What Happened (Prior to TGS)

Not Directly Game Related

• Found a composer to collaborate with! (@silentswimmer)
• Printed Elfie things other than flyers or post card:
  • Table cloth
  • Playmat / Mouse Pad
• Also printed more flyers
• Applied to Day of the dev
• Applied to another game festival but for Elephant Grass

There are lot of things I could say in addition to the list above. However, despite how important some are, I'll keep them private for now. Nothing bad per say, but they've kept me busy in addition to my progress on Elfie and the preparation for Tokyo Game Show.

In any case, the most important point for me is the first point. Being able to collaborate with a composer relieved a lot of stress I had in regards to the game's music. I'm not composer. I did try to see what I could do at first a few months back but there's no way I could have gotten as close to what silentswimmer has made so far for Elfie. I look forward to being able to share some of it in some way outside of the demo I show at places like TGS. (Through a publicly accessible demo or uploaded to Youtube for example.) 

Game Related

• Sheep Minigame Base Implementation Completed
• Further developed dialogues:
  • A lot more dialogue present in the show demo
  • Having sprites in front of the dialogue if needed like in Space Peanuts
  • Alternate speech bubbles depending on the scene
  • Major bugs found and fixed
• Current minigame polished and some bugs were fixed.
• Current minigame all have their own title screens and pause menu
• New songs from @silentswimmer for different parts of the game
• Alternate gameplay mode for Bubble Bliss (Very good timing because the microphone option would not have world in a venue as loud as TGS)
• More dialogue means more events, so those were integrated too.
• More sprite animations.

I feel like I'm skipping over some things, but it's probably the general improvements that have stacked up onto each other making the list smaller than it actually was. It's not like I list out all the asset creation that went into this version. The best way to describe the progress is that my friends helping booth did say that it did in fact change a lot from the previous demo I had previously shown off.

Tokyo Game Show

Ah yes, the main reason I'm writing this. Tokyo Game Show was quite the experience, and a very positive one at that!

So let's start with what I would do differently next time:

• Test your build on the device you plan to use
  • This feels like an obvious point. But it did happen to me. My old laptop which I had planned to use did not support some of the rendering done by Godot for Elfie. I have no idea if the issues is fixable but obviously at the moment I didn't have time to fix
• Come in on just one day of the move-in/preparation 
  • I feel like I wasted time coming in on Tuesday. Honestly, I would even consider showing up only on the first business day. If all my stuff is there, by the time it opens I have 2 hours of to prepare my booth. Which is totally enough for a single small indie booth.
• Take the train at Shin-Kiba
  • This didn't apply to me but rather my friends. They we're staying at Nishi-Funabashi had more trouble getting on the train early because of how crowded it was during the weekend. Probably not as much of a problem if you come in earlier or later than the expected opening time.
• Wall banner
  • I know they cost a lot, but I was envious of the tarp wall banners some booths had. I know they are durable and easy to transport.
• Trailer/gameplay running on the monitor when no one is playing
  • Having something too static doesn't help when the main thing your trying to do is get people's attention. I could also just cycle through the minigame title screens, it doesn't need to be a video.

What went well:

• Elfie's little picnic
  • I actually decided last minute to set something like that up. My booth 1000% needs to have such a setup each time.
• Flyers work well... to get people to try out your demo!
  • I can't calculate how many people will go see Elfie's Steam page but I can say that giving a flyer to someone at the very least draws their attention to your booth.
• The demo!!
  • This is a big one. It's the biggest demo I've shown yet. It was even, according to my friends, probably a bit too long. (So expect the potential first public demo to be shorter if you've played the TGS one!) But essentially, the demo was very well received. It got a lot of praise and nostalgic comparisons that are much intended (GBA or DS look and feel for example). It happened multiple time during the weekend that someone would just pull out their phone and wish list it in front of me. However, it made me realize that perhaps my Steam graphics / trailer / page / etc. isn't conveying what the demo conveys sufficiently. More on this later.
• Networking!
  • I was told that it would be a good opportunity to network! And it was! Part of me wish I had done even more networking. But the introverted side of me (most of me that is) was satisfied with who I got to meet and interact with. Thank you to my friends again for facilitating some of those interactions.
• Big Show Experience
  • I've done the smaller game festivals before. This was definitely another beast. On the indie side of things, there's isn't as a big of a difference. But I did get to see the bigger booths setup. What happens on the days before it opens. Got to experience going around with my exhibitor badge like a VIP. It was a great experience, and I look forward to doing it again! Other devs already asked me if they'll be seeing me at Gamescom. It's tempting.

So, not to toot my own trunk, but things went so well that one of the big things I will be briefly touching upon in the next section is that  going full time is likely higher on my list of "what do I do next" than before. Before Tokyo Game Show, I had the intention of continuing working on it part time, or something along those lines. Now that's not the case anymore. So...

What Happens Next? (Now)

(For myself, these are in order of priority-ish.)

• New Trailer + Slight Steam page revamp
  
  • As I mentioned earlier, I think I need a better trailer and possibly change some of the assets that I'm using on Steam. Maybe even that small blurb about the game could be made shorter. I find it to be a priority because that first trailer is a bit old now. But also because I'm sure I could find a way to make a trailer that appeals to people in a similar way that playing the demo did.
• Grant application
  • I would procrastinate this one more if it wasn't for the fact that some of them have deadlines this month.
• Soft-launched a demo on Itch
  • I don't want to release the same demo that I had at TGS since it is a bit long. I just want to be able to pique people's interest without showing off too much. I feel like it's okay at shows, it kind of makes it a bit more exclusive too haha. 
  • The soft-launch will likely include the current version of Space Peanuts and Bubble Bliss + Some custom Demo dialogue to make things a bit different from the final thing.
• Visual representation of my dialogue event system
  
  • This is tools programming if I've ever seen it. It's going to take a bit of time since I'm not as familiar with implementing UI or node stuff in Godot. But it's important. The event system works well, but as the amount of events and parameters grow, so will the difficulty of keeping track of them and maintaining them. So I want to have a tool that let's me to that and also modify them if needed through it. Might involve some diagrams making before I get started.
  • Also sadly not really something I can screenshot as easily as other things to share to show my progress.
• Prototyping more minigames
  
  • 1 similar to the One, Two, Three, Shleepy
  • 1 similar to Space Peanuts
  • 2 similar to Bubble Bliss
  • There is a reason for this distinction but I won't say what~
• Reworking older code
  • Not super high on my priority of things to do. But the main culprits that I would target are:
    • The apartment hub : There are meant to be more parts of the apartment and they should all function like a room of the apartment. Right now they're mostly independent scripts that do the same thing... I could have planned that better.
      
    • Pachy Peanuts: It's the first game I was working on while still getting use to Godot. I've already made some pretty drastic changes to TGS, but there could be more. And since I plan to tweak the difficulties at some point, it would be helpful to make those changes.
• Controller implementation
  • I wish I didn't have this at low priority. I likely won't get around to it anytime soon. However, I do want it here to remind myself to code the prototypes of the new minigames in a way that allows to switch to the controller scheme easily.
  • I did try to implement it for TGS. But I concluded, after making it functional for some games, that just having it functional wouldn't be enough. The controller implementation requires more significant tweaks to be on par with the usability of the touchscreen or mouse controls. I can at the very least prepare for it better with the new minigames.

My next devlog won't be for a while judging by the fact that I only release these after game shows/festivals. If you've read all that, thank you! Now time to work a bit on Elephant Grass for reasons I can't disclose hehehehehe.

If Moo Deng so popular, why not Elfie? Really makes you trunk.