Soulspire Dev Update #3

Happy February! Thank you again to everyone who played Soulspire v1 - I hope you enjoyed it! If you have any comments or feedback on the game, please let me know. :)

With that said, I'm already hard at work on v2. This last week, I've focused primarily on fully building out the systems for the gameplay loop that I introduced in v1. As you can imagine, that's mostly coding work; I've never built anything like this before, but I do have a programming background, so I'm doing my best to make this a simple but useful system for the future.

When you go to perform a task (i.e. exercising), the system will randomly play through one of a series of short dialogues about the task. Of course, exercising on your own vs. exercising with Dawn will have entirely different sets of dialogue. The goal is to have a wide variety of these random dialogues and, as the game progresses, add in new ones that reflect the changing game state. I'm also adding in a flag system that should allow reactive commentary from the characters; if you exercise with Dawn, Stella might comment on it later.

The overall goal of all this coding and writing is to really make the characters feel alive. Big, linear chunks of content help define characters in broad strokes (i.e. Dawn is a tsundere, Stella is a princess, etc.), but it's the little day-to-day interactions that really flesh them out (i.e. Dawn really likes mornings, Stella is naive, etc.). In terms of creating content, I'm already >40% done with writing content for the various "rooms"/tasks. That's not 40% of all v2 content, to be clear, but it's quite good progress for this early in the month, especially considering all the programming I had to do as well.

Thank you again for your support, and I'll have another dev update (with an ETA update) next Monday!