Everstone Daycare - Progress Report (Nov. 15, 2022)

Howdy everyone!

I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since we’ve begun this project. I honestly didn’t expect it to go this long, but it ended up being something much bigger than I anticipated. But it’s been a lot of fun and I’m glad everyone is supporting us through it. Thank you all again!

Now, A progress report on what we’ve been doing so far. The main concern we’re dealing with at the moment is how difficult it is to access content as we continue to add more scenes to the game, especially since I ask everyone to delete their saves and go through everything again with each new demo.

To remedy those problems, I’ve been working on quality-of-life features Right now, I’m almost done implementing both a Gallery page (to view individual images that you’ve seen during the cutscenes) and a Replays page (to view the cutscenes themselves again). These will be accessible from the title screen and each entry will unlock as you encounter them in-game.

A note about the gallery, rather than listing out all the images individually, I’ve grouped images from the same cutscene into slideshows to help keep things clean and easier to read and organize in the future.

The next feature I will be working on will be a chapter select screen accessible at the beginning of the game to send you straight through to certain sections of the story. This should remove the need to go through the intro and all other previous content to get to anything new we add in.

There might not be any new story content this month while I’m working on these, but this should help make any future demos more usable and nicer to look at. I apologize in advance.

I’ve also found out the reason why people are sometimes not able to skip dialogue anymore when downloading a new demo. Whenever a new update for the program I’m using to develop the game rolls out, it remakes all the project files I have so that they’re compatible with the new version of the program. That might be resetting the flags that determine whether you’ve seen a piece of dialogue or not, preventing you from skipping over them even though you’ve already read them in a prior demo. I’m not certain, but this might possibly also affect whether you’ve unlocked entries in the gallery/replays or not. I’ll make sure to pay attention to this in the future.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to fix this issue directly, but hopefully the impact of this will be lessened once I’ve made the chapter select screen. I’ll also try to see if i can make any workarounds

Thank you again for your continued support!

TLDR; Gallery and Replay functions nearly complete. Chapter Select screen to be worked on afterwards. Likely no story content this month.