Devlog jan 23rd - Improving cohesiveness with cutscenes

  Welcome to the second devlog of January

Each circle/hexagon is an area the player can travel to. The arrows represent the dialogue/cutscene related to travelling there.

The past two weeks we've been working on making the game more cohesive. By that, we mean that as the player plays the game, dialogues and cutscenes should explain what's happening. We also want to give the player bits of lore about the world.

So, this week we finished the two dialogues we started last week: One with Julia which explains why the player will travel to the town next. And then a cutscene with several characters upon arriving to the town. We also added several optional topics that the player can ask Thecla about if they want to know more about the world.

We made some adjustments to the way the buttons scale based on the text, so now they look a bit nicer.

We also added some small optional dialogue to the High Augur and the two normal Augurs if the player decide to talk with them after the cutscene.

The Augurs are not much help, unfortunately

The next dialogue we worked on was a dialogue with the mage Septimus.

Septimus will peek out of the door while the player is talking with him

The dialogue for Septimus will be slightly different depending on which other townsfolk the player has talked with before speaking with Septimus.

Finally, we added an optional dialogue to one of the Tax Office guards. 

This is the first time we've talked with a character with no expressions. That required some tweaks in the code.

With this, all the characters in the town has dialogue.

So now, it's possible for the player to start the game at Decimus' farm, go to Julias farm and from there travel to the Town. All with dialogue and cutscenes.

Minor Improvements

Another small thing we did was improve the keybind in dialogues. We have a key that continues the dialogue, but before it wouldn't work if the dialogue has options. Now it will correctly do nothing if there's multiple options, allowing the player to make their choice.

However, if there's only a single available option (for example if the dialogue is set up to have multiple options, but only one shows up based on the player's previous actions) then the continue key will advance the dialogue. This makes dialogue feel a little more fluid. Before the continue key would occasionally do nothing without it being entirely clear why.

We also fixed a small bug related to traveling between maps of different sizes. Before the camera boundary and background music would not always get updated correctly to the new map.

Thank you for reading! We'll be back with the next update on February 13th.