dev diary: astrology, and more about lime!

the UI is getting more finalized!!!!!!! i wanted to talk about the hint system in syrup 2 today, because i've put a lot of work into it!!!!!!! it's gone through a couple iterations now and i have screenshots of the old stuff to share too! so this one should be interesting hehehe...

why "astrology"?

in short... it's based on the lore from one of my favorite NIS games, the witch and the hundred knight. there are a few characters in it who can see into the future by "reading the stars". that's the approach i wanted to take with lime--the "stars" are sort of a mysterious entity that whisper plot details to him... he uses his magic to access the information. so he knows a lot of random things, but he doesn't have the full scope or context for them. he's a trickster character, you can never tell if he's serious or not, but he's always having fun!

i got to put lime in trick comes home since he lives in krem! so everyone got to meet him before his syrup 2 appearance (just like souffle haha) but i made them both for syrup 2 to begin with... lime's pronouns are he and she. i think he's my first bigender character? i love her.

here's the original concept art:

the colors changed since i wasn't 100% happy with them--the pink and blue is cute but it wasn't working, so i put a star pattern on his scarf instead and i think it looks way better ehe

there's a few reasons syrup 2 needed a hint system. FIRST OF ALL... IT'S A HUGE GAME....... and you have a lot of freedom in who you choose to party with and the pace you make new candies at. it's kinda easy to start feeling lost as to what you should do to unlock more stuff. that's why i've put a lot of effort into the objectives screen and astrology, so you can always get a sense of how much of the story is still waiting for you to find hehe.

it's also like... if there wasn't a checklist somewhere, it would be really hard to know what events you have and haven't seen yet. that's how i felt when i was playtesting with just the guide screen--i was checking it to see what i was missing, and i wanted the final game to have a feature similar that was better written into the lore. that's why i came up with lime! he's a big fave now, so i'm glad i added him.

check out the improvements!!!

this screen went through a lot of iterations because there was a lot of coding i needed to do for it... each place has a list of events and i check whether you've seen those events or not, and write hints for how to find the scenes. meaning... i need a hint for basically every event so the player can find them all. you can reach lime in chapter 3, so i didn't need to write hints for the required events from chapters 1+2, but there's 8 chapters so... that's still a lot of hints to write and events to track lol.

here's the oldest screenshot i have, from december 2022!

i had the list of places at the top that you could click on, and each event was represented by a checkmark (whether you saw it or not)... but it was a tight fit! i couldn't add more places, and it was confusing which events you were actually missing since you're basically only left with the number of events you're missing. functional, but needed work.

after this, i changed it to clicking on the place to bring up the hint screen. that way i didn't have to choose a default one to show you either.

since most events are centered around bringing a certain party member with you, i added their icons to the screen so you can at least tell what checkmark is what. 

much more useful! now at a glance i know i should be sending syrup to mount sorbet on her own. and lime's advice says i need a certain candy to activate it. (this is sushka's quest, where you have to bring her a chocomellow...) i also added the backdrop here to make it more dynamic and fun hehe... btw the UI is blue because i was reusing assets from the battle system lol.

THE MAIN PROBLEM with this version is, only one hint could be shown at a time. so i had to prioritize certain events, and it was really confusing to look back through my code. look at this mess:

^ for each place i had a list of hints to show if you're missing the event (plus what face lime should be making when he says it). it was hard to keep track of whether i had written a hint to apply to every event, because some could be reused... and i had to make sure that there was a checkmark for everything separately. it felt very error prone, but that's the code the last WIP build shipped with (january 2023 i think)

the CURRENT screen... uses buttons for each event!!!!!!!

i finally drew unique UI assets too...! there are some things i want to fix still, but it's sooo cute to look at now. when the card has clouds on it, he says "Your future is...! Too cloudy?! Come back later!!" so you can tell from the star cards which hints/events are available to you right away.

the code is much easier on my brain, too... i just finished putting most of the events in!

"hintcard" is a screen i pass the character icon, event flag, list it's recorded in, and the original hint stuff from before. i can also tell it an event that's required before the hint is available to you (for the cloudy cards), it's just... SO HANDY... i'm really glad i made this change, so you can check a whole list of things at once rather than the single vague hint from before.

the next WIP build approaches

STILL going strong, miraculously. i feel so focused. like a weight has been lifted and i can work on the things i want again and have so much fun doing it. whenever i get burnt out i always feel like i'll never be able to get back to this level of productivity, but i'm feeling so great...! trying to pace myself a little, but it's all so exciting. i even wrote this dev diary a day in advance because i realized i had so much to talk about!

ahh i just feel so good about syrup 2 right now. there's still a lot to go, but it's in such a good place development-wise. still planning to finish this build in the next month or so if possible... there's not a ton of new stuff i wanted to include for it left, but there are a lot of small things that i really need to fix if i want to share it. astrology was one of them, and i feel like i over-polished it at this point but that just means it's finished sooner, which is great!

that's all for this week... see you next time~~~