Everstone Daycare - Progress Report [June 24, 2022]

Howdy everyone!

Here’s an update on what we’ve been working since the last update:

• Written scenarios that will play when you enter the clinic, lobby, and nurse’s office – It was never intended for these 3 rooms to be freely accessible while moving around the map. I’ve written up a few scenarios that will play whenever you enter these rooms that will effectively block the player from moving through them (due to someone being present). I’ll expand upon this later, including ways to bypass them or alternate ways to move from the retraining wing to the ‘big boy’ wing of the building.
• Created art for 2 new characters and redid the lobby art – To go with the scenarios we’ve written above, we’ve created art for 2 new characters you’ll be interacting with: Nurse Joy and Chansey. The art for the lobby has also been redone and should look cleaner.
• Refit the patrol system to work with the Everstone Daycare map – After deciding on where each nurse would patrol on the main map, the patrol system should be working fine now. I’ll continue to check for issues such as if the map is actually traversable when your stamina state is maxed out.
• Discussed plans and designs for updating the title screen and the other system screens – The title screen is currently just something thrown together from otherwise unused assets, but we wanted to create something that would be made for the purpose of being a title screen. Similarly, the backgrounds and buttons used for the save, load, and volume screens are defaults that came with the program that also want to personalize in the future. This likely won’t be finished in the next few demos, but it’s something we’re working on.
• Bug Fixes on the previous demo - I’ve received a few reports on bugs and issues that I’ve missed in the previous sweep of changes I made and hopefully fixed them for the next demo.

Plans for the rest of the month:

• Programming in the story and additional scenarios – The main goal of the month. I’m starting it a little later than expected, but hopefully with the additional content and a working patrol system, it should be worth it.
• Re-do the way event flags and map transitions – Currently, all the checks for whether moving to another map would instead move you to a scene, prevent you from moving at all, tell you the door is locked, etc. is written inside the map files themselves, which makes it a little harder for me to read, edit, and add in new flags. I’m planning to instead make it call a function whenever you move between scenes, so that the content of the room and the jumps and flags are in separate files and therefore easier for me to mess around with.

The last things I need to do for the month are programming-related, so it shouldn’t take too long unless I find a major issue with the way I redid the code or need new art/writing that I didn’t expect to need. Please stay tuned!