Conviction Chronicles blog post #9 - Bunch of improvements + updated demo

 Link: https://evilous.itch.io/conviction-chronicles-alpha

The last dev post wasn't that long ago, but some changes were added. I'll have to update it some more when I make the steam page.

Skip text and Auto text mode

This is actually the most significant as it allows the player to use the Z and C keys to enter skip text mode and/or Auto text mode. Skip text mode is a few lines of code which doesn't need any other integration. Auto text mode requires putting a variable at the end of every message text block. There are still parts of the game without it, but most dialogue related content of the game has it configured correctly.

It's a little weird with the button, as you can hold the button to activate/deactivate, meaning depending on how long it's pressed it can turn it on or off again in a split of a second. I'll have to find a better fix for it. Auto mode isn't fully integrated too, which is something I'm adding over time.

Rat events

The rat can now fully function, honestly funny the basement's events I didn't even touch on since I completed the first floor. But now his AI can work where he can get a randomized inventory and can do anything a normal AI can do. he can also be killed which alerts the killer of them to their existence, purely so they can bring it up during the trials.  Because of the forced limited scope, it means it will always attempt to do something to create chaos, either with putting alarm traps around or with spiking the food in the kitchen. They cannot cause murders too much by themselves outside certain conditions being set, but instead it's focused on creating tension. It will attempt to place traps that can kill and to attack characters if conditions are right. It means no matter what there is going to be something to force tension being built up across the days in game.

Bianca Death

Bianca has a randomized set time to die from her illness based on the amount of set days of the game. There is a chance she will outlive the game, but it's very rare.

At night, if she is alive she will be in the pool area. The AIs can attack her and get a chance to kill her off in exchange for their lives, with a small chance they will survive after attacking her. This is extremely rare for it to happen.

Mr.Cuddles

Since Bianca is based on Junko, she needed a Monokuma toy. There also needs to be a host if she dies, which lead the creation of Mr.Cuddles. Mr.Cuddles I based on mixing multiple ideas of Shanks with Carebears, making a cute but also a subtle design. He has different dialogue for the rollcall events while sharing her animations.

Medical Bed events

The player can now enter a medical bed, wait to see what happens, and if their medical bed is still on they live. If not they die.

Title Screen

Mostly edited the backend to it so it runs better and allows submenus.

Bonus Menu

The bonus menu allows for the replaying of the prologue and doing the traditional extra tutorial made before the prologue was made.

Cheat Codes

The player can insert cheat codes to give themselves bonuses, extra starting money, starting items, immunity during battles, etc. The full game will disable achievements if any of them are active and only once can be active at a time. Some of them change the player's default graphic to always be in swimsuit for example. I might change the text to activate them further to make them more funny, but overall it works well. The cheats don't activate until the end of the intro for the game.

Anything else?

Like I said before, a bunch of stuff still needs to be implemented with the auto text before a Steam Demo can go live. I might even try to add more details to the prologue and such just in case.

I have to prepare to get the Steam Assets ready, which means cover art, text, a trailer, and a good song to use for the trailer. Some of this is really quick and/or can be handled by a commission. I'll 100% have to commission the trailer and try to make it look as good as possible. But for the trailer song, I'm not sure if I should use a song I made already or make a new one and commission vocals for it. I have to do a lot to make it look good and for the Steam Demo to be as complete as possible for what I want it to be. This means it might be a month before the Steam Page goes live.

After the Steam Page goes live, it will showcase a lot with how much people are looking forward to the game and what is needed to finalize the game. It's mostly the trials and anything connected to them and the game endings which most of the work is going to be in the trials/executions. It's not too bad, but there is still a lot to do, and a lot to polish. I'm still very hopeful that this game will come out well in the end, it is at a pivotal part of the game for making sure it showcases the effort put in outwardly, which is a little hard to do with how the game is setup to be based around character AIs doing things in the background based on their feelings and desires, but also doesn't have the true freedom like a game like rimworld due to the lack of building. It's going to be a little hard to navigate, but with enough effort it should be expressing what I want it to express to people trying to navigate Steam, and I need everything to be as perfect as possible for the best first impressions possible.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Conviction Chronicles blog post #18 - Improved Title Screen

 This is a smaller blogpost, but it does have enough info to warrant it. New Game Introduction When booting the game for the first time, there is a small introduction for "setting up the game's profile." This is mainly so I can set up biases. This is an idea that Gnosia does where items like what color the player chooses impacts the gameplay in very subtle way with enforcing a starting bias.  This also introduces a character that I have planned out for a couple of months now with some 2D sprites. Their 3D model is in the title screen itself. I don't want to go too in-depth with them, but their design has a bunch of symbolism for their role as an assistant type figure which might come apparent later on. This scene only happens once, you can answer the questions, or actively try to deny answering them which loads the default answers. I might have to move it around or change it up later on, and I do have to add the new bias system in based on the answers.  Title Screen I...
Read more

Conviction Chronicles blog post #17 - Evidence gathering implemented

 This is going to be in an update to the demo, but there won't be as much text for this as most of the content done is backend code, which is more technical and doesn't much more to talk about for the average person. Evidence With evidence gathering, I had to go back to everything to add support for slots to be used to store certain information for the player and each living character. Basically it's a very dynamic way of gathering information and pushing it to the storage whenever possible. Lots of checks to make sure it runs well, and I still need to re-review it later to make sure it's doing every thing of evidence correctly. Evidence is stored between >The Main evidence text >Description for the evidence >The date >tags The date is separate since certain tags, like getting evidence from someone else, uses numbers and storing a date in that same slot can make some errors where code might think a tag of getting evidence from someone else means a date inste...
Read more

Conviction Chronicles blog post #12 - Demo is online

 Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3908320/Conviction_Chronicles/ Why the delay? I had to make some smaller changes and bug fixes, but another aspect was the Steam Review where I had to remove one of the options that could have been done when someone was sleeping to make the review process faster and to update the content survey to be more specific.  Anything else? I have to send some emails promoting the demo to see where it goes and to see how much traction the demo brings. The main game is currently being worked on, and I would say I'm around 50% done with the main flashbacks at this point. It will be interesting to see where the game goes from here, since before the game wasn't being shown in the Steam Discovery Queue, but once it does start being shown there, it will be interesting to see how much of an impact it has on the overall visibility. 
Read more