Devlog #4

"I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice." -Roald Dahl

This update is finally putting us in the home stretch. On the game side, I put a color filter over all the asset packs so that they go together a bit better. It does make everything have a sort of drab monochrome feeling, but that depressive tone is at least is consistent as opposed to the offbeat color schemes the mashed together packs previously had.

Additionally, I had the game play tested by a friend, which really exposed a lot of glaring issues. For one, I've been so focused on game viability- I completely neglected the intro. There was way too much confusion as to the controls, setting, and objective in the beginning. Additionally, the sink holes were pretty punishing. In response I have cleaned up in the intro to provide more relevant information, and shrank the sinkhole collision masks. I've also tried to generally improve the hints around the first few interactions.

Lastly, dialog. Something I have been trudging through this entire time. I laid out the main dialog for all the characters and implemented it. I have noticed the spell and grammar checker within the dialog plugin I'm using is not functioning correctly, which makes me think there is more errors than I originally expected. And with the amount of dialog written, this could be an issue. Aside from that, Writing for so many characters in such a succession was difficult, and I feel like some passages the characters would bleed together or I would just write as I would in my own voice instead of using the characters mannerisms. 

With some of my own playtesting though, I should be able to notice and knock out some of these errors. My last update before I submit should add music and maybe some one off dialogs that can be found by interacting with objects in the world. I could really spend forever writing custom dialog for every situation possible, but I have to do my best to guess what the player might do because I only have two days left before it's time to submit. Overall, this was a really difficult type of game for me to make and I really wonder if the style coupled with my inexperience will make it difficult to approach for most. That being said, when play tested by my friend they were able to progress through the game with very minimal hints from me where features were missing. This tentatively makes me believe once things are finished, players may be able to figure it out.

More to come!