Conviction Chronicles

Not much time since the last blog post, but I delayed the last one due to needing some final graphics for the night time section. Investigation theme loader This loads the investigation theme to be played in the background. This has 6 songs in total with a base of 2. Sinners Delight plays based on the amount of trials that have happened already relative to the days selected. So if it's near a limit it plays Hollow Steps with it's variations. If not then it sticks with Sinner's delight with it's variations. It's 2 sets of 3. If the player is completely innocent and haven't murdered anybody during the game, they get an instrumental version of the song. If the player has murdered in the game, then they get the vocalized version for increased intensity and involvement with the game. If 4 or more people have died for the investigation, then a slowed down version with reverb plays to show how major it is. 4 or more people dying can happen naturally through the pool wi...

 This covers some stuff I mentioned before in previous blog posts but in slightly more detail. Desolation graphics The desolation graphics are graphics that appear before a character is executed in the first trial. Before it was a black screen and some new graphics had to been made for it. Each protag gets a graphic along with Bianca. Right now these are only being used for the first trial, but I might consider adding more to the "body exploration" to showcase these graphics of how they react to seeing a body to give it more depth than what it has right now. Still have no idea if it's possible to even do a body discovery graphic animation like danganronpa has with how dynamic the game is without heavily stylizing it, but it's something to think about for me to do later. Dream events This is the Nightmare events and such. This includes new graphics for the current dream sequences with the unknown dream figure. I've increased his dialogue count to 76 lines instead o...

10 songs, with 4 vocal and the rest variations. I'm going to count this as my summer album as well. Contacted the same producer and they helped out a lot with the ideas I had. link: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/michaelrichardlannon/neon-ashes I'll go over each one with their role. Sinner's Delight + Hollow Steps These are the investigation themes. the one I had before was a placeholder and really didn't fit the quality other aspects of the game has now, so I decided to replace it.  Sinner's delight is the main investigation theme, made to be uplifting, raises the stakes before the trial greatly mentally even further, and is a song meant to be about someone enjoying the chaos they cause. I'm not sure, but I might have it where if the player is innocent, they don't hear the lyrics, but once they have killed someone they will get the lyrical version. Mainly for symbolism. I have to playtest it for a bit. Hollow Steps is the secondary investigation theme th...

The demo will be updated as I upload this. Might not be there until it finishes uploading. --E&S Playhouse-- I mentioned the start of this in the last blog post, but this is meant to play when the game boots up to always showcase something new, gives tips, and gives some small lore. There is unique dialogue for every single day of the year, even leap years are considered. It's all short so it only takes up 1 minute, but it adds some extra momentum for the player to give them a slight reward purely for booting the game. Some of the dialogues are similar, but most are made to be unique.  This adds more to the unique factor for players at a baseline, since it feels more personalized when a player plays at a certain date. I personally think adding something so small but so special feeling as a baseline right at the very start of the game will be great for engagement. The idea of this is a better implementation of Lily's Tea Party for advice, which still exists in the bonus menu...

 I'm releasing an update to the demo, adds some stuff and some bug fixes. --Motive system start-- I've added the start to the motive system where before each trial a motive that changes how the game functions is introduced. It's actually being set up to be pretty complex, right now I have 38 motives planned. Some motives will take longer than others since they require making cutscenes and more dialogue with certain gameplay systems exclusive to them and such. It allows me to do things like Solitary which I had in mind since the beginning of development. Right now the game will force the player to always get new motives until they have seen 18 unique motives. The first motive will always be one of the first 10 motives in the list. Once the 18 unique motives has been seen across multiple playthroughs then it will have a "previous run" motive blacklist of up to 3 motives from the previous run. This is mainly since around 7 motives/trials will be the max and it depend...

 This is a little bit of UI stuff, again, but it's needed. Text Backlogs I added some basic backlogs I can showcase and edit. The problem is it's very simple with how it looks and there is no direct way to manipulate it with how it looks. I can add text exclusively to the backlogs and make text preventable from being saved to it, but other than that, at this moment. the only way to make thinking text look different from normal text is if I wish to insert font color code into every single thinking textbox which I really do not want to do. For now it's going to stay this way until some sort of update is made to allow me to manipulate data stored inside to store it into some sort of array automatically in the background, and then I can make it look better with showing images of who is speaking along with better separation and automatic color coding of text without needing to edit hundreds of events.  References Instead of having it being a text event for the past year, I made ...

 This is only the first part to it, but I want to release it in an update now. Shop update The shop now as the ability to be set to randomized or a normal shop where you can choose what items to buy. Randomization keeps everything the same price, but with random outcomes. Normal shop shows each item and every item can be chosen. Gives more control to the player and such. Fast Travel There needed to be some sort of fast travel outside the elevator. But also having it being too powerful would break many gameplay systems. Instead of being able to teleport to someone's location at any time, all you can do is to teleport to a chosen floor, along with the option saying what floor is what. Only in the daytime. The last map system was very dogshit due to showing a badly rendered layout of the map terrain without any objects. So this is much better than what was before. The biggest problem with the idea of having the ability to teleport anywhere is the concept of collecting evidence for som...