Dev Log 3: More Production

In what is essentially our final stretch of production, we reviewed playtester feedback, completely overhauled the narrative for our last character, and implemented more quality of life features into our financial advisor visual novel game.

Long story short (all puns intended), our game focused on messages on wealth inequality and financial management missed the mark with our final character: not only did we incorrectly calculate the character’s finances making it fundamentally wrong, but we also overscoped the character’s needs and ended up teaching the complete opposite lesson we were supposed to!

Without going into too many details, we originally had an elderly character looking to buy a home and retire soon, but realized that it was nearly impossible to plan for a 65-year-old doctor’s retirement when they were already in their mid-50s- it was simply impossible to create a meaningful retirement plan from scratch at that age. The character was eventually reworked into a 35-year-old doctor who only wanted to plan for retirement. By scoping down a bit and giving ourselves a more realistic in-game window of time to work with, we successfully rescripted the character and our playtest results show a noticeable improvement in understanding and enjoyment of our final character; however, we neglected to update the news brief to align with our character’s reworked premise. Luckily, that part of narrative is rather simple to fix and implement, so it won’t be a huge headache completing it before the deadline.

In terms of QoL updates, we implemented some new buttons that would allow the player to review past information.

The News Brief button acts as a hint button that gives the player a rundown of relevant in-game events that would better help them choose the ‘correct’ financial decision for their client. The Financial Report button also allows the player to view

Some common criticism we received from our playtesters was that the character voice audio was too loud and abrasive, and with no in-game volume slider, was grating to listen to for the entire playthrough. As such, we removed some redundant sound effects and lowered the volume of the character’s voices- we had initially planned to implement a volume slider as a stretch goal, but decided to focus on more pressing issues first, such as the aforementioned informational buttons as well as an experimental save/reload option that allows players to save their progress.

With all the UI elements now completed and implemented, our game looks better than ever, and with the recent audio updates, should also sound better!