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Weekly Update - Back to Work, Revising Dialogue

2 years ago667 words

WELL THIS WEEK I COULDN'T DO WORK BECAUSE MY DOG ATE ATONAL DREAMS AND-... Or no, gasp, I actually did get stuff done this week! I've been revising dialogue scenes based on tester feedback... though everything continues to take so damn long!

So yes, my mood's been a bit better recently - the latest storm is over - and I got back to working on the stuff reported by testers from the second alpha (that ran only a couple of days ago, right??). I decided to tackle the most daunting thing, reworking the dialogue scenes, to get that out of the way.




Essentially, there was this battle against Pierce which used to serve as the very beginning of the game, then I added the nightmare intro before it which serves many of the same purposes, but I'd put so much effort into the Pierce scene that I didn't want to remove it entirely. So I kept it in, mostly unchanged. It was really long, though, and dragged on, stalling the pacing.

So I've split that in two - now you battle Pierce thrice in the tutorial area - which probably works better. But...

In that encounter, Pierce summoned a figmon from Collie's mind - Pawnite - which Savitr tamed, and which acted as the first skill you acquired and could equip. But as I cut that bit out of the first Pierce battle, you no longer acquired it as a skill, and a lot of tutorials I already had no longer made sense in the positions they were in.

So I ended up revising basically all the tutorials that I'd spent so much time and effort on! It wasn't just a case of tweaking a few words in a single conversation or anything. Or, to clarify, I did keep the majority of what I already had, but I had to reorder everything and revise lines in pretty much all the scenes. It ended up taking all week, and I've mostly done now, but not quite.



I changed around the order you encounter certain figmon species and get their skills; now Bite, a basic Discord-elemental skill used by summoning a Brigrrnd, is the second skill that Collie gets, which makes more sense in terms of story stuff and gameplay mechanics. So that's good!



The introduction of gameplay mechanics is now more spread out, too. Runes and elements are introduced in parts, and wakefulness and intensity are saved until after the first elemental arena boss. So that's also good! Probably!!

Hopefully I'll be able to finish off the changes next week, and I might upload the revised version for testers... but I don't want to do that a bunch of times for minor things because it'd become increasingly unlikely anyone would bother to replay something which is mostly the same as their last playthrough. So we'll see how that goes.



Also, I'm still working my way through Final Fantasy VII... slooowly. It felt great at first, but I tired of it much faster than I did with any games when I was younger. It's why I'm intending Atonal Dreams to last less than about ten hours, rather than the 50 or so of a typical JRPG!

I'm near the end now - literally at the final dungeon - but there's all this optional stuff to do - superbosses and such - which just feels like such a chore. Especially the breeding chocobos. So I might not bother. But maybe I should?? Ehh... I've only been playing it for like an hour or two every other day though.

(Which gets me going down a mental path of panic about why I'm making games myself if I feel this way about them in general... but I decided I wouldn't rant about anything negative this week, so...!!)