Everstone Daycare - Progress Report (March 19, 2022)

Howdy!

I’ve been continuing to work through the goals I’ve set out for myself in the ‘Plans for March’ post and have come to a good stopping point where I think I can give everyone a reasonable update. Some of them took longer than others, but past that, these tasks can be considered completed and I’m going to move on to writing the story once you’re past the intro.

Itch(dot)io integration

For the sake of giving this project more protection from Patreon content ripping websites and to make it easier for me to upload/archive demos in the future, I decided to look into the itch(dot)io Patreon integration that I’ve seen other projects make use of.

Unfortunately, despite the convenience and security doing so would afford me, the hoops patrons would end up having to jump through just to be able to download the game if I did implement it didn’t seem worth it in the end. Getting the full benefit from the integration would have required patrons to also have an itch account to claim a personalized download key for the game, which wasn’t something I wanted to have to ask people to do. There are half-measures that I had the option to take, but those would have made the security arguably worse.

So in the end, I won’t be implementing any Itch and Patreon integration and all demo files will continue to be uploaded here, in their respective posts. Itch will continue to only be where I upload any free content of the games I’m working on/plan to create in the future.

Cleaning up the code

This was something which I underestimated how time-consuming and tedious it would end up being due to the quirks and limitations of the program I’m using. I’ve spent the past few days re-doing almost all the scenes, including the whole intro and all the areas where you are given free movement, and implementing the text scrolling sound effect to all of them.

Previously, everything was made with only the current demo in mind, with some labels prefixed with “demo_” or references to your species being hard-coded in instead of just referencing a variable. Not much has drastically changed if you were to play it now (typos have been fixed and a few lines of dialogue were changed to sound nicer), but I’ve made it easier for myself to read and reference everything as I continue to add more content to the game.

More UI adjustments

As you’ve seen in the previous post, we’ve changed the design of the textbox to make it feel a little less cramped, and changed the options buttons to make it more obvious as to what they do at a glance.

This time, we’ve done something a bit more drastic. In addition to shrinking and rearranging the existing UI elements to make more room between the UI and the textbox, we’ve also decided to change the color scheme from lavender to electric blue to match the color of the dialogue choice buttons we use.

The main reason for this change was because I had been given feedback asking if it’s possible for the question to not disappear when needing to pick between dialogue choices. I was able to do so, but I don’t think it’s something I will implement for every set of dialogue buttons. As having the two contrasting colors from the textbox and the dialogue choices side by side didn’t look appealing, we’ve decided to make the colors consistent with each other. This however did come with the added benefit of popping better against the colors of the backgrounds and the characters, a smaller issue I wanted to address as well.

I’ve posted a few screenshots of what the new UI looks like above, as well as a screenshot of the old UI for comparison.

Typically, it’d be easier to change the color of the buttons themselves, but again, due to the limitations of the program we’re using to make the game, we’re limited to not only the select few color presets they have for this button design, this button design is also the only one compatible between both the Windows and Mac versions. Many of the bumps we’ve been facing recently have been me fighting against the limitations of the program I am using to make the game, and this unfortunately is one of them.

Again, thank you to everyone for the support and we couldn’t do this without your help!

TLDR: No Patreon-itch integration, code is all nice and cleaned up now, the UI is now electric blue (see above). I’ll be working on writing more of the story next.