January Round-Up!
Welcome to the January round-up! I’ve decided to slow down the amount of blog posts as part of me redirecting my energies towards more regular social media updates, rather than sticking to a weekly digest format. If you’d like to receive these updates more frequently, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or join our Discord community!
Since the new year, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on menus and UI systems. Although I thought I was finished with the main menu, there were some usability problems — having all the buttons move with the currently selected timeline always at the top SEEMED like a good idea at first, but in practice it made the UX very clunky, as players could never learn where buttons were, making for a clunky and slow timeline selection process. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but due to the constant need to restart the day (i.e. restart the game), the player ends up spending more time on the main menu than they would in other more traditional video games. I added a nice wobbly, shimmering shader to the background to give it a more elusive and ethereal vibe, and experimented with particle effects to create some engaging graphics solely through code.
There have been a few changes to the ending as well, including more appropriate pagination icons, a more rustic looking scroll background and some better UX for being able to show or hide the text easily (in case the player wants to re-examine the illustration).
And it doesn’t end there! The loading screen, too, has had a major overhaul. This one I did a lot of research for (I’d never have put the logo on otherwise!) but I think it came out looking great. Also, the more I’ve playtested, the more I’ve seen the need for tips just to jog people’s memory or point them in the right direction, and the loading screen is the perfect place for that. Even the smallest piece of text such as “travelling through time” help to lead the player and help them frame the experience, since the repeated visits to the past aspect of the game is so unlike most other video games.
The final screen to do was the credits scene. I looked at a few styles for this, but settled on a polaroid style collage of the characters that you meet throughout. Since the credits can be played at any moment from the main menu, characters that you haven’t come across yet do not appear in photos, preventing spoilers of certain events.
I’ve made some quality of life improvements to the game, such as a more precise and easy-to-use fast forward system. I’ve also added more options for quickly switching between Ann’s different timelines, bypassing the need to revisit the main menu as often. This timeline select replaced the standard ‘restart day’ functionality that already existed within the menu; if you want to restart the day without changing the timeline, you can still use this system. The timeline that you are on is selected as the default for ease of quick multiple restarts on the same timeline.
Finally, the portrait artist has been doing a fantastic job on the expressive busts needed during dialogue. Here’s an example of Charity being prideful along with her in-game portrait. I need to think about what background I would want each portrait to have or whether it should just be a block colour. I’m currently planning to use one background for any outdoor occurrences and an indoor background in any other instance. This decision isn’t final yet though.
And that’s all for the time being! I’m in a cycle of testing-fixing, currently focusing on the first hour of gameplay, as that seems to be the roughest spot for players right now. Come February, players should be able to orientate themselves quickly and start enjoying the game much more quickly.
