Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2022-02-17 (Patreon)

It's already Friday! Well, Mondaynauts (...sorry), this week was a busy one, both with real life and with game dev life.

Patreon exclusive life updates: Today I went to Costco. And also ate a burger. In-N-Out, natch.

As for the game I'm consumed by, I made very good progress this week. I finally fully implemented phone calls (something I've been procrastinating on), which in turn unlocked a crapton of new dialogue I can finally write, as well as a crapton of bugs that I also fixed this week. All the features are mostly done, and the code is basically a huge house of cards at this point, so I'm not going to do much more besides finish up the story/dialogue and art. Which means we're probably done with silly minigames. :/ (okay I have one more planned for an actual story thing, though)

The phone home screen is also finally done, with a bunch of new apps and a perfectly realistic reason why Penny can't see her emails. Next Endless Monday work simulator game will have it for sure, though.

lol.

A big problem I was having with the game is that because like half the text takes place in phone calls due to Penny being alone at the office, she was talking to a gray rectangle a lot, which feels boring.

So I played around with ways we could see the person on the other end of the line and their expressions while they were talking. The character adds a lot of color and the icon floats up and down subtly so there's a little bit of movement. I think this is a huge improvement, but now I need to draw a bunch of new character sprites and expressions. Which I like doing, so win-win!!!!!

Anyway, I'm working through my story outline piece by piece, wrote a bunch of text, and hopefully should be done with the dialogue stuff in the next week, so I can spend the rest of the time on remaining art. I really enjoyed writing Hana's phone calls. The whole game has been awesome for exploring my own characters' personalities, stuff I wouldn't have done otherwise.

And so, we're still 80% done with the game, but it's a bigger 80% now! So much talking. I'll be all talked out by the end of this game. Which is a feat, considering how much I love to heckin talk.

No, Tiger-chan! I can finally see the finish line!

Okay, see you next week! Thanks for your support, as always!