Dev blog 06 | Drawing with Nat & Jel's Cafe |

Was busy with christmas related stuff last week, so I'm sorry for no blog post! This week I have quite a bit to share.

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DRAWING WITH NAT: DREAM DIARY PROGRESS

The main bulk of work this week was related to updated all of the warps and connections to the original versions of certain worlds. Unlike 0.2 I actually made backups for the worlds I would be working on, this has the benefit of if something isn't working out I can just leave it as no damage is done to the original content, the downside is I have to manually update all of the warps and connections once they are done. I'm now 90% positive all of the warps are connected correctly, and I will keep an eye out once I begin a full playtest.

Drawings:

The total amount of drawings still remains at 60, with this update removing the Crossroads drawing, and making the Eye door drawing an optional and secret drawings. (This was done mainly because Eye doors are a little tricky to find, and are more of an easter egg rather than being intended playable content).

The Blue Dunes and Snow World will take their place as obtainable and mandatory drawings. Though I have yet to create the graphics for these as of right now.

Desktop World:

I added a couple new graphics to this world, they can be found floating around in the background like the current ones. https://imgur.com/g2vyQZl

Arcade Basement:

The Arcade Basement was slightly reworked, and has now been split into two different areas: https://imgur.com/a/E6jjmTO

This is because the original area was one of the worst optimised parts of the game for lower end PCs, and because of how the area is designed, it would've been difficult to simply do event clearing on it. To help make this area run better it now splits between two areas so it doesn't have to load everything all at once.

I also edited some of the box sprites to have some slightly smaller variants. This is to help with navigation of the maze as it was hard to see Nat behind these boxes. https://imgur.com/ODwpUJ4

Red World warp:

Simple change, the Red World exit now directly takes you to behind the statue in Queen's square instead of Eraser World.

Area Names DEBUG:

To help with making sure the new areas are loaded when I playtest the game, every area in the game will now have a display name show up in the corner of the screen, for playtesting reasons this will be on by default, and can be enabled or disabled in the DEBUG room. When its time for release this will be turned off by default as most areas use code names.

It'll look something like this: https://imgur.com/BF1zfeF

Event Clearing:

Some more event clearing was done, this time to the Sandy Statues, Sugary Treat World, and the Arcade Basement!

These areas should hopefully run a little smoother on lower end configs now!

This update is nearing its completion, I still have some tweaks here and there I would like to do, and I would also like to possibly update Eraser World, as that is my least favourite world in the game, so I'll see if I can come up with anything to improve it.

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JEL'S CAFE PROGRESS

Character_05 + Character_06:

This week I wanted to try and begin developing more new systems, so customer 5 and 6 were very quickly added to the game, for the time being they reuse the temp dialouge of Hannah and Idris, and artwork of Jenny and Laura. Despite the reused dialouge they are seperate characters in the code.

This now means a total of 6 customers can randomly appear a day.

Upgradeable seats:

This was an entierly new system I developed, it took a lot of coding but it is now possible for a third customer to appear during a rush (instead of two). This upgrade isn't available by default, and once the full gameplay loop is developed will be something you purchase and upgrade. For debug purposes it's simply a button right now.

Break time:

I began work on the next segment of the game, after a rush phase you have a break where you can interact with the staff. This phase is still in early development right now, but the plan is to be able to talk to staff, give them gifts to raise friendship, and also feed them your lunch (This makes them fatter tee hee).

That's everything for now! Development will likely still be slower than normal due to the Christmas holidays, but I will still continue to tinker away at these when I can.

Thank you all for your patience and support!!