Ahh. November. The lovely month that brings nosebleeds and cracked feet. A silent month between my two favorite holidays, Candy Day and Present Day, where the last of the trees slip into hibernation, and with it too, my dreams and hopes... only to reemerge in late spring, when the dandelions reappear in the cracks in the sidewalk...

Hahahaha. Okay, anyway. Onto the real reason we're here. Or - well, I'm here, since I'm not a famous game developer with people flocking to my insane ramblings about scripts, assets, day job plights, and monthly opinions.

Since the last update - not much has changed.

1. I wanted to use Fungus' internal save system for saving/loading the game, which meant that anything not saved as a Fungus variable had to be made into one. So... that took a few days of rewriting some scripts.
2. On a happier note, saving and loading works. The game is saved automatically each time the player sleeps and will be loaded up from the previous save each time you "continue" the game from the main menu. I've integrated this into the mini-tutorial that occurs for the intro of the game so that players are aware of how they can save their progress. All variables, including what characters you've met, your friendship levels with them, date/season/year and money is all saved/loaded by Fungus' save system, which, if I may add, was a complete pain in the butt to make sure was working correctly. There were a lot of logic loops to sort through haha.
3. I'm determining whether or not I want to put money aside for marketing. While this is just a simple kind of game with a few hours worth of game play, is it worth marketing? I wasn't expecting to make money off of it, I just thought it was a good first project that wasn't Frogger or Pong. But with it's eventual size, maybe it's worth even a little bit? I dunno. We'll see.
4. I touched my calendar/event script for the first time since implementing it about 84 years ago (hahaha) so that I could simplify tracking the date/month/year and all events, including birthdays, holidays, and full moons. For the time being, they're commented out of the script to keep the game from loading unused variables because events aren't set to be properly implemented for a few more updates yet. There's no point in the game trying to track them if nothing even happens with them right now. 
5. Playtesting began! This involved harassing my fiancé and some of my friends to look for inconsistencies, errors, problems with functionality and initial feedback on how everything works/flows/appears. I sent everyone an email with the file that included the words, and I quote, "Break the game by any means necessary." So that should be fun!
   
6. My own playtesting included fixing small things, like providing a more random sound experience with the onomatopoeia sounds that  play when you interact with characters outside of their story lines, adjusting the volume of environment sounds like ambience and music to make them compliment one another and remembering to have all sounds fade out when transitioning to a different location which I totally didn't forget to do and had to go back and redo... ahem.
7. Something was just super satisfying about creating the executable file for the demo download. I remember seeing it on my desktop after I installed it to test everything. My heart felt... so good.
8. Things are on track for the demo to be released before the end of the year, or at maximum, January 2022. From there, the only thing to be completed is further art, small mechanics, and story routes for all other characters, so the full game should be available before the end of 2023.
9. In other exciting news, I've decided I'm going to finally open up a new Unity project for my next title, a 3D open world survival (yes, I know there's thousands of these). It's story heavy, with some fun, but simple, mechanics. Right now all I'll be doing is some research and minor preparations for the full project, which includes some basic terrain building, a main menu, and basic UI and features, but nothing too serious. If you're into those kinds of games, maybe give me a follow for when I launch the Itch.IO page in the next coming weeks. My twitter featured some early work on some 3D concepts as well, so if you'd like to follow me there to catch a sneak peak you can check that out too HERE.