Bubblegum Sunday - Devlog 8 (Patreon)

It’s been a while! As most of you know, Bubblegum Sunday was put on hold around May in 2021. It was then that we created Make Me Yours!, which we worked on until around November of that same year. After that I spent my time on the Xmas project, followed by the annual break period over the holidays. Now that we are in the New Year, me and Vivi have picked up work again. Please note that everything shown in this devlog is extremely WIP and can change at any time.

1. Technical Stuff

On the technical side of things, we’ve decided to step away from mobile, as it gave us far more problems than it was worth. It was one of the major reasons we had to put the project on hold last year, as literally every little thing we tried to achieve was thwarted because it needed to work on mobile. Because of this, we are currently developing for PC (Windows) only. The resolution of the game has been set at 1920x1080, which should still give most everyone a good experience. These basic choices simplify everything a lot: from not having to deal with multiple aspect ratios and safe zones (think phone notches) to knowing our game will run on almost all PC’s without much to worry about.

This brings with it one major change: the game is no longer vertical. This was something I held on to for a very long time, as it made for a very sleek and personal experience, but ultimately it had to be sacrificed for the greater good.

Other than that, Vivi has worked on implementing certain basic features such as being able to go from one location to another, a map view, a home area as well as starting the implementation of our dialogue system.

2. Body types & Clothes

From a game design point, I had one major issue I could not overcome for months. Having different body types did not go well with wanting to offer many different clothes. It always felt to me like it was one or the other. For me personally, collecting clothes and dressing up your character is the main point of the game, and since I didn’t like the thought of having to draw each piece of clothing x amount of times for each body type or having to limit clothes to specific body types, I came up with a hybrid solution.

In short, clothes will change how your body looks. From a story point of view, this will be explained at the start of the game and also kick off the main plot line. In practice, equipping an outfit (which includes top & pants, or dress) will change the look of your body. This allows me to not be stuck to specific styles of body and just draw the body to fit the clothes. This means that more extreme (or late-game) clothes can be accentuated by larger breasts, hips, etc. Outfits will count as a whole, which means that things like a top and pants are ‘merged’ together into one outfit. Accessories such as glasses, necklaces, etc. will not change your body shape and will be designed to fit on all body shapes.

This means that you will be able to own all the clothes that you buy and can keep wearing everything you own, as your body changes along with the clothes!

The body itself has also undergone another revision with a more natural pose to it compared to before. Specifically the silhouette of the old design bothered me, as both the shoulders and hips seemed to not have good posture to them. This body will be used as my baseline for creating all the body types and clothes in the game.

3. Dress-up as a Game Mechanic

Speaking of your clothes, I also finally (!) figured out how to make it relevant for the actual game play. In the old Bubblegum Sunday, your clothes had a rating, which served some purpose, but was overall shallow and didn’t offer much in terms of personalizing your own character. Besides that, people would often just buy the clothes they liked, and would then not change their design much beyond that point. These two things led me to realize we need an in depth style system which hooks into the whole game.

Initially I came up with a rating system using keywords with each having an opposite (cool-cute, trashy-luxurious, innocent-sinful, etc) and have items have a score in any of these keywords to build your character, but ultimately it felt too cumbersome and number-heavy for the feel of the game.

Our scrapped system focused on opposites but was far too complicated to make for a pleasant experience.

After a long conversation with Vivi, we came to the conclusion that none of these numbers and ratings and such is necessary if we simply stick to the basics and use the visuals and colors of the clothes, accessories, hairstyle/color, etc, instead.

Basically, all jobs/encounters/stories you will find in the game will be focused around your appearance in some way. A client might prefer blondes. A club might only accept a black dress-code. A story bit might require a specific item to continue. Essentially, it will act as a sort of puzzle mechanic to encourage the player to change their look but also challenge the player to figure out what exactly a client's taste is. Some things might be straight forward (asking for a color), other may be more vague in its description, or need multiple things combined together. This can be done for extra monetary gain as well as to advance stories or unlock unique sex scenes. The system should be intuitive but hopefully have enough depth to challenge the player in the late game.

4. UI

I really liked how Make Me Yours! had a more skeuomorphic design to it using the book and portrait frame, and I want to take a similar approach for Bubblegum Sunday. I’d like to include (most) UI within a Phone/PDA that you can pull out.

Above you see the old implementation of how the UI would function. With your basic functions added as permanent buttons and UI on screen.

The new system contains everything within a phone, with all options (map, messages, stats, main menu, settings, ...) acting as apps on the device.

I like clean UI and I’d love to keep things off screen when they’re not needed. The phone will usually rest on the bottom right of the screen, where you can still see all relevant information at a glance. There are still some activities I have to figure out (mostly context related, such as accessing your wardrobe at home) but almost everything fits in the context of the phone. Ideally this phone will also have some form of customization to it with color and perhaps stickers or charms.

Thanks for all the love and continued support and I’ll see you in the next devlog!

Love,

Alba & Vivi