Conviction Chronicles blog post #15 - base endings and new scenes

 I wanted to get this done before doing any major aspects of the game's trials/investigation so it's all in order, and it's setup where it can easily be expanded and edited if required.

Music replacements

Some scenes I replaced some music with new ones, mainly with tracks I didn't think were good enough or ones that I thought new ones fit much better.

Secrets

Every character has one now, but under certain conditions the player can see a cutscene that reveals a little more of the story. Everything is set up so it's not required to do most of these scenes, but they give extra things to look out for and to interact with. I won't go into them too much, but they are meant to give more context for finding certain information out, some are secret flashbacks, and others are different. 

I've decided to keep everything relating to the main antagonist as one of the final things to do, as I want to go more out with it.

Mole reveal

If the player is still alive everybody who is alive is sent to the court room for a reveal of the mole. If the mole is still alive everybody else is killed, if not then everybody else lives. It adds some tension where it makes the player hope they make the right choices.

Normal Ending

Originally I was going to change the location to where the ending happens depending on the protag choice with the world reacting to the game, but it would drastically harm the reveal pacing for certain information. It halved the time needed by doing this, but it does make it more consistent with getting something special feeling more important. 

Once the ending starts there are 3 different types of cutscenes that happen.

1. If there is more than 2 people including the player alive.

2. If only one other person from the player is alive.

3. If the player is the only one alive.

I did it this way to make rare chances of the player being alone with someone else more special, and to increase the impact of being a mole. There are some special interactions that only happen when being alone with someone else.

Romance

If the player has romanced someone else and they are still alive, there is an extra scene with being alone with them. There are two kinds of scenes that happen here.

Good romance: The opinion of the person you romanced is at least 50% positive or higher.

Bad romance: The opinion of the person you romanced is less than 50% positive.

This is to mainly punish those who would abuse a romance where they act harmful in trials against them for their own gain so they won't always get cheeky good romance dialogue. There are some special things in here for certain characters like Tina to get more information, using the romance as a way to gather more info.

Ending statistics

This is given out before the flashbacks where it shows how many points everybody has gotten, how many direct kills they have done, what bond level they are with the player, what day they died and if they are dead, etc. 

Intro development

I'm getting assets ready for making an animated intro for the game. This includes getting 2D animation done for the game. This is all happening in the background but so far it's all in budget, at least so far. It will be interesting what the result will be like. Once that is done, I can take the assets from it and make a more definitive trailer, especially once I figure out what I want to do for the execution animations. But I 100% would really like to update the trailer with some new info sooner than later for a better wishlist gain.

Anything else?

It's going very well so far, but next up is the evidence gathering logic for the player and AI. I think it will just take some time and won't be too hard, but figuring out how I want to handle cross save evidence for certain events will be interesting. Either I could have it all unlocked once it happens, which I might go with as it keeps all of the info the player has gathered that is important in line, or have it being selective what the player wants to save which would be more complicated and maybe not worth it. I have to do some brainstorming on many things of evidence the player and AI should have available at a time to use in trials, since it will have to be limited by the amount of variables assigned along with what can be showcased in a UI without problems. I might have to have multiple variables set up to make sure everything is gathered correctly for every piece of evidence.

The trials shouldn't be too hard once the evidence gathering logic is set up and the evidence is structured in a way to easily manipulate it in code without problems. The trials and the evidence gathering is going to be the last two biggest things of work for myself to do, while everything else can either be out sourced or won't take much to do per day. Execution animations will be annoying depending on what route I go with for them, but they will be one of the last things done where I can figure it out as it goes along.

I'll also do the antagonist stuff last as it is important and it's meant to be a collection of everything that has happened beforehand to wrap everything up. The true ending will be the last thing done.

This does mean it will be a couple of months before it's all done, and I will have to push the release date a bit, but it all will be worth it. December might be very interesting since I'm not sure how the weather is going to be like with how much it will impact development, but so far it looks like it won't impact it too much.