Everstone Daycare - Progress Report (Dec. 31, 2021)

Happy New Years everyone. Hope 2022 hasn't been too bad for everyone so far. 

It's been a week or so since I've been able to get back home and back to my usual PC. I've been trying to readjust back to a proper work schedule while Tennet and Spooky are dealing with school and work starting back up again. We have some visible progress to report though, thankfully.

I've finished my first draft of the full UI (please see the screenshot above) and would like to get everyone's opinions on it, if you have any. As shown before, we've made our own textbox with options buttons on the right. Hopefully it's easy enough to infer what each button does based on the icon I made. At the very top-middle of the screen is the day/time timer, showing you what day number it is as well as which time of day it is (split into 6 segments). On the top right is the minimap which I've kept minimalist compared to the rest of the elements (which I'm still not sure is the best decision). And finally below that is what we've dubbed the "zonk meter" which measures how much hypnosis you're currently suffering from (split into 3 segments.)

The strengths and weaknesses will become more apparent once we have something actually playable, however I would still like to hear people's initial thoughts on it, such as its readability, thoughts on the design, etc. In particular, I'm concerned about how much it needs to visually pop compared to the backgrounds, as I'm not certain whether the colors I've used are too muted.

On the music front, I just released the Day Theme that will play in most areas during the morning and afternoon periods. We wanted it to have a lighthearted and welcoming atmosphere, compared to the Night Theme and the actual game's Pokemon Center themes. and hopefully Tennet was able to achieve that. Currently were working on what will be the main title theme, and hopefully we should have it finished soon once we've nailed down what kind of song we want it to be. 

Spooky has been hard at work sketching a lot of the major backgrounds and characters that will be used in the final game (as shown above with a rough draft of the Nurse Charmeleon character that people should be familiar with if they follow Spooky.) We decided that we'll probably begin by using rough sketches as placeholders for most of the media needed as I assemble everything together, then polishing it all later to streamline the process rather than finalizing everything first which would take significantly longer to begin assembling together.

That's all I have to report for now. Thanks for the continued support!