Malevolent Planet 2D - Farewells April

Hey! I'm very tired as of writing this, been working a ton on the game this week. Will try to not keep it too long because if I do that it will start not making sense.

Here's what I achieved this week:

Bugs:

• The Simulation Room had a bug that was introduced recently (after the latest release, but during the development month) that could put a stop to players' playthrough. ✅ Tested 2 full playthroughs and it seems to work fine now.

• The Skip Mode doesn't yet allow you to skip ahead to further content, allowing you to pick choices on the way and start at a specific point in the game according to your will. ✅ This has been started, but it currently doesn't allow you to skip too far. However, I've developed the system for it at least and it gave me more time to think about the choices we have (turns out we have a ton of them already) and how they can affect your character's stats, so next week I want to make some polls about what stats do people really want to see in our game that would have an impact on story/choices (and gameplay if we'll have the time to actually get a combat system going) because we have so many choices it's a shame if they don't actually do something to personalize your character at least a bit

• Due to introducing the new expression system, the old way of doing expressions doesn't apply to the avatars anymore so the ISA dialogues might not have any expressions.  ✅ This took me 2 full days, there are so many dialogues already I couldn't really believe it. I think our game deserves to have more polish overall because I can see that over some amount of time it's actually gotten relatively big (at least 1-2 hours of gameplay if you read the dialogues for the first time)

• The game still doesn't have enough sounds. ✅ Added plenty of sounds and I played with spatial sounds for the first time, sadly, because I had to make releases this week there wasn't enough time to make a YouTube video about this but I will try to release one next week so you'll see exactly what's going on. Currently this is visible in the Waterfall map in the new builds.

Content:

• I'm working on a shower animation whose context is a possible containment breach on the ship, it's supposed to be accessible right after the April content. ✅ This has started being animated and it's pretty tough as it's a 3 character scene but it'll definitely be available in the May release.

• I need to add the new Melissa scenes to the dialogue flow back at the Waterfall. ✅ I added them together with the new dialogues that get you back to the ship up to the point where the content will resume in May.

• I'm working on a new shower scene (that's also supposed to be animated) that will play on the ship but it might also replace the ISA one if people consider it looks better. ✅ This has been animated for the most part, but it needs a bit more work together with dialogues & content flow to make it accessible, so it will be accessible in the May release.

Art:

• I've been working on improving the game's artstyle a bit, basically making it look a bit more polished in the shower scenes I'm working on and also in future upcoming scenes. ✅ I've been working on this for the new shower scene, you will see it in May. It's very different from the first shower scene we've had in the game, although it follows the same artstyle.

Release(s):

• I'd like to release new Patron builds by 26th April (Friday this week). ✅ I managed to do this, and if there are issues I will wait for bug reports so that I can release a hotfix by 30th of May to stay within this month's billing cycle.

• I'd also like to make a public release around the end of the week. ❌ I barely had time today to do everything I had planned to do for the patron builds, so I didn't manage to do this. Next week I will most definitely make a new demo release.

So yes it turns out this was a tough week but we got through it well I'd say. I actually had fun implementing spatial sounds within the game and I'd like to show you actual examples next week. It even works better with headphones so that if some specific ambience sounds will come left to your character, you will hear it more in the left ear, not sure how it works with stereo setups because I don't have anything like that.

That's all I could say for today, have a great week!