Development Update 20/08/21

Another week passes us by. This last week has been a lot quieter and has allowed me some time to focus on some of the historical features to update.

The first of these was recently brought to my attention, Dreams of Reality has a lot of music and sound effects, these I feel can enhance a story and bring some realism to the words and images you are seeing. Some of the videos and animations that I have created have sound built into them, notably the rain and thunder that you first encounter in chapter two.

Now due to those sounds being outside the control of the renpy volume slider, it can lead to interesting stories of players who play with sounds muted suddenly being woken up by loud thunder from their speakers.

I had hoped for the funeral scene to be impactful, but giving the player a heart attack was not quite the impact I was looking for. So, I needed a way to allow players to mute the volume from the videos if they choose.

The solution to this was simple enough, provide the player with a simple on or off toggle via the settings (and present the option at the start of the next update).  This does mean I needed to re-encode all the videos containing sound to be muted.

All in all there were six videos that I had to redo, thankfully I keep a master copy so rendering and encoding didn't take too long. Why do I bring it up? Well, it's these small quality of life improvements that probably would not be noticed by the majority of players, but can help make a game feel more polished.

The next historical element to update is the tutorial. A lot has changed since it was first written, blood effects and video audio to name just two. There is also the new hidden clickable unlocks that need to be detailed. Updating the tutorial screens and moving the 'in game' 4th wall breaks that mention them is all part of releasing version 1.0.

Pretty dry this week, however I'd like to share a couple of early preview image from the next update:

We flashback to Kimiko's origins, Her mother.

And Kimiko herself in her natural setting, perhaps we may learn her true name...

I've seen those two guys somewhere before....

I'll be streaming again tomorrow Saturday 21/08 at 8PM. Going to be designing some playing cards from scratch.

Leave your thoughts about the images above in the comments below. Until next week.

Stay safe all.

Cenc