Hello everyone!

Today is the first post for the new month of April!. The weather is nicer, the day is brighter, and overall I feel a new sense of calm and comfort now than in the previous month. I have 3 more months until I finish v 1.02, so I want to discuss what I have done last week, what I plan on doing this week, and what I have in store for the rest of this month.

My Weekly Goals

Last week, I told myself I would finish the CSV Drivers for the characters and all cut scenes for Tiro Town. Well, I have! 

Cut Scenes for Tiro Town

The game not only has cut scenes that help expand the story of Tiro Town, but you are also able to explore different options to change or enhance the story now.  The process for cut scenes in unity has been less than ideal... (cine machines in unity are not really as intuitive as I would like them to be) but I've been learning a lot about how to make them in unity and am learning how to adapt accordingly. Since I have spent the last half of the month of March reworking the framework of cut scenes entirely, making the last few ones wasn't as big of an undertaking.

CSV Files for Game Data Storage

All necessary CSV files (thus far) have been added to the game, along with the corresponding drivers that allows me to take the data from the CSV to instantiate certain objects. This has helped a lot for organizing my data, removing unnecessary hard coded files that take up a lot of data, and allowing me to dynamically change or update things in the game that would've been very difficult otherwise. I might post another blog sometime this week explaining how it all works if anyone is truly interested, but the code is really as simple as parsing a CSV file, extracting the data you want, and placing that data in a game object to use.

Next Week Goals

NPC Naturalness

There are some quality of life changes that I want to add to the game. For starters, I want to have characters say different lines depending on what part of the story the character is in. For example, if an NPC is saying "I can't wait until I can leave Tiro Town" once the player is able to leave Tiro Town, then the NPC could say something like "You're able to leave? You're so lucky" and then when everyone can leave and come back to Tiro Town freely, the NPC can say "I hear we can finally get out of this place. I put in my application to leave already!". This would be a pretty tedious amount of work, because there are a lot of NPCs that I have added to the game. Thankfully not all of them will need dialogue changes, but some of them will, so I need to make dialogue changes for them. This requires some refactoring to the NPC codes that I made, so we'll see how fun that'll be...

Toxic Trails Design/Redesign

Another thing I want to do is start creating the collision boxes for the Toxic Trails environment. Since I have recently bought some new assets from a fellow itch.io user GIF, I think I want to make some updates on how some of the Toxic Trails scenes look so far.

Goals for April

Honestly I just want to get as much as I can done, but my main goal would be the following:

• Tiro Town Quality of Life Changes
• Toxic Trails Design Completion
• New Character Sprites

April for me represents the start of something new: the weather is getting nicer, the day is getting brighter, and I have a new sense of calm as I begin to work on the new chapter of Guardians of RPG.  I want to thank everyone who has ever taken the time to read these devlogs and go on this journey with me. I hope you all will be able to stick with me on this journey, as I plan on working on this for as long as it takes to complete.