Monthly Post: Soft Locks and Writing + I'm sick

NOTE: I originally typed this out at the first of the month, and then somehow got the coof the next day before I could post it. Then I just forgot about it for a while. 

I'm fine, I basically had the flu for like two days and then the actual worst of it came after cause I have the rare side effect of everything smelling rancid and tasting bad. I've had this when I got sick for before even as a kid, but this is the worst I've had it, and the longest amount of time.

It's been like this for a week now and it's extremely frustrating. For now I'm trying to figure out how to make my space not smell horrible to me, and figure out what food I can eat that doesn't taste like bad refried beans. From what I've read it could be like this for months and if that's the case it might affect my motivation to do my work if I can't manage this.

If not for this smell and taste thing this would be nothing. But now I feel nauseous all the time cause of how gross everything smells. 

Anyway now on with this very late post.

Original Post:

Hey peeps, since I already gave the big news mid-month, and not a whole lot has changed this post will be relatively short. 

Like I said before the dialogue is now functional in game, and playable up to Act 4. But that was only in theory, in reality a lot of issues were revealed causing a lot of soft locks in the dialogue progression! :P These softlocks aren't really the games code but the structure of the dialogue which needs to be done in a particular way.

So much of the last couple weeks has been:

• Make build
• Progress dialogue a bit
• Encounter soft lock
• Fix it and hope that's it
• Make build
• Repeat

In good news eventually we made it to at least the start of Act 3. And decided to review the dialogue from there. 

Some issues were found, largely related to general themes, so there's no need for major rewrites largely. The main thing is there's this dialogue related to the players job that's simply too lengthy, too vague, and too distracting. So that's getting a lot of cuts and rewrites, because there's also needs for the planned work minigame. The rest is adjustments to the dialogue for character consistency, and thesis which is a consequence of hiring multiple writers over time.

I'll be handling the work dialogue personally, while the writer who is permanent now handles the rest. 

After that gets squared away I'll shift focus to progression implementation. Which has a range of needs across UI, dialogue conditions and more. The goal is to finish this stuff this month and shift to cinematics before the month is up.

I said before that there would be a test release for dialogue but that will have to wait until the rewrites.

Conclusion

Thats about it, like I said a short one. Further handling of dialogue and progression but we're coming to the end of the long road this has been. If you want perspective on longer term plans, consider reading the last post. 

Thanks for your support and patience

~Sacb0y