You can just feel the pressure of an impending deadline. It's in the air when you walk into class. Everyone asks each other, 'how's your game going?' and we know it's asked as a polite conversation starter. But when you ask that question the response is literally always the same.

It's an intense stand-off of mutual understanding.

What you need to know is I've organised my time as well as I can, and yet the looming presence of 'THE END' is still there and makes things a lot more difficult when you have two other subjects also getting closer to 'THE END'. But it's cool, it's good, it's life.

My priority this week was… Well. Yeah. I honestly don't even know what my priority was I just kind of did general work. I think I wanted to bug fix. But then I didn't know how to bug-fix so I had to wait for class to talk to a teacher about it. Also I had to organise my final playtests. I also wanted to design a menu. I organised a bunch of playtests, but then got nervous about the menu, so I procrastinated by drawing up the final portraits and occasionally fixing really minute details in a script. I guess the point I'm trying to get across was I absolutely did a lot of work, but it's a bit of a blur.

Then the playtests finished and I got all the feedback. I then had to write a report of the feedback and then immediately implement a lot of the feedback into the game. There's bubbles in the game now, too.

OH THAT'S RIGHT! I had to submit my game to a whole bunch of stuff. Like IGF and GCAP. I'm pretty sure the build I sent to GCAP is non-functional trash, considering all the bugs that came back from my playtest. Neat! But that's ok, such is life. I've fixed a lot of those issues and I hope they remember that HEY, it's STILL IN BETA, but STILL FUCKING SICK - as it says in my trailer. Just quoting a legendary piece of cinema. 

Actually thinking about it now, I did a lot of detail things. Like I finished all the furniture and backgrounds, so I put them in the game. Making spritesheets actually takes a lot of time, it's tedious and cruddy. I put a whole flipping movie into my game, it's 7 minutes long but whatever it's from the 20s it's cool. I made the train have a background finally! It scrolls so it looks like you're actually on a train. I put all the furniture in the game! I forgot about the furniture for the Church! Also, the outdoors is looking mighty barren! I might have to make it even smaller or draw some trees! Hoorah!

I've started working on both the pause and main menu, here's a lil peak.

Makes the game have some finesse, you know?

So I put some interactive stuff in the game too, so it says 'E' or 'SPACE' so you know to do stuff. Issue was that it would totally fluctuate and if you pressed the buttons it wouldn't actually do anything. I sat down with a teacher and he told me, 'Hey, here's why your script is GARBAGE,' and so, for all you gamedevs out there (shout-out) turns out it is really bad to put multiple colliders onto one object! I sure as heck didn't know! Whooooops! So basically the Player is the trigger, not the other objects, and the players walking into a bunch of these lil' bad boys and thinking that is the trigger it needs. Nope! Wrong! It's a bit complicated but it's mostly fixed. Mostly…

It's cool! It's still all a bit blurry, but I'm doing it. It's happening. I'm near the end. The game's getting better, people are playing it for longer. People I think are genuinely enjoying it, despite the trash and glaring issues. I'm happy that the game's getting better, I just can't feel that feeling of elation right now. My brain is like… a train getting to the stops but forgetting to honk the horn. You know? Does that make sense?

To recap!

What I did:

• Finished ALL animations
• Implemented furniture!
• Except the Church
• Added Interactive Signal
• Finished all the portraits
• Started a main and pause menu
• Fixed major bugs that have been there since the start of the game, let's be real

What's next?:

• Fix the friend dialogue implementation
• Add dialogue for smaller objects
• Smaller thingies
• Boom gate
• Delete bubbles
• Make a sprite animator controller for the sprites that changes i.e. balloon on grave
• More dialogue editing (I've been doing that throughout, don't worry)
• SAVE FEATURE
• QUEST LIST AND SUDOKU PUZZLE INVENTORY BUT WHATEVER THAT'S EASY
• ARGH
• Sudoku puzzle and stuff but that's post-graduation

I'M SO CLOSE! ARGH I'M SO CLOSE. JUST READING THIS LIST I'M ACTUALLY SO CLOSE.