v0.2.1 and the codex

Hello cadets! 

First and foremost, happy new year to you. I hope 2023 will be a great year for everyone!

As work on v0.3.0 continues, we have also been preparing v0.2.1 which aims to fix some issues encountered in the initial v0.2.0 release. We expect to release this version somewhere between this weekend and the next weekend, depending on how our testing cycle go.

The most notable fix is the replacement of two "goto" statements we had added in specific orientation paths that broke the ability to go back in history. These are now replaced with more complex code conditions that allowed us to remove these problematic statements.

The codex

A new feature will be introduced with v0.2.1, which is the codex. The codex is made of individual character profiles you can access after you encounter a character for the first time.

If we look at Curie's profile, the first section has lore information but also an affinity status. Affinity is a statistic all characters possess which increase or decrease based on your interactions with them. Choices or interactions that will influence affinity are highlighted in green (increase) or orange (decrease). 

The last section is the notebook, which is an evolving recap of events told from MC's perspective. Based on your playthrough, the content of the notebook can be very different. For instance, here is how Curie's notebook change if you are constantly mean towards her:

We have added this feature as over time it can be difficult to recall exactly what happened, like after not playing a game for months or as content become very extensive. 

Final note

I'm sure you've also noticed the codex looks a bit different from the current aesthetics of the game. As stated in an earlier post, we are looking to speed up our development process and one of our paths of improvement is to reduce UI complexity by transitioning to a single visual framework shared by all elements of the game rather than completely isolating all elements from one another. This way, when we introduce new features most of the visual elements for it will already exist and save us time.

We are transitioning elements to the new style over time and we expect to complete this transition in v0.3.0.

Have fun out there!