We're moving closer and closer to the release of the free demo. By now, all planned major improvements and additions have been made. You can view this week's improvements in the video below.
As the video shows, this week, we've implemented animated mouths to make it even easier to determine who is talking. This means that eyes and mouths are separate now, so that they can be animated independently. Implementing this not only meant reworking every character's facial sprite, but also reworking the code with two new, majorly important scripts. Even though this took a considerable amount of time, the scripts will make everything a lot easier down the line.By separating the mouths and eyes for animation, the player now has the option to choose a mouth. This has, of course, been added to the character creator. Also, the new background for the character creator can be seen in the video as well.
Last but not least, we've added a log to the game. Due to the way the dialogue is set up, it's not possible to have a log with several previous lines of dialogue. Instead, it's only possible to view the last line of dialogue prior to the one currently shown. We deem this to be sufficient, since it can be easy to skip over a line of text by accident at points and we only wanted a log for that reason. Besides, having some sort of log is better than not having one at all!
Besides the work on the game, we've also recorded and edited our first proper video devlog (devlog #0) and the script for devlog #1 is written. We'll inform you when a devlog is posted on YouTube.
Starting next week, we'll hopefully start proper playtesting, as well as complete a final long event. There is of course some marketing and business management that needs to be done as well, but all in all, it hopefully won't be too many weeks now until you can get your hands on the free demo. Stay tuned for more updates and info about the release!