Weekly devlog, Field of Dreams Edition

I'm happy to say I got a lot done this week relative to the last month. I've completely refactored the field scene. This is definitely the hardest scene in the whole game so it should all be downhill from here. Working on this scene first also required me to get a lot of boilerplate out of the way. For example, I had to come up with new ways to display the icon in a menu to represent that it cost energy to click. 

Big announcement: I decided I am going to remove the human and transformation aspects from the game and turn it into a pure monster girl game. That said, Eva is going to remain human and so will the shopkeeps, so there will be opportunity for human on human sex scenes with them. 

I thought long and hard about this change and it wasn't an easy decision but it had to be done to have a reasonable scope for a one-man team. The quests themselves are going to be extremely complex with NPCs interacting with each other along the way. If I had to factor in the possibility that each NPC is human, transformed, or somewhere in between for each of those interactions, it just explodes the complexity in a way that is not manageable in my head. I'm sure a lot will be disappointed by this decision, but it's the only way to make a game maintainable in my mind. 

Another thing I've realized, I'm going to have to come up with rules or restrictions on the way the quests are presented to prevent a different type of complexity explosion. I don't think I figured out all these rules yet, but I figured out one:  If 2 quests involve the same NPC, even if it's just for a step along the way, those quests cannot be started at the same time. You must complete one before you can learn about the other.  You can see how I've come to this conclusion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/dm4tc0/how_can_i_manage_complexity_when_i_want_lots_of/  I don't think the player is going to notice the effect of this rule too much, but it’s going to make my life so much easier. Before I discovered this rule, I had a lot of analysis paralysis trying to come up with any quests.  

I'd love to discuss these topics in more detail if any of you are interested or have questions or concerns. Please leave a comment below or send me a discord message if you'd like to reach out.

Here is the dev log for this week:

• Add stuffed animal emoji's to discord
• Create a command that can tell you how many quests have been completed.
• Eva's field dialogue should exist
• Have a lot more placeholders for menu options
• Eva's expressions in the field dialogue exist
• You can collect crops
• You can't click on characters if a dialog box (e.g., map) is open
• Hide the click to interact text during a conversation or when a dialog is open
• Menus should use TextMeshPro (so I can print the time icon in them)
• Create a type of menu that has an energy icon by it
• Create a "subtract energy" command
• Menus in the field scene that subtract energy should have an icon by them
• Eva field menus should only show up at appropriate times
• quest states should be set in the field dialog
• Mia's button shows at the appropriate time
• Mia's shy dialogue should exist