Bubblegum Sunday - Devlog 10 (Patreon)

I realize I've not talked a lot about Bubblegum Sunday in a while! (since April, eek!) I did share stuff in the discord channel (if you are interested, please do join us there!) and I want to bundle that all together into a post here. It's a little bit 'all over the place', but that's game development for you.

I'll start with the least visual side of things: Vivi has continued their work on the technical work to set up a proper saving system. This has brought a lot of difficulty with it, since it is basically tied to the idea of "progress" within our game system. We obviously want this, but it is hard to juggle two things at once and make sure it all works nicely together.

Last time I shared an image with an ID card, which is how I envisioned the save slot to work. We have implemented this in a very rudimentary way.

As you see none of the graphics are in, but the rough pieces have been implemented. We've got the head shot which updates when you have how your character looks as well as all your relevant information. And more importantly, it is persistent! We have a save file now!

With this added necessity of having progress, we also implemented a first version of a character creator:

I've been working a lot on what I call body v2, which essentially gets rid of all the currently clothes and replaces it with a new set on an updated body with more accurate features. We've not gotten to implement that, but hopefully we will soon:

I'm also experimenting with "alternative" versions of certain clothes. This one being a goth version of one of the clothes above.

Moving on to the map, we made progress by implementing little pop-ups when you click on a location. We've managed to put that in nearly exactly how I envisioned it:

(that second Afysco is meant to say "Clothing Store")

This will help identify what exactly you are looking at when you are not instantly familiar with the name of a location and prevent you from accidentally going to a location you didn't want to go to.

Speaking of the map, I also got around to creating a night version. Not exactly too exciting, but it does give us a hint of where development is heading~

Lastly on the topic of the map, I've created a new location for the color store, which is named Dyed & Bound.

WIP shot of the Google Sketchup file

The way clothing works in the game, we decided each set of clothes has a "default" color and you can later on customize them with new colors. However you'll need to buy those colors, and you'll be doing that here! (This location might later on also offer clothing as well)

On that topic, the system to buy colors has also been implemented and works correctly. We've reached the point where we will be replacing our dev items and colors with actual game items, to start the proper database of items. 

After that point we will be placing all locations correctly and place every NPC correctly where they belong in their respective stores, so we can finally get an idea of what that will all look like. I mocked up a video of what that might be like for AFYSCO:

Lastly, I designed 3 more NPC's. These are a lot of fun for me and keep me motivated in between the rough spots!

Lizzie (99DEGREES), Ozias (Thug), Valeria (Cop)

That's it! We will soon be implementing a bunch of new colors and body v2. After that we will place all store owners where they need to be and we might be ready for another preview... I still haven't even tackled night time but that'll come soon I hope :P

Thanks for reading!

Alba & Vivi