potatoptarmigans gamedev blog

 no textures yet. the area from area 7 to 6. tiny rhys for scale. still busy! exams in Nov, if I fail (likely, considering the reputation), I get a second chance in January, but basically 80% of my free time is studying now. I am feeling very energized about ALAWT which was not really true of the bar game. I already have plans for this connecting area and area 6. Update: Fixing a lot of bugs in ALAWT, I refactored some things in the bar game and they broke all the interactable objects. The key names for them were manually input into a field and all of those got deleted. So I'm having them pull from the object names instead. Not fun, but necessary.

I'm still moving along but very slowly, I have to fix some bugs within the minigame as well as make more decorations/furniture sorts of things. I'm integrating a few suggestions that I got from people so I'm working on some animations that'll incorporate some of that. I've only been slow this year because I'm busy studying for an intensive cert. Things should go back to normal once I (hopefully) pass the exam.

Got all the portraits colored and a set of expressions for Morgan and Sera. They're not amazing but they'll do for now. I'm still learning how to do proper colorpicking. I just need to start putting in cutscenes and put in proper transitions between cutscenes and gameplay scenes and there should be a demo soon!

 I have 3 basic customers for now. I haven't really figured out how I want to match their likes and dislikes. Will stuff that they like be tied to their physical appearance/type or it'll just be something they're talking about? The current system is just a single personality such as Birdwatcher (likes birds, most types of plants, more tolerant of messiness) or High class (likes classy environments, dislikes mess - so birds/animals are a no as are the random messes that show up). Maybe I could introduce styles as a separate "personality" since some customers are clearly femme/butch/tomboy/in between. Hopefully I'll get some input from playtesters. At one point I'll implement a rng system where certain classes of customers will pick randomly from a set of models.  I also need to make a couple of different face styles as well as different body types - but that'll require a different base mesh, so for now it'll just be 3 simple customers so I can get a...

 Got the ability for players to drop props on the floor working fully along with the item shop. I just need to have the game round wrap up and properly transition into story scenes, clean up the character sprites then I should have a demo available soon. I don't have any music, but I might throw in some free placeholder ones online for now just to get something out there. Players can also put their own music into a specific folder and the game will not only play it but sync to it with certain objects. Edit: Still modeling a bunch of customers too. Modeling hair ...just kinda sucks. I was trying to model a couple of common butch haircuts but they look terrible so they're probably not going to make it to the demo.

 Still making a few modular customer models. I'll probably just stick with 3 variants for now. At first I was going to figure out a navigation system for the customers, but I think this would take too much time since the layout is going to be constantly changing and I can't be rebaking the nav map every few seconds. The customers will probably just fade in for now. I'm working on making it so that the player can place props where they want, but the props will influence how well they do on the minigame. Fixed up a whole host of bugs involving the item shop. There will be dancing birds! I've also written some short ministories for ALAWT and will post them once I edit them a bit more, so that you can get more of a feeling for what Lea was thinking during some of the major story beats. I wanted to emphasize the horror feel in these. Ingame, ALAWT's horror is intentionally supposed to be light, I didn't want to scare off half my audience.  After this bar game I still...