v1.0 Progress Log 3

Happy to announce that the game is fully playable from start to finish. From prologue, to epilogue!

Needless to say it was a huge task. The events during level 6 were for the most part the longest events in the game, and due to how those events go, they had some pretty unique requirements when it came down to coding their routines. One case in particular were the Crater events, aside from the routines needing some new features for the events to play as envisioned, they actually also required layout adjustments and additions to the geometry, as during the events there are a couple of parts that take place outside of the playable area, so there were some layout changes done so those out of bounds areas look good during the events. Overall, development on them was smooth, but there was a lot of things to do.

Level 7 is a bit more tricky. This one is part of the epilogue, in the same manner that level 0 is part of the prologue. I'll be addressing level 7 as the epilogue level from now on. After a lot of thought, I decided that rather than it being a free play level like the others, the epilogue level would instead be a single incredibly long multi-POI event. The main reason for this being that I thought of some fun situations that could only happen if it were a single event. Throughout the epilogue level Hana will go through most POIs, having one final event in each of them. Thoughout the events there are various things that wrap up and there are a few payoffs to things set up earlier in the game. Overall it's a really unique event with lots of fun things, and a lot of payoffs. I'm quite happy with it's role as an epilogue.

Then there's the epilogue scene, which takes place after the epilogue level. Quite happy with that one as well. It's heartwarming, and it really let's Hana and Mei shine. This one has a particular 

Really happy with how it all turned out.

Fun Fact : Mei is directly involed in roughly 90% of the content that takes place during the epilogue level, so rejoice Mei fans! There's even more exciting stuff to be said, but I can't spoil too much!

Now, let's talk about the ugly. The only issue about making it all a single long event, is the length. I said it is incredibly long, and I meant it. The epilogue level event is over 1200 interactions long. Making it almost three times longer than the longest level up event. It's an absolute behemoth of an event.

Now, this one is a problem because it's all one single continuous event that is fully controlled by a routine. This makes it hard to add save points for the player to be able to stop and finish the event later. What I'm thinking about doing is split the routine into chunks in a way that each chunk will contain the events of a POI which could allow the game to save and reload later from that save point in between POIs. 

This would also make it easier to allow the epilogue events from each POI to be viewed in the gallery without having to go through the entire epilogue level event in order to see the scene you want to see. Anyhow, as you can see, the routine is done and playable, but I'm still working on optimizing some aspects of it to make it a little bit more player friendly.

At the beggining of the post I said the game is fully playable, but note that the keyword here is "playable". While they game is fully playable, they events aren't ready to ship so to speak, as there are still a lot of missing CGs which are in the works, and once they are done they will need to be imported into the engine, and placed into each interaction that uses those CGs. The total amount of images that still need to be placed is easily above 5000, so there is still this bit of work left to do before I can say that the content itself. is 100% complete. 

Unfortunately, it wasn't all smooth sailing. As usual, something had to go wrong. This time what went wrong was the method with which I would trigger things in a specific line during a routine. The way I had been doing it worked fine up until I started working on the code for the final version. I don't know for certain why it wasn't working, but I did not have the patience to figure it out, and there's also the fact that if it was causing issues here, then it might've also been causing issues elsewhere on other routines and I just hadn't noticed, so instead I implemented a new and far better way of doing this I thought of. Similar to how I had done recently with some other mechanics I made for the routines, this new method also uses the tool I had created to add things to Hana's main sprite during dialogue, which had tuened out to be an unexpectedly powerful and versatile tool. Anyhow, with the previous method I used to dance around 3 different variables from the dialogue script in order to make it work, and now with this new way all I need is to add one small prompt in the extra sprite tool and gets the job done effortlessly. This new method was used to make every routine during level 6, and the epilogue level's routines.

The bad news is that in order to get this new method to work, I had to make a couple small changes to the dialogue script which caused the previous method to completely stop working, so now every routine from level 0 to level 5 is busted. The good news is that because of how simple and easy it is to use this new method I created, it'll be really easy to implement it into those routines in order to fix them. The other bad news is that every instance where the old method was used, has to be fixed one by one. The other good news is that due to how easy it is to fix, it should only take 15 minutes or so to fix and test each routine. The bad news is that there's around 100 of such instances. This is something that will take a few days, which brings me to my next point:

The gallery. Now that the game is fully playable, I've now properly moved on to work on the gallery. As I mentioned, I did break every previous routine and will need to fix and test them, but while I implement the events into the gallery I'll have to test every single one of them either way, so I may as well fix their respective routines while I test them for the gallery. So, now I'll be working on getting both these done.

I was planning on talking about a couple more things, but I ended up getting quite busy throughout the week, and wasn't able to wrap them up. Plus, I'm feeling quite exhausted. So, instead, what I'll be doing is I will be making another post talking about these remaining things either next weeked, or the one after, on top of the progress log that will be coming at the end of the month which will be about the gallery.

That'll be it for now. Thank you for supporting the development of Hana's Exposure!