on abstract semantics and instead focusing on concepts that are much easier to understand and visualize. This means you will spend less time figuring out what subtle meaning you could squeeze out of the grammar and more time thinking about what the vision actually means.

Add in a few more hints to point struggling players towards the correct characters to interact with if they're missing clues, as well as a way to reset your interpretation to what it started out as (which will make it easier to ask other players for help), and the whole puzzle should be a lot more enjoyable to deal with in every way, even if you just use a guide. Quality of life improvements is vital before a game's final release.

It's now time to move on to bug fixing. There are a lot of bugs to deal with, but they are almost all very subtle and hard to discover, hence why I've held them off for so long. Still, I want every known bug to be eliminated before I feel confident about releasing version 1.0. 

Supermodel

After finishing the abovementioned puzzle, I went on to create several card illustrations for Supermodel. There are a lot of cards already, and each of them requires its own image that often has to be related to concepts that are hard to illustrate in a realistic style. For example, it's not straightforward to illustrate the concept of "flattery."

I will probably continue illustrating the cards until they are all done. I want to get this game to a level where I can create official screenshots to show you. Especially now that LLtP is about to get completed.

And with that, it's back to work for me. 

Until next time!