Cards of Gluttony Dev Log #15 [26/04/2024] (Patreon)

Alright, it's been a month since the last update and that means it's time for your regularly scheduled development log! I've been doing a lot of work on the backbone of things, so there aren't a whole lot of immediately exciting things to show off, so I'll do my best to keep it interesting!

Massive walls of text

As the game continues to grow and the many, many branching narratives grow longer and more involved, it'll eventually become impossible to keep track of what is actually happening, especially since all of the plotlines are fed to the player in small pieces scattered in-between all of the other stories. Well, there's an obvious solution to that, isn't there?

(Say hello to your personal library of recaps.) 

Indeed, it is time for the game to get a Journal! As you can see, this new window, accessible from the menu bar, contains a recap for the various plotlines, as well branching paths highlighted in yellow so you can keep track of which paths you've taken, or perhaps even find out a scene had branches in the first place!

I've been having a lot of fun with writing these so far, they've been quite the memory lane to go down. Rather than just writing simple, straightforward recap text, I decided to take the time and write them in somewhat flowery language, so that one could perhaps read these as stories for fun, on a rainy friday night. Particularly some of the... more exciting parts.

Accessibility and text size

Ever since the beginning, I've been struggling a lot with the way text is displayed in the game. Text size, placement, sharpness and whatnot. Especially on the cards, which are often very difficult to fit all the text into, not to mention the smallest of texts on them are already far too small.

There is also another issue. You have likely noticed this if you are playing the game on anything other than the game's native resolution of 1920x1080: the text gets blurry and is overall just not great. Now that part, I cannot fix, that is just part of the wonkiness of the game engine I use.

But before this, I've attempted to fix this somewhat by adding a "larger card zoom" option to the Settings, which scales the cards a bit bigger to make them more legible. It's not a perfect solution, but as mentioned earlier, it's not exactly possible to increase text size on the cards as they would overflow out of it.

... but what of the rest of the game?

(The Settings window is a surprisingly great indicator of how much the game has grown. Look at all those tabs and options!)

I've added font size settings for the dialogue, battle and center message (the ones that appear down at the bottom and fade upwards) texts, alongside a little preview. You'll also notice there is now an "Extra Large" card zoom option, which increases the card size even further, and it now shows a preview as well.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to just make one big ol' slider for all the text in the game due to the way it is set up with the many different fonts used in various places, so I had to add these manually for each part of the UI. I covered the main ones with the dialogue and battle text, however there might be some other areas that could use these, so let me know if there are any you can think of.

I, of course, didn't neglect to add one for the Journal, as that window is all about giant walls of texts. You can see the slider is built in directly into the window if you go back to look at the screenshot!

And from the land of content:

I couldn't write a development log without including a few pretty pictures now, could I? Here are some of the new faces I've been working on that will be involved in the next Main Quest, MQ5:

(They're a package deal.) 

Well, it's probably not a surprise, based on their attire, that they're farmers! But what is their deal? Are they just two unrelated people? Are they family? Father and son? Brothers..?

... I'll leave that part to your imagination until the day you get to meet them in the game. 

Aside from these new faces, I've also done some work on an existing character whose story has yet to really unravel:

(Hey, it's Arnold!) 

Now what is going on here? More perceptive minds may notice that his facial expression looks different compared to usual, serious even. Hopefully I'll be able to finish working on this plotline fast enough so that you get to actually see this in-game in the next update.

I've been having a lot of fun giving the various characters different outfits (Beau has 3 now, not even counting the variant where he takes off his apron!) which, while great and fun... is a lot of work since I have to do the sprites for all of the weight stages... oh well, who doesn't like putting their silly little characters in silly little outfits?

Card of the Month

We didn't have a card last month due to the devlog being tiny to accompany the release, so surely we cannot pass one up this time.

Planning Ahead

Gain +4 Energy and draw 3 cards at the start of your next turn (adds Status).
Effect ignores statuses.

Think ahead and set yourself up for success.

It took me... 4 updates to realize I can use any and all of the characters from the game in the card illustrations, but I got there. Admittedly it gets a little awkward, because it ends up strongly tying a card to one character. This means that if I wanted to add this card to any other character's deck, a lot of questions would arise, such as: "Why do they have that card? Does that mean they met and fought, and that they got this card by winning?"

I'll workshop that... eventually.

And with an actual character in the illustration, rather than just disposable one-off faces, I found myself putting in a bit more of an effort to make it look good than the usual card, more dramatic even!

And naturally, this whole thing lends itself to the signature card illustration picturing none other than its owner, so this is indeed the signature card of our friend from earlier.

And that is all!

I'll be going back to the woodworks now, as there is, as always, an unholy amount of work that needs to be done that is already behind schedule. You know the drill by now: thank you for reading and for supporting the project!