Malevolent Planet 2D - Sidetracking
Hey! I'll start off this post by linking this video, it explains perfectly what my development schedule was this week. I also recommend Malcolm in the Middle if you never watched it.
Here's what I planned to do this week and what I ended up doing instead:
Bugs:
It's not possible to save/load saves in WebGL and I'm trying to figure out why my implementation isn't working. ⌛ Regarding this bug, it's not so much a bug as it's making a whole new feature because it requires javascript interoperations, etc. Sadly, even though I made it work to some degree, it still has one strange issue when you try to load a game so I've kept my changes to the saving/loading flow separate until I can come back to it later
The first gameplay scene (where you enter the ISA up until the moment you go to sleep), I might need to rework it entirely ✅ This has actually been done. I even had to add in a new functionality at runtime that allows me to equip, unequip clothes and unequip specific slots, making it much easier for me to do this during dialogues. It took me like 2 days, but it'll help a ton long term.
The old ISA chibi sprites are still being used and I have to replace them with the new four directional ones. ✅ So all the ISA female chibis are now updated in Unity (except the nurse), but not in all the scenes that have these characters. Still have a bit of work to do on this side, but it's fine because we're also going to need the ISA male chibis to be updated before we can consider it done.
Content:
Plan the content flow for this month's release. ✅ Regarding this, I have actually plotted up this month's content this week but considering there'll be some changes to the intro cutscene with the new visual novel-like images, what I plotted serves more as a conservative plan that makes sure you get at least a new animation this month, in addition to other additions such as the ones I've mentioned. Drawing Likurieris chibis, a *REDACTED* room (redacted to not spoil) and so on may take a bit more time so I wanted to make sure the minimum is guaranteed.
Render at least one scene and try to get it animated this week as well. ⌛ It's been rendered, drawn, but not animated yet. Considering everything I have to do, there wasn't enough time to focus solely on the next content although that will be my first priority next month.
Work on what happens in-game following what happens in the December release. ⌛ Although the new content flow for January is planned, I haven't had enough time to write the dialogues, add new elements to the flow, etc. So I'll be working on this next week as well.
Rework the intro cutscene, giving more visuals rather than just text on a space background. ⌛ The art is ready, but not implemented yet into the intro cutscene. This will also be a focus next week.
Release(s):
The Explorer & Scientist build should be updated today/tomorrow with the latest bugfixes. ✅ Because the latest content wasn't showing up, it was pretty urgent for me to update the builds and I did that earlier this week, so we're fine on this task.
Update the latest public release Wednesday-Friday with any bugfixes. ❌ So, regarding this, the public release I rushed out before Christmas ended up being surprisingly stable given all the changes I made back then that could all make a mess of all pre-existing content. So, I decided not to waste time today compiling new builds for all the platforms, making a new post, etc and instead I'm just going to release the existing build on other platforms than itch.
I didn't go too much into everything I had to work on this week, because that would take too much time to write out and wouldn't bring that much insight if you're not interested in the coding part of game development in unity (unity can be very buggy in unexpected ways) so even though it may look like there are some tasks that are still in the pending stage, there was actually a lot of stuff done this week.
Anyway, I'll continue working more on the game today and maybe I'll manage to not offload more work than necessary for next week.
Thanks for reading this and have a great weekend!