Postpartum 0.0.3

All sprints should end in a retrospective.  These will not be a defense or glorification of what happened in the past 2 weeks, but rather an accurate depiction what happened to get us to our current location.

What changed:

White box UI for Menus

White box UI for save/load

Added a skip combat feature

Programmer UI for talking scenes

Got Danica’s portrait

Did a few various fun animations with the portraits.

Got Backgrounds

Added The Nightmare (M2F scene)

Added Help Lizette (Hucow, FF scene)

Meeting Blackfire can no longer be skipped.

Removed Blackfire’s romance battle

What happened:

I want to split my time every week 2 weeks between content and engine work.  Engine work has to come first for now, as I can’t show content if there is nothing to show it with.  Very little splitting happened.  I got the final design for the talking UI weeks before I thought I was going too.  While this was great news, it was a radically different design than I had intended.  Taking one look at it, I knew it was the right design.

This meant I had to redo all the existing text in the game.  I thought it would take a few hours to get it done, but each scene took 2 hours.  Instantly, half my time for the week was gone.  By the time I was finished with it, I only had 3 days to implement all the content I had planned, which is not possible.  So I paired back content as appropriate.  I had planned to get in 2 battles, and 4 scenes.  Instead we got 2 scenes.

I’m really happy this all happened.  Having less content for the first new version sucks, but getting all that splitting scene splitting down now means I don’t have to do it later.  It also makes the game look much better early, which will help people get into the game.

I was REALLY hoping to get a 2nd portrait this week.  I wanted a variation of Catelly for the opening, dressed in her bedsheet.  Unfortunately, that didn’t end up happening.  Having no image there, with the background and text boxes felt bad, so I put in her normal portrait.  It doesn’t fit what is going on there, but it’s better than nothing for now.

What’s up with Blackfire:

Blackfire’ battle got cut because while I love the idea, it was the 2nd possible fight.  People barely understand the normal mechanic for battles, and I suddenly reverse it.  Not cool.  This battle will return, but it can’t be the 2nd battle of the game.

I want the game to feel like stories are optional, and therefore characters are optional.  However, we need a universal start point to launch the real story from.  I don’t want have branching that early in the story.  As a result, I need to have Catelly at least have met Blackfire.