Today I officially finished the work on the beta build and started the beta test cycle!
Here's a summary on the state of the beta build:
The beta will not include voice overs or translations.
The music tracks are pre production demos, final production will start closer to the end of the development, once I'll have more music written.
The UI and menus are fully functional, but not fully designed.
Other than that everything else is polished to between 95%-100%.
Here's what I did this week:
I made the back view walk cycle for Mikey, not completely polished, but good enough for now.
I worked on the promenade scene, polished the background, added some parallax and implemented some new hotspots.
I worked on the intro, I did the 2nd gift closeup and another camera angle.
I added some fidgeting animations for the demo ending cutscene.
I did another dialogue rewrite session, mainly on observing item monologues, but also some of the characters/story dialogues.
I added multi page support for the Inventory, though this is not necessary for the demo, since there aren't more than 14 items to get. Working on this surfaced a few unexpected issues I neglected to think about. My inventory items are drag and drop based. So, if you want to combine an item from inventory page 1 with an item from page 2, well, you don't, cause you can't. Once you click the inventory scroll button the item gets dropped.
So I'll probably need to switch the controls to pinning the item to the mouse and dropping on second click. Not a very big deal, just some extra unplanned work :) This brings up another question, if and when I'll make a touch based for mobile port, how will this work? There's no mouse to pin the object to, it has to be drag and drop, but then you'll need to drag with one hand, keep holding, scroll the inventory with the other then drop? I don't want to do that whole two boxes, drop item A into box A, item B into box B and click a button to combine.
One solution I have in mind is, instead of scrolling the inventory page, I'll have an "expand" button, clicking it will fill the whole screen with an inventory grid. A row has 14 items, there's enough space for 8 rows on the screen, that's 112 items, which is way more than enough. I will give this some more thought, though like I mentioned above, this is not crucial for the demo.
I also did some different shading on the lighthouse in the main menu.
So, what's next?
Aside from addressing feedback and bug reports, Next week I'll start working on the UI and menus design, work on the greens (trees, plants, bushes) and on the little bit of polish that’s left (the last 5%), mainly on the walk cycles and in some of the cutscenes.
If all goes well we'll have the official final demo ready by next month.
Once I'm done with the above, I'll continue adding the rest of the game's part 1 (out of 6), which I estimate should take another couple of weeks. But that will not be featured in the demo.