Hello everyone!

Since this is the last post (and day) of the month, I wanted to take the time to detail my progress for the month of February, as well as talk about the goals I set out for myself last week, where I'm headed, and what I hope to get done by the end of March.

February Progress

I'm going to be completely honest, February felt incredibly short, shorter than usual. I'll admit I didn't work on the game nearly as often as I did my first month, but even so, I still have some substantial progress that I wish to share with you all.

Map Completion

After creating all of the map designs in January, February I dedicated some of the time fully completing the Tiro Town maps by adding collision boxes, collision logic, implementing the ability to interact with certain game objects in the map like signs, store clerks, other NPCs, and books, and adding lighting to give the scenes more ambiance. This has helped Tiro Town feel more lively or lived in than before. I'm super proud of the difference 2 months can make when comparing this work to my previous work.

Animations

I have created a dynamic way to implement animations in my game, cutting back on time that would have been used to create transition edges for every single NPC sprite or object type to just creating the animation. This allowed me to add more NPCs of different varieties in the game that have simple AI that allows them to walk freely around the map. This was a huge step up from the current version, where the NPCs who were able to be animated are the ones in a cut scene. The world feels a bit more natural and real in v1.02 as a result of this new change.

UI Elements

I have recreated huge portions of the UI elements for the game, most notably the player setting window, the narration text boxes, and the Store UI. I think these UI elements work pretty well, though maybe in the future I might want to explore different assets, not to replace everything, but to add or update a few. At the moment I am using the assets made by Hontei from the unity asset store solely, and for now I believe keeping the homogeneity of UI elements already makes this a better showing than my current installment. I still have a lot to learn about UI and UX design, including how to write code to make both concepts work seamlessly, but at the moment, everything appears to be working fine, so I'm happy with that. Maybe towards the end of the deadline I can carve out the time to fix any bugs I notice later.

Cut Scene Designs and Implementation

I have created a cut scene design that gives players the opportunity to choose their own way to play the story. I think this gives the player the opportunity to have the game be more personal to their own experience in the game. This also helps solves the problem with having the player mindlessly click the next button until the cut scene is over and be more involved in the story because they get to be the ones to decide how it plays out. 

Because of this though, this meant that I needed to create more cut scenes in the upcoming version and in my current version in an attempt to account for the actions that the player might choose or want to do. Creating a flow chart before implementing the cut scenes has certainly helped, but I was not able to finish every cut scene in the Tiro Town story line.

Misc

The following things have also been completed:

Save Feature

Since the inclusion of the cutscenes have been implemented in the game, I have created a way to also save your progress when it comes to what cutscenes and other story flags you have completed/accomplished in game. With all that in mind, the save feature can now accurately save your player information (general information, items, moves, quests, etc.), location, and now your story progress.

Book Novels

I have been storing books in the game that you are now able to read. Some of them are just fun, cheeky exerts that I thought would make the world feel more real, and others may follow a more lore intensive purpose to them. However, the books are in the incorrect order and will be scattered throughout the game, so keep an eye out for any bookshelf sprites that contain books in them, because you might find something interesting in them.

Weekly Goals

Like I had eluded to in the previous subheading, I did not complete my previous week's goal of finishing all of the cut scenes for the Tiro Town story line. It would have been nice if I was able to finish the Tiro Town story line for this month, and work on Toxic Trails for the next 4 months, but it looks like some of that time might have to shared with implementing more cut scenes, fixing any last minute bugs, and working on the Battle Simulator, so that's some of the things I plan on doing for the month of March. After I finish those to my liking, I want to officially start on the Toxic Trails story line, because it sets up some really interesting plot threads regarding the land of RPG that I can't wait to share with you all.

Summary

There are still a lot of things that need to be changed/updated, or implemented before the game is fully complete, but I have gotten through a good chunk of that over the course of this month:

• Finish Save Game feature
  
  • include saving flag information (for story)
  • including saving bag information
• Map Creation (50% completed)
  • Add all signs for each map
  • add all npcs for each map
  • Add box colliders for all map scenes
• Scene transitions for all scenes
• implementation of cut scenes for story
• Creation of items (50% Completed)
• Creation of moves (10% Completed)
• Inclusion of music/sfx
• Animations
  • Characters/NPCs
  • Move Effects
• Additional UX features
  • Stores (Tiro Tavern and Chop Shop)
  • Player Settings
    • General information
    • Bag
    • Moves
    • Quests
    • Options (Include saving game)
• Bug fixes
  • Music looping issues
  • Battle simulator issues
  • Store issues
  • Stairs and portal clipping issues (80% Completed)

Before writing this devlog, I didn't think I had much to showcase in my monthly progress report, but after writing, I feel much more confident that I am moving forward and making enough headway to complete the first 2 chapters by the end of June. I want to thank everyone for joining me on this journey, and I'll see you all next week.