YIPPEE!

The Negative Reverie demo on Saturday went so well! There was genuinely someone lined up to play it the entire night! Behold~

Buttonmasher played my game :)

There were only.... a COUPLE of game-breaking bugs to be found during all the playtesting, oops.

Also there were about 140 people there to see the game and my band play! (Obviously, they were there for MORE than just that, but at least they got to see it!)

Speaking of my band ZAKU....

THE NEW ZAKU ALBUM IS OUT!

This is an actual slab of steel that we got CNC'd. Big thanks to Mal4m for the photography and editing on it!

It only took us like... two YEARS of recording and farting around, but we finally released our first full length album! You can check it out here for now:
https://zaku.bandcamp.com/album/zaku-3

Apparently, Google search thinks the new album is called "Philadelphia, Pennsylvania"....

It'll be available for streaming soon... but probably not on Spotify, haha. Everywhere else, though. B)

I REWORK A WHOLE CRUCIAL SYSTEM YET AGAIN

I have completely reworked how dialogue works in Negative Reverie. Now, instead of text for items, npcs, cutscenes, interactables, ETC, being handled within the object itself... there is now a giant JSON file that stores all the games dialogue and each object looks up the appropriate line via a key search.

It's also easy to hand off to a translator, if that ever becomes a thing.

This is going to allow for a lot more flexibility, easier editing and the possibility of translations. Feelin' good about it.

I was writing the dialogue for this JSON in Google Sheets and then converting it from a CSV to JSON, but instead I figured it would be faster to create my own dialogue editing program, so I did that too.

This is made of 'so much' copy/pasted code from other people's projects, lmao.

EVERYBODY'S TALKIN'

I also added a "beeper" function and voices to the game. Have I said this already? I forget. Anyway, all the characters have little beep voices now and the game automatically pulls up the right voice depending on who is talking. It's fun! beep beep!

GRAPHICS

Mai sent me a different full character portrait for Gisele. She wasn't happy with the hair in the first one, and while I was fine with it... I gotta admit, the new one looks SO GOOD.

Chef's kiss. Follow Maizilla on bsky, cuz she's awesome.

MUSIC???

It's been so long since I've done an update that I don't think I've even told you that the first area's music is completely done, thanks to DonutShoes! It's such a banger... we gonna win some awards for this one. >:)

GIT DUMP

Once again, here is a big dump of my git commits, so you can really see the nitty gritty of what I've been getting done, if you're curious:

Added FIT Building music demo, added a Beeper global scene and "VoiceType" resources for dialogue beeping, the switch screen was all screwed up, but now it's fixed AND the party_lineup array does not require null values, added action icons for when you're able to interact with objects, the "add_party_member" function is actually correct now

Set up Godot exports, reduced window size to work better with smaller screens, added music and various sound effects, created initial equipment for party members, fixed several item and skill descriptions, increased the battle text box to hold 3 lines, made the shop menu speech bubble a little wider, added demo mode to title screen, defend prompt and victory screen responds to controllers, fixed bug where the game would freeze if you learned a skill in a scripted battle, changed character collision boxes to capsules instead of squares, added freight elevator and everything that goes with it, made changes to riser shaft and added an explanatory cutscene for demo mode, finally fixed the stairwell graphics, rehauled items (they no longer load from database), <- this includes rewriting code for PlayerGlobals, Item screen, equip screen, etc, added save station demo mode, added action icon, changed skill battle math, added target indicators for skills that exclusively target the self, changed NPC "sitting" type to just "STATIONARY DO NOT FACE", changed so much stuff in playerglobals it's hard to describe, changed learnable skill list and levels to a dictionary, buncha graphics got added.... too sleepy to go on now....

Started reworking the dialogue system, added dialogue portraits and names as individual scenes, added voice for main cast

Edited voice for main characters, changed how NPCs do dialogue and rearranged their "states" for moving purposes, replaced Array dialogue with references to dialogue json, Updated dialogue.JSON with most of the new dialogue, but not all.

THE RETURN OF PIXEL BABES

Just a few for you. :)

AND NOW, I BID YOU ADIEU!

I'm all hyped up and ready to keep working on the game thanks to the energy from this weekend's demo! Y'all be good and thank you so much for your support!!! It means a lot! If you wanna get access to the demo from this weekend, send me a DM and I'll let you into the Discord and give u a link to it! Bye bye bye!!!