I'm almost ready for the Steam demo release, which will be released next week!
Note that the Steam demo will still be considered a beta and will not include translations, voice overs or final production music tracks.
Here are some of the stuff I worked on:
I made the first part of the intro interactive, you can now look around on some stuff, then make the wish and then blow out the candles. From there on the intro continues as a cutscene.
I Changed Chuck's view in the intro - scene 2 camera A. Originally I didn't plan on adding camera B here, so I had them all facing the camera. And it looked weird that Chuck is facing the same direction when the camera switches, so now he has a more back view in camera A. I'll possibly do the same for Grover.
I added a new closeup on Mikey and Grover, for the intro - scene 2 dialogue.
I finally finished all the green work, updated the bushes and plants in the promenade, park and house scenes.
I changed how the camera scrolling works. Basically it will now scroll only when you get close to the edge of the viewport. Instead of scrolling the character constantly to the center of the viewport. This really helps focusing the mouse cursor on hotspots, while walking in the center of the viewport.
I worked on the shadow system. I now have one global layer that all shadows are drawn to and blend together to a maximum opacity. Previously besides Mikey's shadows, all other scene shadows were baked into the background. So, when Mikey's shadow was overlapping them, the opacity was added and the shadow became darker. I removed all baked shadows and added shadow objects instead.
I also added a pixelatte shader on this layer. Since the game is actually running in high res, when skewing the shadows the result is much smoother than you would want for a pixel art game. Lots of small subpixels. The shader helps make it blocky again.
The questions bar will now slide out when dialogues are running and back in when they're finished.
I added some new unique action animations for Mikey and also a back view general interaction (used when picking up items or interacting with objects).
I Added new spider animations (house hall).
And finally I updated the trailer once again, mostly for the new logo, but I also added some of the new stuff.