This is the third week working on the side project. I estimated a month for a good prototype, and that seems like it's going to be the case.

These past two weeks have been a bit of everything. The level is almost fully textured, only missing some bits. The girl has a stronger AI, more sprites.

Save / load system is in. I'm debating a bit on having multiple savefiles, or just have a continuous one that saves when exiting + autosave every 5 minutes. I understand that options are always good, but the game doesn't have a game over. Only critical parts are when she returns from her journeys for gold, which can have bad effects on her, but nothing major.

I've been experimenting with 2D UI, and made four little icons that adapt to the interactable things of the level. It's a small thing, but after putting some time into it, the whole game now feels more polished. It's full of tweens / code animations. Mouse enters area if the icons are not visible? They appear fast. Mouse enters area, but the icons are already visible? They move from their previous position.

At the entrance, when clicking on it, the idea is that you can choose whatever weapon the girl might take before going on a journey. The chest is for bought items. The small place next to the fireplace is for wood reserves. And the last one is for food items. 

At first I thought of making the player give food to her with the mouse, but felt a bit tedious after a bunch of times, plus I want to make this run without needing the players input, even if it's preferable. So I'll go with the Princess Maker route, where the player selects different diets with different effects, some more expensive, some cheaper.

Plans for the next two weeks:

One of the last features left to do is the inventory system, I'll just take it from Love Inn and strip it down, since it's a bit overkill for this one lmao. Especially now that I'm sprinting with this side project, I've been thinking of how useful these years have been on my gamedev knowledge, things have been really easy lately.

Add behaviours for the monk. The idea is to not have him too much on screen, so he is on the other side of the doorway during most of the day. I need a guy, and that's the basics of it. I thought of having a "no face" character, but it felt maybe a bit too cold? Idk.

In Love Inn, there was a time when I considered giving the MC no personality and making him customizable, like in life/farm sims. But I felt so attached to the delinquent MC that I just went with it.

The basic loop has been done since day 4, but once it's more fleshed out with all components in, I'll like people to playtest it to gather feedback. I'm biased, but I actually like having it on desktop running.

I've been missing Love Inn and its characters, so I'll probably take two days to just write dialogue for it.

For those curious about the setting, it's based on Mozarabic churches and monasteries. Here's one of the two places directly inspired by, Monastery of San Miguel de Escalada, in northern Spain:

Next devlog on the 1st of July! Probably will have a Steam page set up by the first half of July -> Playtest last days of July / Early August, and then we will all see how it's going, what to add and what to remove.