Mid-February Progress Update!

Hello friends!

So, it's mid-February now! Progress has been good with Baby Maker, and I'm getting more and more excited to share the update with you all. To be candid, I'm a bit anxious about finishing everything that I want to have done for the update. Of course, anxiety isn't necessarily a bad thing- it's been pushing me to keep working hard at this! And even if I don't finish every little thing, I think that you guys will have fun with what's new :)

For the past couple weeks, my main focuses have been adding/fleshing out adventures, honing the levelling system, creating different interaction branches based on traits and stats, improving potty and accident animations, adding some basic skill functions, and making some further UI improvements.

There are several adventures now fully implemented! These will send you around the daycare to read books, play with toys, and lots of other fun stuff. (Kiera might disagree with how 'fun' these things are at first, but I'm sure she'll come around eventually!) I'm hoping to have 10-15 full adventures ready for the update- some that delve into the plot, with others that are just silly fun.

Check out the attached video to see the adventures system in action! When you start an adventure, you'll get an alert and you can check it out in your adventures menu for a clue on what to do (the clue will update if there are multiple steps). Then you can do the adventure, which will take away some of Kiera's EXP and stats. Once you level down, you'll get another alert, further stat loss, and the ability to spend a point on traits! (PS- one adventure won't usually bump her down a full level, I just set it like that for the video)

The skill system is coming along since being reinstated. I'm not sure if they'll be ready for the update, but I'm hoping to get at least 1 or 2 done to show the idea. Basically, you'll unlock 1 skill point every 2 levels, and the skills you can pick from will be based on your traits (kinda like you're specing into a class with unique abilities in a classic dungeon crawler RPG).

Whereas traits affect your game passively, skills are abilities that you activate, that will either put a lasting status effect on Kiera (like 'sucking her thumb'), or one-shot abilities that may cause something to happen based on her location (like 'throw tantrum'). Right now, I'm thinking that I'll have a few different skills available with each trait. You can unlock one skill for each level you put into that trait, which could incentivize levelling up a single trait if you want all those skills, and would allow for more customized baby builds! Activating skills will also give different dialogue based on Kiera's level/stats. She may argue with you when you try to activate certain skills- at least while she's still mature enough to protest!

I've been building more interaction branches based on traits, stats, underwear type, whether there's been an accident or whether Kiera needs to go potty.. etc. There's a lot of ground to cover here, so it will be a while before every interaction reflects things properly- but it's coming along.

Naturally, been working on the potty system. Since I've been going through things sequentially, the desperation animations for jeans and pull-ups have had a lot done, but I've been lagging behind on the diaper animations. I'm trying to have them look a bit different, to account for how thick they are, so they require a bit more time. Either way, animations should be looking a lot better (and have better synced audio) for the update.

So, that's it for now! For the next 2-4 weeks, I'm planning to continue with what I've been doing- adventures, traits, stats, skills, and potty events. While bug testing and fixing is a constant task, we'll be going into hyper-drive with that in March! I know some of you are interested in helping with that, so it will be fun to get you involved :)

As always, I'd love to hear from you guys if you have any thoughts to share. Are there any aspects of the game you'd really like me to focus on for the update? Let me know! Talk to you again soon!