Malevolent Planet 2D - Work, work work

Hey! I'll really try to keep this one short, pretty tired after working a lot this week for the game 😅. I've made many improvements, fixed many things (and hopefully didn't break other things), tried to polish the game, make things look more beautiful, and so on.

It was a difficult week but I'm happy I achieved a lot of stuff I wanted, for example I've improved the gallery UI a lot and sadly I don't think I have it in me to make a quick video to show the gallery UI improvements in addition to other things like making dialogue avatars and chibi characters be affected by the lighting caused by the time of the day.

I'd say one of the only things I didn't have time for was to make the earlier content in the game use the new expression system which offers a lot more choices over the old one, but I can do this over the course of the next month. The newest content should include a lot of expression changes at least.

Here's what I've managed to complete from Monday's list:

Bugs:

• Skipping dialogues can still behave strangely sometimes. ✅ I think I fixed this, during skip mode if the user also clicks it's going to break things so during skip mode you won't be able to advance the dialogue by clicking until you disable skip mode.

UI:

• Reposition elements in the game's UI and resize dialogue elements as well to make the game feel more homely during dialogues, like a visual novel. ✅ I'd say we still need to make some changes, like changing the way the quest indicator looks in the corner but I think the new changes are slightly cleaner and we're also going to hide a lot of elements we don't need during some times like we don't need the minimap or the menu buttons during dialogue.

• Gallery UI Improvements. ✅ There's now a Hide UI button and more support for static scenes so you'll be able to see pretty much all scenes in the game in the gallery now with the ability to hide all of the UI elements that may overlap the scene. We're also not going to show the Play State button for animation clips if it's a static scene that doesn't have animations.

Sounds:

• Find someone to work with to develop sounds for the game, sounds we can play during animations, scenes, and general dialogue lines (like a very surprised sound when the dialogue line shows surprise). ✅ I might have found someone to help me with the sounds and I'll make some time over the course of the next month to record audios, add them to scenes (animations), to dialogues (gasps, scared noises, not voiced lines)

• Replace placeholder sounds in some dialogues. ❌ There aren't/weren't so many of these, so I'll keep it for when I also have more recorded sounds for gasping and other sounds that can play during dialogues.

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. ✅ All done, we now have a good opening for what'll come next in terms of content. (upcoming Melissa content maybe, together with going to sleep after mission content at the ship since after every mission the day should be "over" which gives more reason to take a shower which can create opportunity for scene(s) before sleep)

Release(s):

• Make a Patron Release on 28th-29th of March (Thurs-Fri). ✅ I've also gone through the extra work of building new builds for the Supporter tier as well which include the android improvements, UI bugfixes, better android gameplay, better ISA flow, etc. because I felt bad to be lazy about it and send the one month old builds that might still have bugs I solved by then.

Now I'm pretty tired so I'll get some rest. See you in April!