D.I.D Update Post #2 - August 2022

Hi Hello Gentlepeople! How are you all?

This update will be just a few main points, as I'll put all the major changes into the September update as I initially wrote this one just a few days after the old one. However, I'll post the September update on the 1st! 

Art -

Anywho, let's get started with possibly the biggest change to D.I.D. The art. The whole time throughout all of D.I.D's now 9 month development, I wasn't the biggest fan of my own renders in the game. I was tempted to commission them from someone else, and almost did actually. But I always felt like doing so would make me lose my personal touch with my own creation. 

I've always wanted to do this anyway, so I thought this would be a handy solution to my distaste of my own 3D renders: Bust out my Wacom tablet and give my hand at drawing again! 

I've never really touched on it, but I broke my wrist quite badly many years ago, and it lead to me quitting drawing due to irritation that persisted well after healing. But I thought it might be worth picking it up again and starting drawing!

Especially as I believe 2D art would look much better in the game anyway. It's been a few years tho, so Im gonna have to practice my butt off to make quality pics again! 

That, and, you may have noticed from the drought of pics where there used to be several a week. I kinda lost my drive for 3D art. So who knows, maybe my drawing will give me that spark back? Either way, I'll get myself at least a few months of practice first so you don't have to see horrendous line art from my poor shakey hands.

Gameplay - Minigames

So up til recently, D.I.D has had the following:
Random encounters - While traversing the tiny landscape, you can suddenly be pulled into a turn-based battle.

QTEs - If encountered by a giant, a quick time event will play, in which you have to press your enter button at the right time. A bar pops up on screen that will move back and forth, and you have to make sure to stop it in the right place. 

The QTEs aren't very hard and even come with just an easy cancel if they're not your thing and you just wanna enjoy the scenes. However, after a while of coding I was able to make a stomping event mini game, similar to other size games out there. 

You're in a small tile version of the map, with the object chasing you following you on screen. You have to move the character around before the object crashes down on you, dealing damage. Take enough hits and you die. It's been done before in several other size games, but it's certainly more interesting than the QTEs I was making before. I won't just fully remove the QTE's though, they'll simply have a new purpose <3 

Story: Routes - 

I realised early on with the style of the story I'm writing, that a lot of the content I want to include basically can't happen at the same time. I'd have to choose one idea or the other. One story beat or the next. They couldn't BOTH occur, ya know? They'd contradict one another. How do we go from Person A finding you and protecting you to Person B doing the same without just forgetting Person A for example. 

It might be a big bite to take, but I've diced up the story into different routes! A choice-based game that branches off to different paths depending on player actions. This way I'm able to include every Idea I come up with, and even make updates post-release! Say after the game's already out, I can just re-release it with an update with another route and story! This way the player will get a lot of replayability by exploring each route there is, and playing through the story more than once. 

As of now, I'm focusing on the family route, Aka the main branching choice right now is: Who do you go to for help once shrunken? In this route, you'd find your big sister Hannah, and go down the Hannah story path. As of writing, there are 5 routes that have individual content for each of them, none of them are complete, however. 

That's all I have to report in this month's dev update. Hope you all are excited! Love you all, and thanks for your continued support. <3