Devlog Day Night Cycle (Patreon)

Hey everyone a huge thankyou to all my patrons!

It has been a rough couple days.
So after thinking my project upgrade went well I found what I thought was a bug that broke a a huge number of objects during the upgrade.

SO here is a fun story of game development. In order to bug test/fix this error I needed to roll the project back to before the upgrade. Each switch takes about an hour to re-construct the project. So one roll back and forward takes about 2 hours.

So after about 8-9 hours of trying to fix this bug rolling backwards and forwards I discover it was my own stupidity. I had a piece of rogue code deleting objects. Once I removed it everything was fine again and I didn't need to roll backwards.

So after that frusterating nightmare I decided I wanted to build something fun. So I built a way to change the Time of Day (Graphically).

This was a fun little task where I can set how the lighting looks then save it into a specific file. I can then switch between them. In the final game this will allow me to have 4 different styles of lighting for the Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night cycle.

Another neat little polish was linking it into the lighting and shaders. Now I can have environment effects turn on and off depending on the time of day. The example gif is entirely dynamic. I just set the time of day and it switches! So every area of the game can be constructed to have a dynamic time of day system!

Daytime/Nightime
This will be a great part of the core "Time" mechanic.
I've written about this before but I'll write more clearly my thinking about the 4 time periods.

Morning/Afternoon
During the day is when you will do most time consuming activites. These will be things like going to classes or maybe doing some exercise at a Gym. Giving you two daytime chunks you can fit two "tasks" each day. Some timed events could also require a certain "time" to pass.

Time will only tick forwards for certain activities so you won't have time limits on exploring or talking to characters. If an activity takes time it will tell you in advance. In most cases you get a specific benifit for doing the activity.

Evening
Most daytime events have finished and this is a good period to engage in "socialising" talking to characters and a great place to put some ABDL content. A bedtime sequence where your put to bed by your caregiver would be a fun bonding time. This would then tick forwards to night. Although some activities will be avaliable in the evening, like maybe a characters party.

Nightime
This is the primary place where the combat happens. This can turn any game area into a combat arena. This will tick fowards to daytime when an important event occurs or your are knocked out by a ghost. This could also be a fun way to get you in trouble for being out all night. If the game ticks over to morning and your not home your caregiver might be upset when they see you next. We could also include stealth sections or specific story pieces.

I actually think doing the time period graphics before I built the environments was a great descision. I can work on what they look like both day and night. I'll need to add a GUI element so you can tell what time of day it is but that system won't take long to finish.

I thiiink my next task should be starting to build the start game customization and opening/tutorial.

Anyway I'll post updates as they come in!