Dev Log - November 2022

October was a big month for development progress. v0.9 was a big focus on bug fixes and trying to add more dialog to existing content to help move the story along, help explain puzzles and moments in the game, bring the amount of content for Pregnancy gameplay up to the level of Weight Gain, and so on. While it didn't get everything, it was a lot of tiny efforts across the whole game. 

Meanwhile, I'm reflecting on the differences between the progress made last month, and the visibility amongst the players. A wave of tiny changes across the game is hard to show to players. Meanwhile, there was background research into game design in general, but also into the RPG Maker engine. When I first started making this game I was starting from scratch from a knowledge basis. Meanwhile, there were game elements that I wanted, and I couldn't quite figure out how to make RPGM behave the way I wanted to make it work. So there were a lot of creative features and workarounds at first. Now that I have learned so much, there has been work to try to remove those flashy, creative features in favor of practical, well-functioning methods that are much easier to use in more places, and that I can build off of. This also means that features may have been fixed at best, or appeared as it was to a player perspective. The lesson I've learned is to also try to approach design and features so that players can see and enjoy the value better. 

Looking forward, v0.10 is underway, and has some clear goals in mind. At the end of v0.9, the blueberry art content was completed. Also, art assets opened up for NPCs! I had such trouble at first getting art assets that I didn't think it would be feasible to get any other humanoid characters. So I even wrote the story and encounters to avoid it. Now that I have NPCs, I've started doing some work to bring them in, including another attempt to revamp battles to make it more fun. That's also why you see a new view to combat, so that the players can enjoy seeing the characters more. Here are the three main goals for v0.10:

1. Blueberry expansion theme (Art is complete, writing dialog and events now)
2. NPC introduction! (Som art is complete and in game, a simple placeholder cutscene introduces them. More maps will showcase them later)
3. New battle system. The NPCs are now showing up in encounters after their intro cutscene. New energy types are in for a rock-paper-scissors strategy, and attacks will follow to help provide a strategy to combat encounters. New boss NPCs and fights are planned!

I am seeing reports of more bugs and some features which I'm unable to replicate. I'm trying to look at them. I'm also guessing that working now in v0.10 instead of v0.9 that some of these changes have already been fixed. Handling versions up to release is going to change, and I'll address that in a specific dev log for my plans for the final version release.