Malevolent Planet 2D - The Realization

Hey! This week was relatively productive I'd say, the only issue was that the more things I got done the more things I wanted to get done as well so it's a vicious cycle.

There was something I felt bad about, the gallery is very important for many players and even though I was already out of time on Wednesday, I spent a lot of the day trying to at least get a "basic" version of what the Gallery System will look like in the future, one that would at least allow you to view animations according to the location you picked.

Somehow, I have managed that, but there are still a few issues that with it such as the fact that some of the static scenes I'm loading in there don't have their own cameras, so the preview image can't be generated and that makes the main camera the game relies on remain inactive, however that'll be fixed either in a hotfix next week or in the next content update where I'll try to separate the static illustrations from the animations so they'll be in different categories.

Now regarding the bulletpoints, I'll start with the Bugs:

Fix any bugs that might happen while finishing up the development of this latest content. 1️⃣ ✅ There were some issues but I resolved many of them.

Mechanics:

We have a choice between the mechanic I should develop after the release, that is, either the Gallery Viewer or the Unity Timelines Improvement. ✅ Well it turns out I got to work on both of them even before the release on Wednesday, the Unity Timelines Improvement is relatively done and it's a solid foundation for what we can do in the future to make development even faster, and the New Gallery Viewer system is already in its "alpha stage" and will only get better from here, offering also more control over how you can play animations.
Add a Day/Night mechanic. ✅ This was also done, the mechanic is in and it's active. However, I didn't yet have time to make the map in the forest, lake, waterfall area on the planet also respond to the day/night cycles.

Content:

Animate a scene which happens in the Human Camp. 1️⃣ ✅ I had some troubles with this animation due to some layering + sprite problems so I hope I managed to at least make it presentable given the lack of time and the unexpected issues.
Add 2 New Mini Scenes that have 3 stages of progression each. ⌛ This one, I was almost done on Wednesday evening with the illustrations but I realized it's better to add them in the March update so that I can look over them more and also give more reasons to players to replay that content, because of the upcoming expression overhaul.
Write the remaining dialogues up to and including the encounter with Anna before going back to sleep. 🤔 The dialogues were written, but there isn't an Anna-to-Player dialogue yet because there was no time to actually sit down and try to write it and also make it good and not a chore to read.

Release(s)

We're behind on a public release, but we might have to do one this week on Friday. 2 ❌️ ⃣There was no time to take care of this this week :( It's pretty bad to not have frequent public releases because it seems the Patreon patronage is very dependent on how many public players get to play your game, but I'll definitely do it next week and try to come up with a plan so I can prepare the builds ahead of time.
Release a Patron build on Wednesday (28/02) with the newest content available up to that point. 1️⃣ ✅ It wasn't easy but I did it. I tried to leave things obviously unfinished, because there are many things that are getting into the game which will ideally make it better and more polished.

Now I'm running out of time writing this, but for the near-future I have the following plans:

Work on Render Textures in the unity game so I can preview expressions while editing dialogues and also add more effects to the dialogue avatars.
There are 3 scenes planned, 1 will be "Alien-on-Alien" content, the other 2 will/may involve the player character
Add the 6 illustrations to the game (2 illustrations/scenes with 3 variations which include clothing deformation)
I wrote a bunch of choices into the game and I want to make the choices you picked, especially those in the latest content, matter as your relationship with other characters evolves and potentially unlocks new scenes.

So many things to do and so little time... But this is what game development is so let's hope March will allow us to achieve the above and more!