Weekly dev update!
Added 2019-04-04 03:05:49 +0000 UTCHello all! Wanted to give you a list of updates on the game development. Since this is only a week of work, I can explain my thought process behind these bullet points:
- Rename the game - It's now called Monster Girl Farmer!
- Make every button WASD - I greatly simplified the interface. Now all you need to play is the mouse and the WASD keys. I changed the inputs of every task to be one of the WASD keys.
- Arrange dialog buttons in upper left dialog to be in the shape of WASD. Space would be at the bottom for done.
- You click on the characters to open the dialog - It used to be that there was a "selection" that you moved with the keyboard to decide whose need you wanted to address. Now, you just click on the character.
- Highlight girl you're hovering over with mouse - Now the characters have a big yellow mark behind them when your mouse is hovering over them, indicating if you were to click, a dialog would open (assuming they have a need)
- Update tutorial with new keyboard layout info
- Use the new background and ensure that everyone's standing in the correct place regardless of aspect ratio. I really like the new background, I'll post that to the $1+ pledges after this.
- Add a SFW mode that swaps out character sprites while playing the level. - IMO, the biggest hindrance to getting feedback of this game is that it's NSFW. I'd love to show my friends or strangers this game, but it has nudity (and will have sex), so that would be pretty awkward. So, I made a SFW build. At the check of a box, I can build the project and the lewd sprites will be replaced with some free characters I found online. Now, I can show anyone the project and get a lot more feedback. IMO, the best form of feedback is when you watch someone play your game. I might even go to some meetups and do just that.
- In upgrades, use the correct sprites when in SFW mode
- In upgrades, hide the wardrobe in SFW mode - It doesn't really make sense to dress these free sprites I have. They don't have separate clothing. In the name of time/effort, I just decided to remove the wardrobe functionality in SFW mode. In the future, I'll probably commission SFW outfits for all the characters and prevent certain articles of clothing from being removed, that way even the SFW version can have wardrobe functionality.
- Bug: Characters show in front of events - When you get a random event (like finding Jessie), the characters in the background were in front of the dialog.
- Hide the maintenance sprites and shadow, since they're now part of the background. - With Yo's new background, I don't need placeholder art for maintenance, so I removed it.
- Create a SFW tutorial
- Bug: The game is unpausable - Oof... If you paused the game you couldn't unpause it and had to quit. This was a problem with another dialog being in front of the pause dialog, so the wrong dialog would eat the clicks on the unpause button.
- Test that pause canvas is in front of all other canvases. - I've since written an automated test that effectively says, "The pause dialog is in front of all other dialogs." I don't want this to happen again.
- Bug: Characters are in front of the pause - Similar problem as above, but a visual bug.
- Test that tutorial has Repo checked as NSFW. - This is a preventative test. I don't want to accidentally send people the SFW version, so I wrote a test that checks that by default, the game should be in NSFW mode.
- Less time between needs. - I'm trying to balance the game right now and the most comment feedback is that it feels too repetitive and that once you figure out the way the game works, you spend a lot of time waiting for the next need to pop up. My short term solution to this is to make less time between each need popping up.
- Shorten the levels - Similar to the above, the levels used to be 180 seconds long, now they're 120 seconds long. Funny... "Cook, Serve, Delicious!" levels were 360 seconds long, and I always thought this was waaay too long myself, so I decided for my game I'm going to halve that. Yet, people are still saying it's too long :)
I've got new backgrounds to show $1+ pledges. In that same post, I'm going to put a poll and ask, do you like the extra detail I've put in these dev notes? I can keep doing it this way, or just paste the titles of my issues like I did all the other times before this.
I have some WIP UI art to show $10+ pledges, too. I apologize in advance for the extra emails you're about to receive :(