🔧Devlog 20 - Diego Visual Update Decision, current wordcount, new menu and more

Diego visual update. 

This time I decided to talk first about something that was highlighted for me and for you last week: Diego's possible update.

Short answer:

I'm not going to update Mr. Diego.

Complete answer:
When I launched that poll, I was quite unsure. I really love the current Diego, but the combat animations don't feel 100% him. So that left me wondering if I should do a major update or not. Two things made me make not to.

The first was that the voting difference was minimal. I would have a tremendous amount of work, sacrificing hours working on content for you, for a minimal difference of less than 10%.

The second, and for me more important, were your comments. I think many of you think exactly like me. The things I read not only reinforced some stuff I already thought, but some left me thinking about factors I hadn't considered.
And I loved and felt genuinely happy reading your stories, your experiences, and how Diego is for you—and how the way he is fits him perfectly.

I enjoyed reading what you wrote and I enjoyed making that post. Maybe I'll do more of these, as long as you keep in mind and don't mind that the final decision is mine.

To everyone who voted and commented, my biggest thank you. You helped me a lot with this decision. But diego now stays as he is, with his cute but perfect little nose ;)

PS.
Hope you enjoy the extra CG - let's see if I can use it ingame sometime :P

Current content:

These past weeks might seem less productive than they actually were. In total, in terms of written content, we have 8k+ words.

It's a low amount of content, but I also have to take into account that I had to allocate a lot of time to things that don't add to wordcounts but are necessary. Reviewing keys, adding chapter dividers to the game, retesting different scenes under different conditions, making sure there are no bugs, updating character images, creating new images, making a complete mini game that can add up to an hour or more of gameplay if people enjoy that sort of thing, among other things I'm probably not remembering or didn't register doing because these were intense weeks. I'd love to once again deliver 30k+ words, but at this pace I won't be able to. Especially since I really want to improve the combat presentation.

That said, I'm really pleased with the quality of what I've done. Both the mini game and Diego's content are turning out great, and I'm genuinely happy with how they're shaping up.

Mini game: Written content - 4.5k words
It's practically done. I just need to polish one variable or another. Nothing more to add beyond that. I'm just unsure whether to show you or not. Maybe I'll create a post talking about it and put a spoiler tag in the title so you know spoilers are coming and can read at your own risk. What do you think?

Diego talk after Matt: 3.5k words.
This has quite a few CGs with different layers to enhance the storytelling. I really liked how it turned out so far. It's a technique I used when I was a DM in D&D, but here I can refine and improve it more since it's a game 😛

PS.
On another note, did you manage to get thee Harry CG in 0.5 or should Alex write a guide ? :3

GUI Update 

I'm bringing you the base of the GUI we've been cooking up lately. The design was done by Sterki and me, always asking the rest of the team what they thought. After some changes, we went with our original idea. A tablet to replace the game menu in hopes it increases your immersion.

Sterki made all the assets we are using (screen, keys, etc) and I'm programming and animating it myself, adding sound effects, animations etc. It's still a very early version, but I wanted to do this myself to learn more because I feel that by learning one thing, one way or another, I improve in others.

Here’s an early preview for you (the video may contain minor spoilers):

I’ve implemented the main GUI elements, created an entry and exit animation with sounds (exit stopped working for now xD) and wrote code that allows you not only to customize the name of your saves, but also shows you which chapter you're in with an overlay that disappears when you hover over it. I really liked how it turned out, both visually and functionally.

Alex then jumped in on this task, having already coded and implemented the settings options.

I'd like to know your opinion about how it looks so far, about our idea and its execution.

Coding and organization improvements 

This is a personal reflection, but I feel I've improved a lot since I started making TrueClash. However, I feel there's still a lot to learn.

I lose a lot of time reviewing and trying to understand the flow of what I wrote weeks ago. To improve this and waste less time reviewing, I changed the way I program a bit. Basically I’m trying to follow the rule of not repeating code even more seriously and making it reusable while also keeping it’s workflow easy to read.

This doesn't cause any change for you, only for me and to facilitate content creation.

Also, by learning to work with and implement the GUI, I now have better control over images, with various ways to animate them but also to place them in the game more easily, requiring less time and effort on my behalf. Which allowed me to make the mini-game as I did, as well as improving in terms of storytelling.

That's it for the devlog. I really hope you enjoy V 0.5 and what else is to come ^^