Developer Diary 28 - Check-out (Patreon)

This week I had a great breakthrough in my shop design: a check-out!

This simply means that rather than buying something straight up, it gets added to your check-out bag instead. This means you can change your mind before you buy and also buy multiple things in one go. This is a solution that makes everything come together, and allowed me to take some big steps forward with design, since I can apply it to many more stores.

For the tanning salon, I decided to go a different route, and adopt the system I had in place for work. Since you have to choose how long you spend in the machine, you are presented with the different options in a similar way that you are presented work options. Applying the system for work to the tanning salon solves quite a few problems, as the tanning salon was a very unique store to begin with.

I’ve added 10 skin tones in total now, going from very pale to very dark. To achieve a darker tone, you will need to spend money and go to the salon, and spend time in the machine. I am thinking about also having the option to go tan at the beach, but I have no idea how to solve that currently.

I also re-did how lips work, using the code to generate their colors. Now, if you do not have any special lip color on, you will have the same tone as your skin tone (eg if your skin is darker your base lip color is darker) and with lipstick you can apply the colors we had before. This is a nifty little detail (which I like) that adds some more realism to the game, since the shade of lip now represents your shade of skin.

This new method broke how I used to do tan lines. I thought this new option would make tan lines work quite easily, but that is sadly not the case. I end up with quite ugly lines, so I will need to come up with a better technique in the future, when I have time for it.

Lastly I added art for Lizzie, who works at the tanning salon. She is quite a brat and a bit of a meanie, but don’t let her judgmental talk let you down, you are much cuter than her!

Oh, and lastly lastly I added bigger lips to the game, so there is that too~

Thank you all for the continued support, I really hope I can bring you another release soon, even if it means it is less polished and has slightly less features.

~Albatross