Devlog Oct 23rd - Dialogue History

  Welcome to the second devlog of October!

We have a few new features to show off! First, the game now has a dialogue history:

The little portraits show the speaker, including the expression and pose they were making at the time.

This is a popup that the player can bring up and it will show the latest pieces of dialogue. It's quite nice if the player missed a line or wants to re-check something.

Many games with dialogue has something similar and I think it is a nice feature. 

The second feature we worked on was a bit of a technical one, related to saving and loading the game during cutscenes.
We have decided to disallow saving the game during a cutscene because we would have to save the state of the cutscene as well.
Cutscenes can be quite complex and contain a lot of components, some which are triggered immediately and some which are waiting until later in the cutscene. If the cutscene had 15 components, some of which has already been handled and some which are waiting, we'd have to save which ones are in what state. For example, if a character is moving from A to B, we'd have to save exactly where they were, and where they were going.

This is not impossible, but we decided it's not worth the amount of work it would take. This is especially true because errors in this area would be devastating.
Imagine if a player saves the game and something goes wrong and the save is unusable. If the player didn't keep previous saves, they would have to start the game over from the start. Being forced to start over, even in a short game, is never fun. That kind of error can cause players to drop the game permanently.

The save button is greyed out because we're in a cutscene. Currently there's no explanation for the player, but we might add that in the future.

We considered also disabling loading or starting a new game while in a cutscene, but instead we went through the effort of ensuring that everything in the cutscene is reset correctly so the player can load or start a new game with no traces of the old game. 
We found a few bugs related to this, but in the end I think we got everything working.

Another small thing we worked on was a rework of how we use menu music. Previously, if the player opens the menu while playing the game, any music and sound effects from the game kept playing in the background while the menu was open.
Now, opening the menu will instead play menu music. Any game music and sound effects will be paused while on the menu and resumed upon return. This caused a few bugs, but I hope we caught all of them.

That's all we have to show for this devlog! Next time we're going to play the game from beginning to end and try to fix all the problems we find. This is the last step before we again ask playtesters to have a look at the game, so it's going to be exciting. Talk to you then!