Friday Rambles + game dev update 2023-03-03

It has come, the famous month of March. February is a little too short, don't you think?

I got a lot done this past week:

- Added UI icons for settings and dialogue history and phone menu (bottom right corner). Keyboard controls here, but if you start using a gamepad, it shows gamepad buttons instead. You can click them with your mouse too.

- Made a dialogue history screen, so you can review previous dialogue. I actually really like it. It's quite useful and looks spiffy.

- Made a pause menu. Removed the settings menu from Penny's phone and put it in the pause menu instead. The project files serve as the "progress" for the game.

- Click on one of Penny's "finished" drawings to look at it. I blanked out the rest of the pictures, for story spoiler reasons! But this one was in the trailer so I left it here. :)

- Also made a menu for save and load slots. They work! I'm planning on adding some cute Penny/office/lore related decorations on the sides of the screen too, so it looks less bare, but didn't get that done in time for this post. I'll show it off next week.

So basically a bunch of necessary UI work that's finally mostly out of the way so I can finish the actual game content. It was incredibly time consuming and annoying, and not super glamorous or shareable. But I'm pretty happy about all this stuff, like none of this even existed in any form after the last ramble, and now it's all working and mostly done! I'm so tired.

Also:

- Finally started to address my terrible unhealthy lifestyle, and started jogging again,  using the standing part of my standing desk, and drinking more water.

- Watered my desk succulent.

- Drew Penny (see top of post).

- Renewed the lease on my apartment. The rent went up. I hope spending 4 months straight working on my game instead of finding a job is worth it lol

I guess that's it for this week. I'm mostly just trying to make progress on this game as fast as possible. All the stuff that's done and working now is giving me hope that I'll be finished soon. Next up is polishing the UI a bit more, writing out the remaining script, drawing the remaining art. Easy, right? Anyway, "end of march" seems more and more like a "stretch goal" instead of the "drop dead date" -- realistically launch is probably going to be in April. I'll be able to set a true launch date after starting playtesting (hopefully within the next 2 weeks), and start my (ugh) marketing push around that.

Yeah, yeah.

In closing, here is a tweet that I ended up not sending because it's dumb, but nothing's too dumb for my Patreon friends.

If you don't love me at my Endless Monday Visual Novel Procrastination Simulator, you don't deserve me at my Endless Monday Typing Game Deckbuilder Roguelike - @hcnone

Thank you for your support, as always!! I've noticed that there have been very few people discontinuing their Patreon support (and I haven't really been advertising it so extra cool if you're a newer supporter), so it's been a very stable group here for the past few months. I'm really happy you're sticking around! <3