Devlog #4 - 01/04/24

Hi, all! Another week, another devlog brought to you by The Fellas! This week's devlog will be on the shorter side this time, as we ended up being quite busy over the past week with things outside of game development, so we didn't get much time to work on the game.  Rest assured though, we still have some small quality of life features to show you all this week!

Art

For art this week, we have some super secret insider info to share with all of you! We have an updated background for a section that wasn't included in the demo version of the game, but something you will all get to see in the full release. I won't give any more details, but our beta playtesters seemed to enjoy this section, so we think you all will too!

Programming

One common critique we got during our playtest was that the dialogue in the Brief and Interrogation sections were a little too slow for some people's liking. This was our top priority when it came to polishing; for a game as text-heavy as a visual novel, it's important to make sure you cater to many different reading speed levels.  

To fix this, we added a feature seen in many text-heavy games. While the dialogue is typed out, you can now left-click to have all the dialogue appear at once, instead of having to wait for everything to be typed out. Initially, if you left-clicked when the dialogue was still being typed out, you would automatically go to the next line of dialogue. Adding this feature also fixed another common criticism we got, where people would accidentally skip lines of dialogue because they clicked while it was still being typed out. 

Audio

There hasn't been much progress on the updated music and SFX tracks just yet, but we do have some new audio features to show you all! You can now finally adjust the volume of in-game audio. There's separate sliders for the master volume, the music volume, and the sfx, so people can customise their audio experience how ever they want! The sliders are available on both the title screen and during the investigation sections.

Title Screen Volume Control

Investigation Section Volume Control

Current Work

Our main focus this week will be similar to last week's, that being general bug fixes and polish, such as the game's sound design. That's all from us this week, so make sure to tune in next week for the newest updates!

Until next time, bye for now!

The Fellas