Malevolent Planet 2D - Sudden Realization
Hello! Just yesterday I realized that February is traditionally a shorter month and we don't actually have one more week to get things done.
This week was a relatively difficult one and it very much seems like I might have been too ambitious with my plans from Monday. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have slept well today so I wasn't able to finish the animation, but I at least started it and did some polishing work on it.
Let's see what I managed to do:
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. ⌛ I fixed the issue that was causing your character to move when the quest journal was open, but I didn't do this for the minimap and character buttons yet.
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. Fixed ✅
The Quests list in the Quest Journal can be dragged around. ⌛ I'm still in the process of reworking the UI even though the design is finished, Unity isn't making it easy.
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. ⌛ This is still in development and will most likely needs it own 3-4 days to actually get done, and we don't have those days yet.
Add the functionality that allows me to more easily set characters' expressions during dialogue lines. ✅ Fortunately I actually got this done, but we have a new issue. We have about 30 new expressions we can use, but it seems I might need to change the way I render the images & expressions so I can preview the expressions while I'm editing dialogues, because many expressions can be ambiguous and work in different circumstances, so naming them isn't easy.
Work on a mechanic that allows me to use Unity timelines way more efficiently. ⌛ This hasn't been done yet because there was no time but it's very important. If I don't manage it for this month's release cycle I'll definitely have it for the March one, as it will help speed development & testing time by a lot.
Content:
Animate a scene which happens in the Human Camp. ⌛ I haven't finished animating it, but I started doing it and I'm not too far off from finishing it.
Add more expressions to NPCs and to the player character. ⌛ Related to my point from above, I need to be able to preview these expressions while editing dialogue nodes so that has added an unexpected task I have to take care of before I can add those new expressions everywhere in old and new dialogues.
Because we're kind of out of time, I'm aiming to have a new patron build next week on Wednesday, 28th of February (2024). Since I feel pretty tired today I don't think I should continue working on the animation as the results may not look good, which means on Monday I'll need to finish it together with writing new dialogues that lead from what happened in the preview build to the circumstances that led to the animation.
We also need a day/night cycle, a script that can make everything look like it's sunset, evening, night, morning, full daylight. I hope I'll manage to conjure one and actually have it functional to make the new content better because the animation happens at night.
I hope you'll have a nice weekend and that I'll get enough rest so I can get back to work and be energized enough to do everything by the deadline!