Malevolent Planet 2D - Crunching the Numbers
Hey! This is the Friday continuation for my in-trial responsible transparent development post from Monday. It sounds like a lot of buzzwords to me, but I couldn't come up with better words.
So far, I think this style keeps me focused on the real priorities better. Harder to get distracted or forget what I was supposed to do if I can just check the Monday list and see what I didn't do yet.
Next week if everything goes well, I may have the release for the Trick or Treat mini quest I described in the previous post ready next week. I will also attempt to update the crew chibi sprites as well, but that'll be in the want-to-do list for Monday. In addition to that, I need to develop an elevator UI that should also be on Monday's to-do list.
Let's see what I managed to finish this week, based on my initial plans:
Bugs:
When Morris walks to your character's bed after the interaction on the beach, he collides with her and she moves away. ✅Fixed this, it was as easy as I thought it'd be.
When loading a save where your character is on the beach after what happened there, there's some strangeness where both the day and the night mode are active. 🤔 I couldn't reproduce this bug using the save I was provided, this leads me to think that it may be a race condition (how is that possible though? the game is single threaded). It might happen on slower PCs, so if you see it feel free to report it to me.
When you save the game, the lust meter doesn't get saved as well so when you load that save again lust will reset to 0. ✅ This one wasn't that easy because the stats apparently aren't stored in a database of sorts, they are individual instances. However, I did manage in the end and I'm not only saving the lust, I'm also saving the Health and Energy as well.
There are more bugs that started happening during the development of the new content, but it's not worth to list them as it'd take too much time.
Content:
I want to finish rendering both scenes where you have to cure your crewmates by the end of the week, possibly even draw one of them. ✅ I managed to render both scenes and draw one of them, but they're not going to be animations. The poses I wanted to use are better suited for a different context, because this one was pretty limiting and the pace would feel off. So, we'll have two "alive" scenes instead, where we have a static illustration and the elements in this scene get changed, like the player character turns around and that changes the illustration as well.
I want to write dialogues where the scenes happen, together with the dialogue where your character goes back to sleep after it's done. ✅ I managed to write a bunch of dialogues here, more than I thought I'd manage this week. We also have a dialogue post-waking up and the flow where the freeroaming starts ready for polish.
I want to finish setting up the ship as a fully explorable map from top to bottom, together with placement of Ted, Morris, and Alberto where they should be. ✅ Related to the bulletpoint above, this phase has been completed. I've setup the logic where the player can enter/exit rooms in each floor of the ship, but there isn't a way yet to teleport between the ship's floors. I need to develop an UI that does this, similar to Mass Effect in-ship map that opened when you entered an elevator.
Releases:
I want to prepare the game for a public build to be released on 14th November or 15th November. ✅ I managed to do this as well, spent some time on testing the available public content manually. I've yet to update the f95 thread though.
Marketing/Social Media Engagement (incl Patreon):
I want to post some reels made to publicize the game on Twitter/"X". ⌛ Well I didn't manage to do this, but maybe I'll get around to it today. Many other creators had a lot of patronage growth due to Twitter, it doesn't seem to be working very well for me though.
I want to post WiPs of the in-development art as patron-only posts to show progress and seek feedback. ✅ I posted a WiP this week with the new chibis for the crewmates, soon we might have more WiPs I can post.
So this week seems to have been productive so far, but my work isn't yet done as there's still plenty to do today in order to have less workload next week.
Thanks for reading this and I wish you a great weekend!
