Malevolent Planet 2D - The Emotional Week
Hey! As you can see in the title, this week will be a pretty emotional week.
While I was writing the dialogue for the preview content in the Human Camp, I realized that we could make the dialogues a lot better if we spent a while reworking the current expressions and making new ones based on different combinations of eyebrow, mouth, eyes sprites.
So we have that in the order of priorities for this week in addition to the following:
The Quest Log UI needs to be redesigned inside Unity.
The Gallery Viewer UI needs to be redesigned inside Unity and its functionality rewritten to accomodate the new design.
The Gallery one is a pretty ambitious task so I'm not sure I'll be able to finish it by Friday, but there are a few bugs from a previous FridayNews post which I'll pick based on whether it's reasonable to fix them this week due to the high workload. So, here's my list.
Bugs:
You can move your character when the Quest Journal window is opened by clicking outside of it. Likewise, clicking the Character and Minimap buttons still triggers character movement.
In the Medical Room, when you're near the doctor or near the exit and you're not hovering the mouse over either of the elements, the dialogue/exit action icon is displayed near the privacy screen in the upper right part of the map.
The Quests list in the Quest Journal can be dragged around.
Mechanics:
Write the system for the upcoming Gallery Viewer, allowing you to load visualize animations depending on the selected area/location together with maybe giving you hints where you can see the scene if you missed it during gameplay.
Add the functionality that allows me to more easily set characters' expressions during dialogue lines. This has been a task for a while, but it's a bit difficult due to the lack of time.
Work on a mechanic that allows me to use Unity timelines way more efficiently, drastically cutting down dialogue testing time + content flow testing time.
Content:
Animate a scene which happens in the Human Camp.
Add more expressions to NPCs and to the player character, based on the expression rework mentioned above.
These bulletpoints are slightly ambitious and I'd be happy with even finishing the gallery viewer redesign + the expressions rework this week. I don't think we have very important matters except for the above in general, most of the bugs we have right now (at least the ones I'm aware of) aren't game breaking, just annoying perhaps.
My focus is as usual on content and that's why I'm trying to get through the above this week, so we have more time for actual content. Most of what I'm doing is meant to both make development of new content faster, and also make the game more pleasant to play.
It's a good thing that at this point we don't seem to be getting reports of things being broken, the game crashing and stuff like that so I'd say that's pretty good progress and makes my work more worth it, since it sucks developing new content but being worried people may be stopped by a bug before reaching the new content.
