Devblog #25 - Making It Gooey

Hey everyone, LoafyLemon here!

It's been a while, right? A couple months or something? Sorry about that. We've just been busy working away on the game and I was struggling with some writer's block for a bit. But hey, the code and art was going well so I just kept plugging away at that. Gotta keep things moving along!

So, what have we been up to? Well, let me tell you about some of the changes we've made to the menus and stuff in game. We call it "Making It Gooey" because GUI is pronounced "gooey," get it? Yeah, I thought so too. Anyway, onto the juicy bits...

First off, there's a whole new main menu with brand spanking new art. I put extra effort into drawing Hermione in the new style we've teased previously. The entire menu is animated and includes parallax effects for depth.

Next up, the Achievements menu got an overhaul. Now you can see your progress on each achievement, which is pretty neat. Plus, the entire UI has been updated to match the rest of the game. Nice and clean!

Now for the Clothing Store. You guys have probably noticed that buying clothes was a bit tedious before. Well, not anymore! Now you can skip all the dialogue if you want, plus you can see way more items at once with large previews right there next to your cart. Oh, and speaking of carts, there's a new preview section showing off everything you've added so far. And if you need to remove something, just click it and it'll disappear from both the character model above and your cart. To top it off, I added a checkout section where you can confirm your purchases. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

The Wardrobe Colour Picker has been simplified too, but don't worry, it still has all the same features. There's now a tab dedicated to quickly selecting the worn items, which makes things much faster. Plus, we've added an auto generate accents feature that picks secondary colours to match your main colour layer. Nifty, huh?

We also cleaned up the Favour menu. The previous menu with the hearts system was a bit confusing, so we sat down and redesigned the whole thing. It's simpler now, without all that info dump, but we managed to keep the essence of the game intact. We want you guys to figure out how events affect your relationship with each character on your own without worrying about black, green or red hearts. You can still get hints though – just try it out!

And finally, the Inventory has been given some love too! Now when you select an item, it'll show who you can use it on, making things much easier for you. We've also added the ability to use gifts items on Genie, which should make things more interesting. I believe Johnny has mentioned it already, but might as well reiterate it here.

So there you have it, folks! All of these menus are already implemented and playable, just need a tiny bit of polish and some new icons to finish them up. Anyone curious can check out the changes through gitea (available on our website).

Now, the big question is: when will all this be released? Well, we're still working on adding more content and features to the game before we consider releasing anything, so a release before 2025 seems unlikely at this point. But hey, Rome wasn't built in a day, right? We want to make sure everything is just right for you guys. If I had to put a rough estimate on it, I'd say Q1 2025 would be a safe bet. (I hope!).

P.S. Would you be interested in reading more in-depth blog posts about each change instead of just me rambling on like an idiot? Let me know in the comments!
P.P.S. I will be posting some art previews and sketches under #dev-dump on the discord in the upcoming days so if you're interested, be sure to check it out.