Dev Blog 29 | Jel's Cafe | Story mode work

Happy 4th of July everyone, it's friday so its time for another weekley blog post! Heres what I've been working on this week:

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JEL'S CAFE PROGRESS

Carmela:

Carmela had some more work done to her this week, including her finished artwork for fullness level 0 and some new interactions during the intro of Story mode too. She's still missing a few things like her special gift items and of course the rest of her art and writing, but like everyone else these will all be added in the future.

Story mode ending conditions:

A new system and mini WIP ending has been added for failing a Story mode playthrough, after talking to Frankie and not having enough money to pay off what you owe him, you now have a small interaction with another character who gives you the option to either return to the title screen or continue your playthrough, but switching the gamemode to Casual mode, this means you get to keep all your progress on the save but you will be locked out from the ending or interactions tied exclusively to Story Mode.

Writing and the Chat feature:

More writing work has been done outside of the game thanks to the help of a friend of mine, Mantaraydiated, some more plans for character endings and their stories, as well as some brand new finished (or at least much more polished) writing has been added to James, Jenny, Stella, Angie and Frankie. These characters have the new planned "Chat" option which is planned to replace the "Talk" option that every character currently has.

The Chat function contains progress towards characters endings, with unique one off interactions that once exhausted are replaced with the normal rng chat pool. New chat options become unlocked every 10 fullness. For now the characters that were mentioned prior only go upto fullness 10 with their chats, but the groundwork has been laid out for them to go to 100. Eventually leading to an ending.

Overworld interactions:

This is a feature I've yet to work on, but something I can and plan on including. Currently how talking to characters works is it warps you to a unique room that turns the player invisble with all the code to run a characters interactions. Something I discovered I can do but will take a lot of time to fully convert is allowing these interactions to appear whilst walking around the cafe rather than the warp process. The only problem with this system is to due with characters like the shopping vendors or the staff that have additional "selection" screens, there might still be a way for them to all work and have them be overworld interactable but its something I'll need to experiment more with first.

This is something that will be absent from the next playtest build as it'll take a long time to finish, and I've gone long enough without sharing a new build. So this is something to expect in version 0.3 instead.

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That's everything this week. Version 0.2 will be hopefully ready in the coming weeks, I'm currently waiting on some more music to be added which is also near completion, and some more clean ups too. Once all of this is complete Version 0.2 will be ready for playtesting!

Thank you all for your support!