Malevolent Planet 2D Summer Status Update & Release Schedule (Patreon)

Hello! The end of the month is nearing and it's time to let you know how the release schedule will occur this month, together with what else I've been doing.

First of all, I'll start with the release schedule because this weekend it's going to be my birthday and I'd like to do the release(s) tomorrow, Thursday 29th June:

• Supporter Tier will get access to ISA X-Files build from May.
• Explorer/Scientist Tiers will get access to the Blackmail Update.
• Public build with Day2 (I think) will be released next week around Friday.

So, this month I will be able to respect my monthly schedule plan and I think that's a great thing because without your support it'd definitely be difficult to keep going at this pace and the least I can do for this support is to provide monthly content updates.

(however it's been a bit difficult to actually do 4 illustrations/animations this month because many of them have 2-3 characters in complex poses)

Now, regarding what I've been doing since the latest status update:

• 3 Animations have been rendered, drawn, animated, and added to the game with their own dialogues. 
• 1 Animation has been rendered, and is in the final stages of being drawn. Today I will rig this animation and if I'm lucky I can finish it today. If not, I'll finish it tomorrow and include it in the Blackmail Build.
• Dialogue UI update. New UI to make it less distracting during animations. I'm not yet 100% sure about it, because it may be a bit difficult to read on light backgrounds, so I will see what I can do.

• Hide Button for Dialogue UI. When you go to the next dialogue line, it will appear again. You can also click the button again if you want to show the UI on the current dialogue line.

• Fixed clicking events during dialogue. Now, if you click around the menu or the buttons at the top/bottom, it won't advance the dialogue line. Before it was unintended behavior that literally any click anywhere on the screen would advance the dialogue line.
• Bugfix with npc character clothes. This bugfix has been added at the beginning of the month, but it's a pretty important one. I use scriptable objects for every NPC so they can listen to events when clothes are being equipped and if two NPCs with the same name existed at the same time, only the latest loaded one would get the events and that would cause bugs. I am right now instantiating this scriptable object at runtime for NPCs that are likely to exist at the same time in different scenes. (I load scenes additively in Unity to prevent loading screens, so if Scene A has NPC-A and Scene B also has NPC-A they'd argue with each other over who gets to equip clothes before, now each of them will have their own instantiated scriptable object)
• New Dialogues for the Blackmail Update and set up the transition from Day3 to Day4 (spaceship launch day).

Regarding my latest bulletpoint, tomorrow the Blackmail update will indeed have all the animations added and they should be playable and reachable, but the "bad ending" isn't yet developed because I don't really want it to be a bad ending.

Worst case scenario, there'll be an auto save before you make the choice that prevents you from getting on the spaceship launch the next day so I just show what just happened to your character and an option to load a custom save or the latest auto save which happens right before the "point of no return" choice.

So because I have to develop the bad ending dialogues, auto save point and so on, if I don't have time to do everything tomorrow, after my birthday I will make sure to release an update next week with the extras that are necessary to mark the blackmail content as finished outside of scenes/animations. It will be my primary focus, so it shouldn't take more than 1-3 days to get everything done.

Thanks for reading this and I wish you a great weekend! I also hope you had a pleasant June.