Dev Blog 22 | Jel's Cafe | End of Pre Alpha + Ver 0.1a Release

Hello everyone, it's time for another Dev blog and I have some big news to share this week! I'm going to just jump straight into it.

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JEL'S CAFE PROGRESS

Ver 0.1a and end of Pre Alpha:

Thats right, the game is now in a state where I can happily say the Pre Alpha has been concluded, no more major features are planned for the game with a few minor exceptions. Those being endings, a new text sounds feature, and of course the last customer, Edna. Once these features have been added then all that'll be left for the game is cleaning it up and improving it.

Today I'm releasing Version 0.1a, not to be confused with Version 0.01a. This new build contains a ton of new changes, features, bug fixes and even some finished assets too! I hope you'll all download and check it out! There's likely bugs to be found and I of course always love feedback and criticisms. The download for this new build will be found in a seperate post, made after this one!

Music + Intro:

Music is slowly being implemented into the game, comissioned and composed by ZLD1. Im personally kinda crap at music making, so I'm very thankful to have them working on the game!

There are more songs on the way, for now the music for the intro section has been added! Speaking of the intro...

Some new weird backgrounds were added to better fit the theme. With these new backgrounds I can safely say that all of the art assets for this section of the game are now completed EXCEPT for the character creation screen (as this will use the same UI as everywhere else). I still have some writing related things I would like to look at related to the intro, but once thats completed the Intro will be 100% done!

Lastly a small change was made to the tutorial, you can now skip it! If you interact with the doors a few times, Bliss will allow the player to leave and skip the whole tutorial section, this for returning players who don't want to revisit this part as nothing has changed at the moment.

Writing:

I did some more script writing, all of this is behind the scenes work and currently has no impact or changes in the game. I still need to add a few more characters to the script, and I'll be looking to do that when I can, its all a bit teidous to do so it's a little hard for me to focus on at times.

Playable Spaces:

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the player's home is now a small explorable space with a few interactable objects. This treatment has also been given to the Moth shop and Marco & Paul's shop too. There currently isn't any objects in there, but the spaces themselves now work!

I also did some work to the Cafe too, the layout has been changed around. The exit/entrance can now be found at the bottom of the building rather than the side. I've also added some new table sprites too! These have bigger interaction boxes so its now much easier to talk to a character as I was aware it was a little awkward to do so in the past. Lastly, the counter where Phoebe rests has been cut open, allowing the player much faster access to the Kitchen!

In addition to these I also added a new Debug room that can be accessed from the Player's home by interacting with a familiar frog. The Debug room will be used to test features in development and also cheat in items (eventually). Right now the Debug room can give you free money (for testing purposes) and is also testing a new feature, "Text Sounds"!

Text Sounds:

This is a feature thats still in development so its only avaliable in the above mentioned Debug room. How this system works is characters will now make SFX when their text appears on screen, similar to games like Undertale or Earthbound. I am able to change the pitch for these sounds and the SFX themselves, and I would like each character to have a pitch or sound that fits them! I will have an option in the future to toggle this as a setting as I'm sure some people might find this feature annoying. Please let me know what you think if you do check out the Debug room!

Thats everything for now! I've still got a bit of burnout in me, but I wanted to get this build out before I take a small break and focus on other irl things. The new build can be found in a seperate blog post that'll be going up shortly after this post!

Thank you all for your support!