Imp chibi reveal + Devlog #097 + Dev poll results (Patreon)

Imp chibi!
I'm very, very happy with how she turned out. If you remember her battle sprite, she looked a bit different. There were a few things about her design I wasn't very happy with. I've made her skin more red and the rocks more brown, gave her actual panties, two pointy little toes, and changed the way the rocks look by making them more like stalagmites/stalagtites, rather than clusters. She also has some rocks around her hips, her bra has been inmproved a bit, and the reflections on her leather clothes have more interesting colors. So yeah, a bunch of changes! She's basically getting the Cerelea (Cow girl) treatment: Design updated for the chibi first, new battle sprite will be drawn later.

As for me, I've been creating new rooms to explore. A lot of them! And it's going very well! Before I go into more details about that though, I'm going to share the results of the dev polls here. In case you don't remember, the dev polls are polls for patrons to decide how much of some features will be present in the Patreon release. Basically, more features means more content, and less features means an earlier release. Anything that's missing in the Patreon release will be present in the public release later.

Feel free to skip this part if you've seen the dev polls in Discord, because this is a simple copy paste:

Room variety

I mentioned how I number and label rooms in the last devlog. Basically, any room that is required to look unique will be made that way no matter what. But there are a lot of rooms, especially in dungeons, that are mostly there to be passed through. If you look at the ocean dungeon in the demo, you'll notice that several rooms look alike, often with minor differences. The reason for that is that I made a few room templates, and then made a few variants of each template for these pass through rooms! The idea behind that is to make sure you don't walk through the same room all the time (and especially not twice in a row!) while saving dev time.
So! I'll be using this same process, and this poll will help me determine how much room variety will be in the Patreon release. Less variety saves me time, more variety takes longer. While I don't have exact numbers, I expect #1 would take 1 or 2 days, and #4 would take 15 to 20. That being said, I have been known to expect wrong!

1 No room variety : 1 template per area, no variants, all pass through rooms will look the same in each area.

2 Some room variety : minimal effort to make the pass through rooms look different, but still noticeable.

3 Better room variety : a few templates per area, close to the ocean, but not quite.

4 Full room variety : Even higher amount of templates for even more variety, similar to the ocean.

Result: 2 (Some room variety) Wins!

Party interactions

At various points in the game while exploring, the characters in your party will have small interactions, somewhat similar to what you'd see in some of the Tales of games. These interactions generally serve to flesh out the world and/or characters, and will trigger if certain conditions are fulfilled (story progression, a certain set of characters in the party, finding a sercet, reaching a certain room, at random...). In the TODO list I post in devlogs, this is what I refer to as "Secondary dialog".
This poll will let you choose how many of these interactions you'd like to see in the Patreon version. While simple, the system that allows this to happen still needs some work. And, of course, writing more of these interactions will require more time. #0 will take 0 days, and I expect #4 will take... Maybe 5 days to a week? Again, I have been known to expect wrong. Some things can be surprisingly hard to predict.

1 No interactions : Since party interactions are optional, I wouldn't be against not including them in the Patreon version.

2 Story interactions : As the name implies, only interactions that relate directly to the story events.

3 Story + Main cast interactions : Includes story interactions, plus various others between the main characters.

4 Story + Main cast + secondary cast interactions : includes the previous 2, plus some interactions between the main cast and various unlockable characters.

Result: 4 (Story + Main cast + secondary cast interactions) Wins!

Almanach descriptions

This one is pretty straightforward, it will let you choose which types of descriptions will appear in the Patreon demo, if any. Of course, the rest will be added later in the public release.
There are 4 different types of descriptions: Item descriptions, monstergirl descriptions, shape descriptions, and general lore. Writing these shouldn't take an enormous amount of time, but it's gotta be done at some point.
Item and shape descriptions should be relatively fast, about 1 day each if that. I've put these together in this poll to reduce the amount of options.
Monstergirl descriptions might take a bit longer, let's say 2 days.
General lore would take the longest. This includes descriptions of important characters, places, and various other pieces of lore, as well as a story recap. I'd say this would take 3 or 4 days, to be safe.
Keep in mind that as always, unexpected issues could arise and cause tasks to take longer. Or I could just expect wrong.
Which ones would you like to see?

1 None

2 Items/Shapes descriptions

3 Monstergirls descriptions

4 General lore descriptions

5 Items/Shapes descriptions + Monstergirls descriptions

6 Items/Shapes descriptions + General lore

7 Monstergirls descriptions + General lore

8 All

Result: 5 (Items/Shapes descriptions + Monstergirls descriptions) Wins!

New Menu NPCs

Dev polls are for the Patreon release only! The public release later will be fully finished no matter the result.
I drew a few new NPCs a while back, but I still need 3 more for the demo. Of course, each new menu NPC comes with a chibi! 2 of these I already had in mind, and the last one will be chosen by me among the winners of the previous NPC polls.
However, I also have the option of using old NPCs as a temporary replacement for the Patreon release, which would save time.
Each new NPC should take about 2 or 3 days.
This poll will let you choose how many of these new NPCs I'll be drawing:

1 None

2 1 New NPC (will be one of the poll winners)

3 2 New NPCs (will be the 2 I had in mind)

4 3 New NPCs

Result: 3 (2 New NPCs) Wins!

Hint system

Dev polls are for the Patreon release only! The public release later will be fully finished no matter the result.
There will be a hint system where Alma, or sometimes other characters, can give you hints about the current puzzle or various information. Kind of like Goombella in Paper Mario! I figured there might not be a need for it since the vast majority of patrons will know how to play the game already.
Just like for party interactions, I'll need to write the dialogue (though it's much more one sided dialogue here) and make sure the hint system works. I expect that'll take maybe 2 or 3 days.
So, should the hint system be part of the Patreon demo?

1 Yes

2 No

Result: 2 (No) Wins!

So! Since I was working on the rooms, having the room variety poll first was an obvious choice. I've already saved quite a bit of time thanks to the result!
Not only that, but I've also improved my room editor a bunch over the month, to accelerate or simplify all sorts of task.
One of the most interestings improvements I made is a way to mirror rooms! The simplest trick ever to add more content to a game. A mirror version of a room will never be worth as much as a completely new room, but it still helps to increase variety a lot and now costs me about 5 seconds to do.
If you remember Sablee in the previous demo, several rooms had a depth perspective where they would basically contains a miniature version of the room it leads to. This was all approximated by hand at the time, but I've added a way to resize all objects of a room at once while also adjusting their position accordingly, which not only saves time and effort for these types of rooms, but also increase the accuracy of the "miniature room".
I think I mentioned this a while back, but rooms can contain 4 types of objects:

- Decoration: Purely decorative, generally cannot be interacted with

- Interactable: Can be interacted with without necessarily having a point, like gems in Sablee.

- Multistate: Can be interacted with, directly or not, and have several states that the game must remember for the next time you visit the room it's in, like a chest, a lever, a door, or puzzles!

- Harvestable: Can drop loot in some way once, requires conditions to be cleared to drop loot again (generally justr exploring for a while).

The most time consuming part of creating a room is placing the decoration type objects, since they make up most of the room. The other 3 types of objects are of course very important, but are more of a game design thing.
For that reason, I've been focusing almost exclusively on the decoration side of things so far. It might not sound that important, but there really is no point in exploring if the rooms look bad or empty! It will also be much easier to focus on adding the puzzles and secrets afterwards, once I know exactly what the rooms look like. There are a few other things to take into consideration, but I'll get into that in the next devlog.
So far, a bit over half of the new rooms are done! And that's depsite the fact that I also had to fix and improve a bunch of stuff, so I'm pretty confident that the rest will be taken care of by the end of march.

I've been thinking a bunch about how long the remaining tasks will take until the patreon demo release. Since the new rooms were the biggest unknown factor left, this is what I expect will happen in the following months:

March : Draw the last 2 high priority chibis. Finish decorating the rooms. Start adding the interactables, multistates and harvestable.

April : Fully finish the rooms (interactables, multistates and harvestable), and place the cutscene! Make sure they all trigger correctly. Finish the last cutscene set.

May : Implement the new monstergirls. Create new player spells and enemy spells for the new monstergirls. Add new shapes. Roughly balance everything. Beta tests will start right after that!

June : Getting really close at that point, but there will still be stuff left to do. Most of what will be left then will be smaller tasks, sometimes dependant on the dev poll results of which there are still a few left to do, so it's a bit harder to predict. I'll go into more details in future devlogs.

July : I'll probably be adding the finishing touches at that point!

August : I've been looking at my TODO list over and over and trying to think of what I might be missing, but I think that's pretty much it. Do keep in mind that my expected release date was off by over a year before this, but barring unforeseen circumstances, this might be the month where the Patreon demo releases.
Again, I can't stress this enough: take this with a grain of salt! The release could be at the the beginning or the end of the month, or in July, or in September. This is simply my best guess right now!

If anything, May may be the month where things take longer than I'd like. We'll just have to see once we get there!

That's all for now! ^^