WHAT A WEEK, HUH?
The game has been officially announced now and got about 450 wishlists on day one! My understanding is that lots of indie games release to way more.... but for someone with no marketing and no pull... I'm pretty happy about that! Let's get into the beans of what happened this week!
STEAM STUFF - This one is obvious. We launched our steam page! Big success!!! I'm sure you've all seen it already, but just in case, go check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3328380/Negative_Reverie/
THE DANG TITLE - Not really an update, per se... but yeah! This is also the first time we've shown off the title of the game! I hope it does a good job of capturing the darker vibe of the game. Also if you haven't seen the trailer, check it out here! https://youtu.be/iobOLVh4CAU?si=PLtBv6syrtHTnLcA
SKILLS - Added a bunch of skills to the cast that do various things like deal damage and heal. Characters also learn these skills on level up now and you receive a little message once you've learned one! Basic stuff, I know, but it all takes a lil time to code up. :)
THE GANG'S ALL HERE - Muscles and Scaltra's map sprites have been added!! Seeing the whole cast running around together really makes the game feel real to me!
DOORS AND KEYCARDS - Doors can now take multiple factors to open... some will need a code to be punched in, others will need the player to swipe a keycard. For keycards, I added a lil interface that actually requires the player to swipe the card themselves.
PICK-UPPABLES - Super basic thing to add, but you can finally find things littered around the world of Negative Reverie and pick them up! I wonder if the way I added checks to see if an item has been picked up already was the most efficient way... but it works!
IMPROVED VUOTA SPRITE - I'm not sure its quite where I want it.... but her map sprite is a lot better than it was!
BUGS! - Found several bugs this time... including one where if you reduced an enemies HP to 0... all instances of that enemy in the future would START with 0 HP... Also, fixed a bug where when you closed a dialogue box, every item in a room that had code associated with closing a dialogue box would have it's functions called. I think in the future, I should remove the linking of items to dialogue boxes from their ready() functions and put them in an input() function.
THE WORK IS NEVER DONE / TO-DO PILE
ENCOUNTERS - The way the game determines what encounter you're about to get into is done by asking the map itself for a list... I don't think this is a very efficient way to do this. I think I should make some kind of database with a list of areas with their own encounter tables. Not quite sure how to implement it yet, but I'll figure it out. (Lemme know if you're a Godotneer and have an idea!)
F.I.T. SYSTEM - I started making a list of potential effects that different F.I.T.s might have. TBH, I looked at the passive abilities from FF9 a lot for inspiration. Now that I have a list.... I need to consider implementation... I'm not happy about it but... I think the way might just be to check if a certain F.I.T. is active before any place it might have an effect during the battle.
FEW MORE TRACKERS - This won't take long... but I'd like to track some more game data like, treasure chests opened and items used.
STATUS EFFECTS - There are variables in code right now to hold status states of each character and enemy.... but they don't actually do anything at the moment. I gotta start making those DO things.
THE BEST IS YET TO COME
That's all I have this week! I spent a decent portion of it sick, so progress was a LITTLE slow... and honestly this week I need to focus on recording guitar parts for my band ZAKU's full length album, so its hard to know how big next week's update will be. We'll see though!
My energy for the project is at an all time high thanks to the announcement reception, so I'm feeling in the zone now!
As always, I REALLY REALLY appreciate you for supporting me here on Patreon! I hope you have a great week and I'll see you next time!!!