Hello, everyone!

Ludum Dare's Extra version has ended, but Ludum Date has not! 
We wanted to write a nice devlog with some changes, progress over the past few weeks and to talk a little about the development experience so far!

First things first, below are a couple of the many changes we've made since the first 72hrs, just for "wow!" purposes :) 

Overall UI Fixes + New Attention Meter + Mood Icon + Improved Art

You like Jazz?

Because we surely do!

We wanted this game to be an artistic masterpiece, so being the frustrated composer that I am, I did the only thing I could do...

Call in an expert musician friend that would give this game the amazing track it deserved.

And so... enter Kaze!

From two weebs to... not exactly three

Early on, our lovely artist, Maru, did this amazingly cute team logo sketch for our credits screen:

But now we had a third member and the project had quite a huge quality bump, so it was only natural that the cuteness had to be updated to something more... professional. But it still had to be somewhat cute, though. That's a rule we simply couldn't break.

However, despite being a huge Godzilla fan and consuming lots of Japanese movies and live actions, Kaze was far from the weeb spirit we not necessarily proudly shared, so the credits screen started to evolve towards a fun new direction:

Did I hear OST?

Not really, but speaking of unexpected professionally-cute art, I couldn't resist to mention and share this AMAZING cover art that Maru found the time to make for Ludum Date's OST Album, if we ever release one, that is:

A Visual Novel... On Construct?!

To be honest, we wanted to make a visual novel from the start, so the main issue was how to make something within the Every 10 Seconds theme. So we started brainstorming and going through a myriad of VN engines.

Turns out that making a timer that executes something Every 10 Seconds (overused theme meme, I know) regardless of the game's current state and most importantly, regardless of the message displayed, is quite tricky to do in most VN engines we've tried, and that has cost us about a day and a half of development during the Jam's initial weekend.

Maybe it would've been pretty easy to implement our timer mechanic on Ren'py, but we still lacked a good Python programmer (or an actual programmer at all).

So we went with Construct 3, an engine that I love and am way too used to resort to when I can't do something that requires a better coding knowledge.

However, making a Visual Novel (or a text-heavy game for that matter) was something I had never attempted on the engine, and turns out it's not exactly super simple, albeit perfectly doable. So due to several engine issues that took way more time than we expected, we didn't manage to include more than 3 lines of dialog by the end of the first 72hrs and the game froze after reaching the last available dialog option, leading a lot of people to thinking it was bug and not really forcing Maru to make the lovely art below.

With the gameplay still a little unclear, the "Text bug" and overall need of code refactoring, our main priorities for the following weeks quickly became making bug fixes, improving gameplay, updating art and making sure everything looked and felt nice, so we ended up postponing the narrative design for... ugh... well... we're working on it, okay?

It's still far from our session time goal, but we'll get there!

So, what's next?

As you can see, we had a ton of fun making this game. It was the first time the three of us collaborated on a project together, and I'm happy to say it will most likely not be the last!

It was pretty tough to manage full-time jobs, side-projects and working on this game with the quality we were aiming for. Besides, as I mentioned before, our choice of engine was a trial on its own. 

However!

We're pretty excited and happy with how the project looks and feels so far, and that should be enough to fuel our energies to keep updating the game in the near future! 

So for now, our plans consist of: 

• Complete narrative design with multiple endings!
• More amazing art and some polishments
• More interactions linked to the smartphone's ringing
• Improved Mouse Usability
• Joystick / Controller Support

And that's our plan for the near future!

Please look forward to it!