Devlog, frustration edition >_<!

Hello all!  I hope you're having a wonderful week.  It took me a LONG time to write the last two remaining intros, but the good news is, along the way, I discovered an efficient way for me to write: Instead of thinking about all the conversation branches as I write, I now write a single "happy path" of the conversation from start to end.  Then when that's done, I look for opportunities to have branches in those conversations.  This is much faster than thinking about forks and where they'll lead and how they'll rejoin later.

After that, I started putting the new conversations into the game, until I got to some intros that required unique animations.  For example, if you go to the clothing shop, you'll see Jessie and "The Shopkeep" standing there like so:

But, sometimes in conversations, I want these two characters to talk to each other instead of you.  I'm not sure why, but for this game, I'm gravitating towards as little narration as possible.  But that presents an interesting challenge: If there are 3 active characters in a scene, and there's no narration, how do you know who's talking to who? e.g., If Jessie says, "Shut up!" how do you know if she's talking to you or the shop keep?

Well, the solution I've thought of is to have these two characters run to the same side of the screen if they're talking to each other.  That way, they're literally having a side conversation.   When they're talking to you, they'll be in the position above.  My hope is that if the two run off to the side of the screen and Jessie says, "Shut up!" you know she's saying it to the shop keep.   Hopefully that makes sense?  I'd love someone to let me know.

Anyway, the reason this devlog is "frustration edition" is because I spent over 2 days trying to figure out how to get these characters to run off to the side.  I know it sounds simple, and I know it should be simple, but I was using my dialogue library incorrectly in a way that didn't matter until I tried to animate the characters in this way.  The good news is, I just figured out what the problem was (with the help from the friendly developer of the library).

The bad news is, along the way of figuring this out, I realized that Jessie's facial expressions weren't changing during gameplay.  This seems to be a problem with a completely different tool called Spine.

The good news is, I've asked for help on the official Spine forum and they always respond within 24 hours.  The bad news is, they haven't responded yet and they always respond when I'm asleep, so I can't fix that bug tonight.

Oh, but the good news is my background artist has nearly completed the second background of Mia's Alley.  I'll post the WIP after this :)

Anywayzies, rather than share a bullet list of what I completed this week, I thought excessive detail like above would be more appropriate.  >_<  I think next week will go smoother, but...

The bad news is, I'll be on vacation this weekend (my most productive days).  The good news is, I think I can make up for it by next Wednesday (fingers crossed)!