Progress Update

Pretty happy with my progress overall this week. Managed to get everything up to the freeroam finished, as well as the majority of it - just a little bit of the end left which I should be done with tomorrow. After that there's 2 more scenes left for the prologue - those should only take a day to put together. I didn't quite make the "few hundred" plan I had, but that was at least partially due to recovery taking a few days, so the work I got done was limited until I wasn't basically a zombie on painkillers. I did get well over a hundred finished though, so I'm happy with that. Also the freeroam ended up being a bit more work than I had anticipated, but we're through the majority of it now, just a few more small things to finish up on it, and I'll be moving on tomorrow.

A real quick overview of the freeroam (what they'll look like, how they'll work, etc).

So here's a basic overview of what you'll see (note: I still need to clean up the nav arrows, but that's a later on thing:)

Note the little icon on the bottom left. Hit that and....

Basically you'll be able to navigate through the free roam using either on-screen arrows (Like I said - still need to replace the ones in the image, but I needed something to write the code for), or using the nav screen on the bottom. You can open or close the screen as you please - it will auto-hide whenever you're in a conversation with someone, or when the freeroam event is over.

Just a couple more shots:

Note the characters with a slight outline and glow - in those screenshots, I have the mouse on top of them. Whenever you mouseover a character (or object) you can interact with, you'll see that outline and glow - indicating you can interact with them. 

Still to do, regarding free-roams - create an "objective list" - this will be placed somewhere near the top right corner. It'll be a small drop-down menu listing all of the things you'll be able to do in that freeroam. It'll also tell you which ones are mandatory, and which are optional.

I set it up this way so people have the option to skip directly from room to room (particularly will be useful later on for those who prefer to do multiple playthroughs!), or via direct navigation using arrow buttons on the screen.

A few notes: #1 some things may benefit from exploration. Example: In this freeroam event, entering the room with the dancing girl, and the tall girl drinking, triggers an event immediately when you enter the room. You could however theoretically bypass this event entirely by using the direct nav menu, and just never going to that room. Anything that is mandatory to the story will never be skippable, but certain things may be if you opt for direct navigation and skip certain rooms.

#2: This freeroam is fairly small in comparison to some later ones, but the system will work pretty much identically. In later ones, the nav menu will likely be scrollable - as the amount of rooms will likely take up more space than the screen provides. One small note on that as well - the larger nav menu currently stays open until you close it (or enter a conversation, or end the freeroam), so if you move rooms, it doesn't close. The only way to close it is either hit the close button, or end the free roam.

I still need to clean up the code quite a bit since it's currently a mess, but for starters I was making sure it was all functional. Now that it is, I'll worry about the rest at a later time (probably when I'm busy working on the next one).

Finally, a bit about polls. As mentioned, the credit shop and wallpapers will be tied to minigames (that will be the main purpose of most minigames - these sorts of extras!). Monday the first poll regarding them will go up. At the moment my current plan is to release with 7 wallpapers, and 20 or so total images for the credit shop. The poll on monday will be for the first series of those 20. I'll have more info on that monday with the poll.

That's all for now. Poll on Monday, and I'll have more progress and a little bit of character info next week. Until then, have a great week!