Sin Spire - Dev Log 35

Hello everyone! I’ll be keeping today’s Dev Log brief as I don’t have too much to discuss openly. First, though, I’ll address the absence of last week’s Dev Log. As some of you know, I had some non-dev obligations that resulted in me being away from my computer for a while. The length of this period was actually longer than I had anticipated and as such I was gone for a little over a week. Previous to that, I hadn’t made much progress since the last Dev Log.

Since coming back, I have been trying to get back into the groove which is proving more difficult than expected due to distractions appearing quite regularly (again away from my computer) but I’m hoping that’ll clear up soon. I have gotten some work done but considering how much I wanted to get done before the end of August, I’m very far behind.

So, let’s go over what’s actually been worked on:

Final Cutscene(s)

I briefly mentioned my original plans for the game to have way more cutscenes but I cut back on them for a variety of reasons. Well, I’ve decided to cut back even more on cutscenes (where the camera is outside of the player’s view). The reasoning behind this is quite simple: to save time.

The introductory cutscene for the final boss is one of the more complicated sequences due to it being affected by multiple variables that occur through gameplay. An actual cinematic is not really possible due to this cutscene needing a choice system as well as having elements affected by previous player actions.

Instead of a cinematic cutscene, I’ve decided to keep everything confined to the already existing dialogue system with some cutaways for key reveals/moments. It’s not ideal but I think at this point I need to be realistic about what’s achievable.

I will note that I did try to use my previous method but got a headache when it came to having to rework systems or make new systems to introduce the choice based elements. So, I decided to just do without so I don’t spend another few weeks making a bespoke system for it.

Of course, there are still some things to figure out and smoothly transitioning from dialogue to those ‘key reveals’ will be something I need to work on. For now, I’m cutting up the recorded audio and setting up the dialogue that’ll be used for this final sequence before working on the actual animations for the reveals.

Boss Fight(s)

The two boss fights have not gotten a lot of love in light of all this narrative work. As such they are not really in a playable state. They’re both using placeholder boss fights (Mangler) in order to get the surrounding logic to work but obviously I plan for the two bosses to have their own attacks and move sets. Admittedly some of this is tricky to figure out but I do have a good idea of what I want to do, I Just need to figure out how to actually achieve it.

Boss fights have not been my favorite thing to work on for this game, so working up the motivation is tricky to say the least. Animation is tough and the fact that it’s going towards something I don’t really like doing definitely leads to me procrastinating a bit.

Final Goodies

So, there are a few more sex scenes planned for the game. Ophelia’s which will happen at the end of her quest (currently there’s placeholder dialogue for her) and a couple of scenes with the final boss. None of these have been worked on yet but they are planned to come in the future as they tie directly to the story.

Kind of an obvious thing to mention but, as I said, I’m behind on where I should be and I don’t think I’ll be able to reach the August deadline for version 0.1. I apologize to anyone who was hoping to see the story wrapped up by the end of the month. As I’ve said before, the closer you get to the end, the longer everything seems to take.

I am still keeping things vague for now but will try and get some images for my next Dev Log as I’m sure you guys are tired of just seeing walls of text. Anyway, that’s all for today. I’ll see you guys the next time I have something to mention. If not next week, then the week after. Have a good one.