NicoleMakesGames

Lots of fun places to go with this but I want to create a steady base for them in particular as they will be who you're trying to get a date in the demo. As such they are the root of every interaction and need to be rock solid.

On that note I've picked up where they've left off. Fleshing out the profiles for a few characters before writing them into the story. Right now I'm working on Sam Diggums, a beat cop and your former partner, distraught now that you've left to form your PI office.

2/3

Wow! Last week was so hectic with the prep for the big fight and the wedding that followed. Both of which were an great time. In between it all I did get some work done.

Firstly after a discussion, my writer and I have agreed that she doesn't have the time for the project and is leaving.

Work on the narrative is slowing down more than I'd like. Coordinating and establishing what we actually need to get down means that we're having to go back over some of our old work. Though now I've mostly exhausted my coding work and debugging I'm hoping I can just throw myself at the writing.

As mentioned, the introspection system has been altered. A filter will only be applied over the screen when the detective is narrating or thinking on something. I've also been working on putting some of the new sprites in game. They require a bit of odd sizing so I need to be mindful in the future.

2/2

I've been so busy lately with this debut fight coming up I wasn't able to post last week! For those of you in NYC come see me compete at the Melrose ballroom this Thursday! I can't promise to win but you'll see me put up one hell of a fight. I did manage to get work done though, shown bellow.

I also did worked with my writer and it's nice too see more of the plot forming. For this next week I'll be ironing out some kinks for the introspection system and honing in on getting the new writing into the game. I'm worried the biggest issue will be balancing the patience system with the plot.

Specifically, there was a long term bug that would break some conversations for seemingly no reason. Turns out it was a syntax error caused by untrimmed blank text at the ends of some of the cells in the spreadsheet that are used to determine specific states like position and expression.

2/1

The recap on this will be brief. January was a pretty slow month with my travel and health. We got an artist on the team and by the end of the month, were kicking back into high gear. The expression system was reworked and in the last week I squashed some bugs and added introspective text.

But because dictionaries aren't visible you can't preload anything into them. Bless the Unity asset store and ayellowpaper for creating a patch that allows you to do just that. I have to imagine this has to do with not allowing duplicates? Or because of the ordering process? Honestly I don't know.

The problem with that is that dictionaries aren't visible in the inspector in unity. Most arrays and lists allow you to add files before the game loads with the inspector. This saves on a ton of resources over manually searching for the file name because of the way that unity compresses file data.

Speaking of, the new dynamic model for art is off the ground. I ran into an interesting new problem while working on it. I wanted to provide the art type and character name and return a unique sprite. I over complicated the matter with lists but simply put its best run through nested dictionaries.

1/3

Finally working again! Getting an artist has been invigorating but also a little embarrassing. It's great to see what the writer made pop up in early sketches. But also makes me cringe at the placeholder art I've thrown together for the new expression system. Thank you bsky.app/profile/llam...

1/2

Hey guys, it's ya girl, I'm sick as a dog right now. I've done minimal programming do I have done a lot more coordination with my team and work has properly started to swing into gear. If I just hadn't been bed ridden the last few days I'd actually get around to the expression system... Ugh.

1/1

Happy New Year! Sorry about missing my post, I was traveling and with lots of family and my partner ended up in the hospital. But things are normal, I'm getting back into work. The team is coordinating on tasks for the next 2 months and I'm going to get back to working on the expressions.

12/5

Can't quite say Merry Christmas nor Happy New Year. Reguardless, holiday times haven't given me room to work but I've met with an artist who's interested in the project and can move ahead with some early sketches. Might start doing some sprint work to organize tasks for the future this week.

12/4

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas if you celebrate. With the seasons and traveling for family I have taken a break from working on the game. (Hence why I've been so late) I may do a little work here and there in my off time but mostly I'll be spending time with my family! ✨🎄

12/3

This one was pretty delayed cause there isn't much to say this week. With Christmas around the corner my work time has picked up and my free time is spent buying gifts or getting ready to travel. I did manage to talk to my composer and I'm poking around for a few artists. Happy Holidays all.

Ooh! As a sound designer I love puzzles like this. Monks immediately give me ideas of Gregorian Chant, low register baritone droning noises that would fit into a chorus. Your animations feel more fast and alive so I'd instead do short tones ending in Oh sounds like Moh & Yoh at different pitches.

That being said, this week will be a pivot back to code, though I may also get working on some of the sound and contact my composer friend about something for the demo. For now though, I'll dive back into how the character portraits are built, and maybe optimizes some things with dialogue gen.

I was a little worried about the story earlier cause I had mostly just vibes that I wanted to capture but sitting down and spit balling ideas has solidified things so much more and leaves me really excited for the future. Though with the holidays around the corner we'll see how much time we have.

12/2

I totally forgot to post this week! Well better late than never. Writing has begun on the demo, we've got some character's outlined and some desired paths for the player to take through the conversations. While our writer will be focusing on that I'll help where I can and knock out some code.

Right now, while there are some small things to change or add in the code (especially the character portrait system) but the big push will be writing out characters and dialogue! It'll be a broad demo so I'll be taking some of the archetypes from my research for these first characters.

Slow downs in my pace have still occured and while it's great to focus on the minutia sometimes (it's kept this from turning into a cancerous code base) I need to really just get a demo out there to start play testing.

12/1

Happy holidays! This last month has been great for wrapping up the last of the mechanics. I've finished the game end system as well as the patience system. Honestly it's been really great seeing how easy it is to add these on. My system has gotten so modular change is easy!

11/4

Agh, the last few days were hectic for me, I can't believe I put this off till Today. But, the patience system is done! There are some more things, mostly around the portraits for the characters and how those are animated but from here I'm going to focus on the writing. Happy Thanksgiving!

Honestly that is one of my biggest weaknesses in coding. I like to know systems in and out, that's why I created a custom visual novel engine. But sometimes you need to just grab something that works well, get the hang of it, and slap it in place. Scroll view has it's issues but works well enough.

Usually, when I make a new system I create some custom dialogue to show it off and with the new dialogue it's started to run off screen! I knew this would happen so I dug into unity's scroll view system. Usually I don't care for their more complicated prefabs cause I don't have control over them.

11/3

So guess who's computer went kaput and lost her a day of work. It's fine but I had to go back and redo some annoying work for the end of demo content. I also decided to do some job apps before that so I had even less time to work on the patience system! But, I got something done anyway.

It was a nice way to kill a slow day at work and it's been fun watching the board develop over time. I'm not hugely into chess and I'm certainly not very good at it but I might post just a daily picture of the chessboard or something. I'm always curious about which of my neighbors chose which team.