Conviction Chronicles

 Merging the two escape rooms into 1 blog post to make it easier. --Escape Room 2-- I wanted every escape room in the intro to feel unique with how it's completed. The first one is simple/comfy where it's very friendly. With the second I wanted to subvert it with it being in a submarine and being claustrophobic.  It has a red light where it makes everybody under the same light.  The way forward is to 1. Vote for someone using a crate which restores power. 2. Play some minigames on the now working PCs to get pieces of a passcode. 3. Read some logs to find the clue that the longest code goes in the middle. 4. Enter the code while trying to piece it together and leave. Lily has the least amount of dialogue when not playing as her to keep her mysterious mystique. I'll probably go back to add more to the content here so it's not all based on one minigame to make it more diverse. The logs do have some lore implications as well. A big thing is most of the cast is more divisive...

Link: https://youtu.be/furcpJI6L5c Youtube shorts version: https://youtube.com/shorts/M8wYYSRdpYY   Why make an animated intro? Part of it is marketing reasons, since it's a short showcase. But also to hype the player up before selecting to play. It also makes the game feel more "premium" as an experience as a whole. It's going to add a lot to people's perception when they first play to make people more invested. Animated Segments So I got an artist a couple of months ago to start making 2D Drawn content. Mainly since 3D content might not look the best, 2D animation can be much more stylized/premium feeling. Getting a full minute long intro that is purely animated would have a very strong cost behind it. Doing it the way I did was a lot cheaper, but had some cons to not be as unified as a normal animated trailer, where the risk was making it unified with the editor. Not every character is represented in the intro to allow for some surprises, but also since it woul...

 I decided to upgrade the game settings and other things before doing the pre-cafe dialogue system. I'm also updating the public demos as well, since it has been a little bit since I have done that. It should all be updated and live once this post goes up. (the update happened a bit ago, but doesn't have escape room 1) A big reason why I'm revamping the intro of the game is to make it better for playtime pacing, and to keep people invested for longer. Mainly since the first 2 hours are very important, and ironing every aspect of those first two hours is really needed. Randomize settings Settings can be randomized instead of loading the defaults. Keeps things fresh if someone wants to do something random.  Save/load The player has access to save slots, which ended up being a little annoying to implement with it functioning correctly. But they can save/load setting presets and name them whatever they want. This was 100% required to make it easier for people to get into new ru...

 Basically this is the first part of adding to the cafe, and this is mostly with the "hallway to the cafe" area where the player can sometimes see another character there and interact with them. Doing any option prevents the player from being in the cafe, and ultimately becomes a massive risk vs reward. Anybody from the cast, Bianca/Cuddles, and the assistant can be talked to in a hallway event. Risk The main risk is that you cannot view the rest of the cafe events and see what happens. It also means if the kitchen is spiked, anybody not in the cafe will be viewed with more suspicion automatically. Evidence Sharing Evidence sharing can happen here and it's one of the only places where it can happen before an investigation can start. Adds more opportunities for it to happen. This is actually the most important of the options due to how strong evidence sharing can be at the right moment, along with blackmail. Purchasing The player has an option to pay for the chance of an i...

Album Cover Art I put a little more effort into this cover art than the other vocal songs, it's very artistic and symbolic for the role the song plays in the story, along with some other details. I don't want to spoil too much about it, but like many things, people might see it if they think about certain aspects of the game in a certain way.  Link: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/michaelrichardlannon/id-never-be Role of the Song So the song is more mature, but also more depressing/somber with it's bittersweetness. It plays in the second credits once certain things have been revealed, and it's meant to be that way to showcase the player's progression and the understanding of the characters with the events of the overall story. The innocence of the player is gone by this point, which is why the song's instrumentation and lyrics fit "depressing/loss of self". It also falls in line with the previous two vocal songs which by this point have been engraine...