Cards of Gluttony Dev Log #5 [20/04/2023] (Patreon)

Another month, another update! I have gotten a lot of presentable work done and as a result, I have quite a lot to show you. So buckle up!

Since there are so many things, I will also warn you that there could be potential spoilers for certain events and such. No spoilers for what happens of course, but things along the lines of "I didn't know this was in the game, but I'd like to discover it for myself." So if that's how you feel, this is your heads up!

It's time for time!

Well would you look at that! It's the town, but later! In one of the previous logs, we've already discussed the "management" portion of the game that will be happening outside of the card battles. There's actually quite a few new things you can notice in this screenshot, so let's go through each of them:

Each day you will choose how you spend your time. Time goes from Daytime -> Evening -> Night. The indicator for Daytime was already there in v0.1.0, but it didn't actually do anything. I've also added explicit days of the week up there, some events and characters will only be available on certain days. I've also made a lighter version of the town music that I shared in a previous log. The game transitions over to it during the evening, I've attached it in the files so give it a listen!

Next up, you will notice the money counter right below the time! There's only about... 3 ways to spend money in the game right now, so how exactly you can gain money is up in the air until I see how much the player will actually need to spend.

Cool rock! On the top right half, you'll notice some plain old rocks. These are the materials I've talked about previously that are scattered and spawned across the map. Now rocks aren't exactly the most exciting or thematically appropriate material for this, so consider it a placeholder until I can get more materials in. Who am I kidding, I'm probably going to leave them in.

2 new locations! We already know about the gym where the player can lose weight, but aside from that we have the Barbershop! Let's dissect both of them in more detail!

The barbershop

So of course the main thing about the barbershop is that you can change your hair in here... that's actually not that exciting is it? We've had the character creator since the prototype, just not the hairstyle options! Take a look for yourself:

First of all, we got some clothes to wear out, isn't that neat? We already you'll be able to customize your clothing from the peek at the wardrobe in the previous Dev Log, now don't those clothes remind you of someone?

Now away from that tangent: I've left the initial character creator the same as is, however, for the barbershop, I've added more than twice the amount of hairstyles! This is also where I'll be adding more of them from now on. There's also a 4 more color options for ones that are more dyed than natural.

I could've just put these options in the character creator, no? Why make the player go through the hassle of going here?

The owner of the barbershop

Say hello to Beau, the man who owns the place. Beau isn't just a generic cashier that you greet when you come in to change up your character. He's also a full fledged character that'll have a few story beats of his own. As such, I recommend that you visit the barbershop every now and then and get a haircut, even if you're not feeling like changing up your character!

And would you look at that, another new feature! It's nothing particularly revolutionary, it's your standard Visual Novel-style choice menu, although I'm very happy with how I managed to implement it! There's actually been a lot of work done on the Dialogue code, so now it's capable of doing a lot of logic like branching and jumping around.

More, we need more character Customization!

To be completely honest, the character customization is a very self-indulgent aspect that I made mostly for myself. I love me a good customization system, so of course I decided to add more to it. Behold!

I've added a few hats to the game (two to be exact), as well as two types of glasses. There's also two clothes aside from the one that appeared in earlier versions: the one you're seeing in these screenshots and another one.

Now that I have this system set up, I hope to get to drawing more of these clothing options soon.

It's finally time to get swole!

Look out, it's time for some physical activity! The gym is finally implemented in the game and as you can see, it's an entire minigame of its own! Whenever you go to the gym, you'll go through a little card game to work some of that weight off.

It has quite a few notable differences from the main card game and that is:
1) You only have one deck that you build up.
2) You gain new cards by adding them to your deck after levelling up.
3) And the gameplay itself, of course. Let's get into that!

You always draw cards so you have as many as your hand size. Stamina is the same as Energy in the main card game. Power is what you need to build up to use cards that actually increase your Fat Burn. And finally Endurance decreases the cost of the cards. Once you run out of cards in your Deck, that's it, so you'll have to rely on cards that refill your Deck.

There's a bit more intricacies to it, but I'll leave that for you to discover once the update is out!

And now a thing that is probably only exciting to me

I've added the shop and the menu has a fancy little confirmation UI that places the YES button exactly where you pressed it. This way, you can just keep clicking to buy the same thing over and over again. UX Design!

I sure hope this works as well as intended when it gets in the hands of actual players...

Aaand that's it!

I'm a little disappointed it's taken so long to put out this next update, but at last it should be ready pretty soon, so look forward to that! Thank you everyone so much for your patience and support. It's been awesome knowing just how many people are excited for this project of mine!