Developer Diary 29 - Some insights (Patreon)

After last week I had to take some time off working on the game to focus on artwork again, but at least I am working on a cool banner to promote the game a bit, which will be featured on my main page.

I’d like to take this week to give you an overview of what is going on right now, and what is needed to be able to give you the next build.

First of all I’d like to explain where I currently am at:

The new HUD is partially done. A lot of buttons still don’t do anything, but the logic is mostly there. This means I just need to ‘connect the wires’, so to speak. Some logic needs to be rewritten or rethought because of certain changes. For example, undressing no longer works correctly and needs to be rethought in general.

The character creator is planned but nothing has really been done for it, other than the in game keyboard which I created a while back. The idea for the creator is that you will have some limited options to customize your character before you actually start the game.

This brings us to the next big one: saving. Right now the saving system is highly limited, and manual. I want to switch to an autosave system which saves after every major event (gaining/losing money, after story events, etc), but this needs to be built in a specific way, which still requires a lot of research. This one scares me a bit, but hopefully it’s not too bad to figure out.

Next up is stores. I’ve pretty much figured out the job system, the tanning salon and the hair salon (all still fairly rough at this point), but the biggest problem remains the stores where you buy clothing. Since the experience is different than going to a hair salon, I do want the logic to be different as well. While I know there will be the checkout system, I don’t yet know how you will browse through all the items.

Finally there is story. The idea is that the start of the story will begin being fleshed out soon. This will not make it into build 3, but it will begin being fleshed out soon. I can’t spoil much, but I will be taking cues from GTA in how they offer story missions in parallel.

I hope this gives you a bit of insight into where I currently am. It’s a lot! There’s also things like music, which I haven’t been able to touch at all yet. But that’s for later.

Thank you for reading and for your continued support!

Albatross