Malevolent Planet 2D - Paving the Road Ahead
Hello! Considering that the planned content is already drawn/animated for this month, I want this week to be a combination of polishing what's already there and content-writing.
Bugs:
Quest Indicators during the ISA stage of the game are sometimes misplaced or shown for locations that aren't relevant at the time. To fix this, I need to play through the game myself and see where they happen and how to fix them, so this month's build won't have confusing UI elements anymore.
The generic "This Area is not Accessible" dialogues that play sometimes aren't very helpful and they can make you feel like there's an actual bug preventing you from progressing. Often navigation in the ISA parts of the game can be confusing because there are many paths to take at a time, so I need to write some custom dialogues that describe why you can't access some areas at some specific times. This should also be done during the playthrough process mentioned in the previous bulletpoint.
Skipping dialogues can still behave strangely sometimes. It seems that during specific/random circumstances if you skip the dialogue, once you stop skipping it you're somehow not able to manually advance dialogue lines anymore unless you click randomly on the skip/auto button. Spamming the skip/auto buttons can also affect some sequenced commands when playing specific dialogue lines.
UI:
Implement the Android redesigned UI overhaul, which if I'll have finished by the end of the week I'll post a video of it working. I think it's a great improvement over the current android implementation and it should increase accessibility for the game.
Content:
Write the dialogues that involve the new animation scenes, together with the flow that moves the player character and Melissa all the way back to the waterfall.
There isn't much more to say, other than that I'm also looking into drawing some scenes that depending on player choice can play out when returning to the Waterfall with Melissa.
We'll be back to the ship soon as well, and inside the ship we should have more freeroam-able content so we'll start with adding a steamy shower scene (that can be reached using choices) and reenable the inventory system to be functional while you're inside the ship for more interactive content that may depend on outfits.
Likewise, I'm also planning the City map and the city content for the 2D game. I'm trying to merge the story from the village with the one from the city in a way that would make sense even when compared to the story of the text game, so we can have the story leading you between the village and the city with the intention of making space travel accessible earlier which would then allow us to add side content to the city/village without delaying the goal of unlocking space travel once the main story plot on the planet completes and you're left with an "open arc" that justifies you going to space.
I'll do each of the above bulletpoints at a time, but I'm confident they're exactly what I need to focus on right now to address the points I made in the last week's status reports.
Thanks for reading this!