Desert Allergy🤧

It looks like I caught a cold on the way back and it didn't activate itself until Tuesday morning, when the all too obvious sore throat symptom shows up.

However, I continued working, doing the best I could without pushing myself too much. I believe after resting a bit this weekend it'll be gone on Monday.

The main reason I mention this is that I actually wanted to release this month's build this week instead of next week, but instead I'll aim to release it on Monday-Tuesday next week.

Before I get into what I've done this week, as soon as I checked the Unity news a bit after I wrote the Monday's status update I noticed Unity 6 LTS launched and I couldn't stop myself from updating to it 😅 it's supposed to give us more performance optimizations, some new features, amongst which the most important one is… iOS users will be able to play the game without downloading it through the Asset Store! same goes for Android users, although I will keep building APK versions because they're most definitely more efficient than the web versions, it'll be possible to play the next builds directly from the browser as well. I don't have an iOS device, so I'll eventually need to figure out how saving and loading can work from WebGL on mobile devices.

Now as to what else I've done this week (the unity 6 update wasn't very easy, had to update many scripts in the game)…

• First take care of some teleportation positioning issues around the ship ✅ This should be fine now but to make sure I'll do some testing, because just yesterday I received a new bug report through the new report form reporting the same issue with the teleports in the ship.

In case you want the boring details, I moved the collider of the chibis to their feet from their middle body, so right now the old teleports are a bit too "low", meaning that the chibi feet are colliding inside the walls, preventing movement.

• Prepare the bar content to be released ✅

• Add the bar toilet scene to the game. ⌛ I have added it to Unity from Spine, but I have made too many animation clips of this scene and I need to decide if I should cut the slower speed ones and only show the faster ones, because the animation is supposed to play out when things are already "heated up"

• Finish some side content animation (a massage of sorts). ⌛ For this I've decided to use one of Spine's features that allows me to export a Spine project as a PSD file of sorts, so that I can easily add new layers because I realized the scene could use a few effects as things progress in the scene, for example "relaxed" eye sprites, blush sprites.

• Add the new loading screen animation to the game so you see the loading animation when being teleported. ⌛ The scene is most likely finished and I've implemented some sort of loading screen system so that even though I never load/unload scenes the traditional way most devs do (an example is when you enter a cave in Skyrim, it probably unloads the outdoors and loads the cave, well, in our game the "cave" is loaded as soon as you're in an area that can lead to the cave, so the only thing I do is to teleport the player), in between teleports instead of screen fadings you'll see a loading screen animation so I need to add the Spine scene to be used in the new system.

• I might need to add some new sprites to the game showcasing different idle animations for some character(s). ❌ Not yet

Extras:

• Started adding the City map in the game, the art assets have been drawn for the most part so while finishing the village content we'll have the city map waiting for us instead of us waiting for it, parallelism threading.

• Did some work on the village ending cutscenes. The cutscene work is tough in general, it feels like I'm working on some kind of movie editing sometimes because I have to synchronize all these tracks together (After Effects-style if you're familiar with it) and I need to often pause the cutscenes then resume them when you get to a dialogue node where it makes sense to advance it. I hope I'll do more work on it today so we can get started on the side content in the ship.

There's something else I wanted to say, you might have noticed that we don't actually have that much "gameplay" in the game except for choices and NSFW scenes (which are also affected by choices)

Considering that this is a game like any other in the end, we will definitely have puzzles and more game-like elements later, but because the "manpower" is low I have to make sure the focus is on new content and then later when the main plot is done we can come back and add minigames here and there to make things a bit more fun.

If you have any minigame ideas feel free to share them with me! Otherwise, have a restful weekend :)