Dev Log 2: Production
Production has been smooth sailings so far. After wrapping up with the initial draft of game narrative, I pivoted my role to implementation to make sure we had a good product to playtest with. Because Jichen implemented dialogue as it was being written, I was largely in charge of QoL and visual updates.
Per playtester feedback, the financial report screens were too cluttered and hard to read, so the first visual update I did was minimizing the visual design of the Financial Report screens in Adobe Illustrator to replace it in Unity before syncing changes on an experimental branch on our team's Github repo.
A QoL update I implemented was the inclusion of a "Review Newscast" option since we noticed our players would occasionally skip through the monthly newscasts before realizing there were very important hints spread throughout it. However, one thing we overlooked was that the "Review Newscast" button would restart the month all over again and players would have to sit through redundant character dialogue/exposition. While not implemented yet, we are planning to circumvent this problem by redirecting the Menu item to a dummy block that only contains the monthly newscast before bringing the player back to the Choices menu.
We also added character portraits and BGM to the game to further bring Ratville to life. Our next steps are to implement ambient sounds as well as SFX for clicking on menu items.
Overall, on the technical side, production is going smoothly with all parts of our team working full steam ahead.
However, some of our struggles come from the narrative side of the game. Because our game divides its character-specific endings into Good/Neutral/Bad, our playtesters have noted that some endings don't make sense to them. While we did a good job on Aukai (month 1 character) with his goal of owning a surf shop, we didn't quite hit the mark with Beatrice (month 2 character) and her goal of financial stability. Specifically, our current Good ending for this character revolved around buying and selling a home (good luck with that in this economy lol); however, many playtesters felt unsatisfied with this ending since they themselves have their own view on what constitutes financial success or stability, noting that they would never sell their homes and relocate for the sake of financial stability. I believe we need to rewrite Beatrice's arc entirely and create a more tangible and objective goal that the players can all agree on (owning a surf shop vs chasing financial stability are two very different goals in terms of specificity).