This is my first devlog on itch! It's a copy paste of the same page from my Patreon, but here it goes.

Hey! This week was a bit messy, but I think I got some work done.

It seems I can't write dialogues for new content very well if I have to deal with frequent distractions (which I do) so I tried to focus on things that I can do without needing to hyperfocus for at least 2-3 hours.

(Before I go into the bulletpoints for this week, as promised, I have made a video with some improvements for the Android platform for the game. Patreon in 2024 still doesn't support embedding MP4 videos into a post, so I also created a Youtube channel with this opportunity)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLvLxU5Jlsc

Bugs:

• Quest Indicators during the ISA stage of the game are sometimes misplaced or shown for locations that aren't relevant at the time. ✅ For the most part in ISA content, this has been fixed. Things should be way clearer right now and I can tell the game is slightly more polished due to these changes.
• The generic "This Area is not Accessible" dialogues that play sometimes aren't very helpful and they can make you feel like there's an actual bug preventing you from progressing. ✅ Now we have a ton of new dialogue lines that replace the default "This Area is not Accessible" dialogue line, and they show up depending on what quest entry is currently active helping eliminate any confusion as to where you are supposed to go at a point in time.
• Skipping dialogues can still behave strangely sometimes. It seems that during specific/random circumstances if you skip the dialogue, once you stop skipping it you're somehow not able to manually advance dialogue lines anymore unless you click randomly on the skip/auto button. ⌛Regarding this one, when I'm testing other things it will happen, when I try to test specifically for it it won't happen. Regardless, I'm trying to prevent the player from being able to skip dialogue lines when skip mode is already on as that will lead to issues, so this task will most likely be moved to next week.
• Old Chibis are still showing up in ISA content. ✅ There were a few characters that still had the old chibi artstyle in ISA content, now all of them should have the new style with four directional sprites, creating consistency.
• The gallery wasn't working on Android. ✅ It was a race condition of sorts that would happen very frequently and wouldn't affect Windows, where if you clicked on an animation icon in the gallery it will not display the animation because it would lose the reference to the animation itself. Made some changes that might also help the Windows platform with optimizations.

UI:

• Implement the Android redesigned UI overhaul, which if I'll have finished by the end of the week I'll post a video of it working. ✅ Implemented the new UI and I've already received some feedback that it's much better than the old gameplay style for Android. You can see the video at the top of the post, where we now have a visual joystick for movement and an action icon that shows up when you're near an interactable element, the action icon will change depending on what kind of interaction it is and it will display the closest interactable element if you're in the vicinity of multiple interactable elements.

Sounds:

• Replaced the main menu music song with something that closer resembles Mass Effect. ✅🎶 This was done personally in LMMS without a midi keyboard. I'm working on more music and sounds to add to the game, together with sounds for animations as well so we can also have some audio in the animations.

Content:

• Write the dialogues that involve the new animation scenes, together with the flow that moves the player character and Melissa all the way back to the waterfall. ⌛ This was too difficult to do because there were too many distractions this week, however it'll most likely be my main focus next week for the release so it will be done better. I don't think I have many bugs to fix right now, just some older tasks that aren't critical right now.

Right, next week I should also add the new expressions into the game, for all the characters in the game that would have them as well to bring more life into the player avatars. This will require me manually making a lot of animation files but it'll be worth it. Good news is that nowadays it's easier to write dialogues because I can test it as I'm writing it so we shouldn't have forgotten placeholders in dialogues anymore.

That's about it. Thanks a lot for reading this post!