MNL Progress Report #103

Hey there, nudies! Hope you're having a spooktacular evening so close to Halloween! We've certainly been busy this week! So busy, it's SCARY! OoOoOoOh!

The big thing we did this week was actually what you see above! All of the dialogue for the opening tutorial is now inserted into the game! Took me a week to write and format for coding, and 10 minutes for Invertex to slip into the game! That's actually a really good thing, too - because it proves that our pipeline is indeed working!

Here's how it works: Every cutscene and interactable object with dialogue is its own unique .DTL file, basically a text-only file with a bunch of code written (which Invertex guided me the whole way through). That code not only contains the dialogue that each scene or interactable has, but also every animation trigger and timer for said animation, the code for displaying art assets like illustrations or insert panels, dialogue options, and situational flags (like if an item should disappear after this conversation is complete). Some of these files are extremely small; the scene above is basically four lines long, with two of them being dialogue and the other two being an animation trigger and a dev note. Some can go up to 185 lines!

In total, this opening segment of the game contains 64 unique .DTL files. That's a nice, healthy chunk of story and optional interactables! If you're a fan of point and click adventures like me, then you should feel right at home with plenty of stuff to click on and cute dialogue to find.

This also means that... this area is mostly complete now! There's a little bit of polishing to be done later, but we're now moving on to the second half of the demo! Does that mean that we're roughly half-way done building the demo? Well... yeah! I'd say we're halfway there! Does that mean I can give a timeline of when exactly we'll be done?! Well... no. Sorry. Still not quite confident enough to give a deadline just yet, but hooboy, we are making serious progress.

This also means you'll probably be seeing less of this cafe/park area in future updates, as we're now moving back into the townhouse for the second half of this demo! Amber's gonna have a lot less clothes on from here on out! I know, so sad, boo hoo.

Note - Because we're full steam ahead on demo progress, this means art duties have been relegated strictly to in-game content. So sadly, no Halloween promo this year, and no bonus comic/pin-up this month. All art being made now is stuff that's going straight into the game. Though I will give you a little something special that Anne made: The starting splash screen whenever you boot-up the game!

Yeah, we're real happy with this one~

That's all for today, though! Thank you for the support, and HAPPY HALLOWEEN! See you next week!