Each week this month has a special occasion. First it's Turkey day. After that it's Birthday #1. Then after that it's Birthday #2. Then after that it's finally Candy time, which is today at the time of posting this.

Sorry if this devlog seems a little disorganized. I'm a little off today. Not sure what's going on but I'm tired, have a bit of brain fog, my eyes are having trouble focusing and I'm on/off interested in working on things, so this post might be a little bit all over the place.

If anyone is wondering what I did between now and the last time I updated for a written devlog... there was a lot.

1. I finished the inventory and gift mechanics, the inventory can be opened and closed during the interaction with characters and gifts can be given with a single click. All characters will respond based on how much they like that particular gift
2. Adjusted volume and resolution settings
3. Resized various sprites/images to work with the resolution settings that were changed
   
4. Changed the text font to black because white was getting difficult to see with some of the backgrounds, it doesn't really fit with the more lightly colored UI but making it easy to see is what's important
   
5. Finalized additional interactions for characters Weston and his tie in with Izumi's story and Gyeong's involvement in Mee's story.
6. Changed/added lines and onomatopoeia sounds for conversation points
7. Simplified and cleaned up story routes and hub blocks to ensure there's no CPU overload
8. Added prompts for when you want to date another character and you're already dating one
9. Adjusted friendship scripts to account for new variables needed for dating/befriending characters
10. Finished scripting the orientation preferences for all characters
    
11. Finished setting up particle animations for when you chat or flirt with someone
12. Added additional ambience tracks for locations lobby and parking lot.
13. Many many more small things that are inconsequential to list here (adjusting the order of commands in fungus blocks, the length/volume of music/sounds, proof reading for the thousandth time, etc)

The inventory system proved tricky, same with gift giving and the colliders/triggers I had to toy around with to get that working. Originally I was going to have a click and drag system but my colliders didn't play nice for this (insert joke about colliders never working here). Instead, I made a system where you can access your inventory whenever you interact with a character but regretfully had to do away with my click and drag scripts.

With my newfound knowledge around Fungus, blocks, variables, and scripting, I also had an opportunity to clean a lot of stuff up. I turned 12 inefficient scripts into 6, and went through each Fungus block to condense it and make it simpler.

When I originally drafted this post, it was going to include the release of the demo, because at the beginning of October when I started writing it, I was sure I would have enough time to actually complete all the tasks on my growing list to get it done. Obviously I was wrong. But the demo will be complete before the end of the year, I think I can guarantee that much. I don't have anything else to do right now other than playtest and make a list of other small fixes but I don't know how long it will take me to do that, and anything that needs to be fixed would be small enough that it wouldn't take much to complete. The demo could be out as early as next week. It could take me until the end of Nov/Dec to complete the playtest, who knows.

At any rate, we're getting close, and since all the major gameplay functions are complete, the next round of developing will predominantly be the procurement of assets for character sprites, location art, and music/ambience. As always you can follow along with development through the Trello board to see where we're at, and what's next. You can follow our Youtube for teaser videos, and video devlogs (among other silly videos we might post). You can also follow us on Twitter for funny tweets and more visual teasers on how the development is progressing.

Enjoy this Spoopy Day! Tell us what you're dressing up as! See you in November!