Malevolent Planet 2D - Mid-Month Crisis
Hello! It's already the middle of the month... somehow.
The way the time seems to go by fast brings me to this thought... I'd like to boost/concentrate my efforts a bit going forward and focus solely on new content development + fixing any bugs that come my way.
I've spent a bit of time on the new scenes that would replace the intro cutscene and some updates to the first gameplay scene to include new chibi sprites for female NPC characters + other changes to bring it closer to the rest of the game (the huge arrows pointing you the way come to mind as a very old implementation of a guiding system to show you where to go), and I think that once I finish replacing the intro cutscene with these new scenes, I'll want to stop looking too much to the past and instead look towards the future. 🌠
Relatively speaking, the game is in a good state right now in terms of the likelihood a bug may impact someone's playthrough and completely block them, but the fact that it still happens (to other players, and not to me...) is upsetting and that's why after I finish doing what I described above and below, I'd like to get to the bottom of what's happening because even if 10 people in 1000 people encounter a game breaking bug (and that would be 1 in 100 playthroughs), that's too much especially since I actually spend time and effort into fixing bugs and I even try to avoid fixing non-gamebreaking ones to not introduce actual gamebreaking ones.
So, below are my plans for this week and hopefully I'll finish all of them so we can move further and further into the story in the upcoming weeks.
Bugs:
I'm only aware right now of a bug that happens when you start a mission in the new mission panel system and the quest starts, but it doesn't teleport the player character to the map where the mission begins. This bug didn't happen to me or to people that tried to report any issues with their playthrough to me, so I need more information.
It's not possible to save/load saves in WebGL. This one, I'd like to revisit it towards the end of the week once my content work is done, because the way Unity WebGL works together with JavaScript in the browser is headache inducing to say the least, but it'd be greatly helpful if people could download their saves when something gamebreaking happens only on WebGL and I could load those saves.
Content:
Animate last week's rendered scene. This is very important, because although I could do it next week and still have a bit of time for the monthly release, I shouldn't get distracted from the most important thing there is, content.
Write the dialogues and implement the flow for the new content. Closely related to the above bulletpoint, it should also be done this week.
Rework the intro cutscene, giving more visuals rather than just text on a space background. This is my first priority that once finalized and playtested would allow me to focus on the above 2 content bulletpoints.
Release(s):
None this week, a new build will be released next week and time spent on releasing yet another bugfix update would be inefficient compared to combining a content update with a bugfix update.
So that's about it from me for today, I'd like to post some WiPs around Wednesday to show you what I've been working on but otherwise I'll be mostly actively working on the game.
I hope it'll be a pleasant week to all of you :)