June Update 1

Hi! It's June, and time for another update. The last two weeks I've been focused on expanding the maps for the new gossip scenario, and a bunch of eventing. Hopefully the environments look a little less drab than they did in the last video!

This was actually a bit of a rocky sprint for development, and I wound up missing a couple of days. Normally I work for half an hour each day but I had to take a couple of mental health days. On top of that, I realised there was a little more work than I'd first anticipated - I needed an additional Gossip characters and all of her Questions - on top of the work I'd originally planned. In the end, I didn't manage to complete a load of stuff I meant to complete this time. It's very frustrating, because I already feel like the pace of development is too slow. But I suppose, I have my limits.

On the bright side, I worked on a couple of cutscenes and realised that I've come a long way since I started. If you're using RMMV, these might be some helpful tips for making and testing cutscenes:

• If events are going to move in a cut scene, and then remain on the map afterwards (e.g a character moving from one side of the room to another), it's best to place the events in their final position, rather than their starting position, and move them at the start of the scene. Otherwise, you have to move them every time the player re-enters the map.
• Use event movement in cutscenes sparingly; it's time consuming, easy to mess up, and fiddly to skip. Consider carefully whether it adds to the scene before employing it
• Break up cutscenes into chunks using Pages or Yanfly's excellent Call Event Script. For instance, a chunk of dialogue, followed by event movement, followed by further dialogue. Test each chunk individually to save on time.
• It's almost always worthwhile building in ways to skip cutscenes for testing (e.g. by switch)

It's not much, but these helped me save a lot of time, compared to some cutscenes in a scrapped demo that took absolutely ages to implement.

This Gossip scenario is going to culminate in some dramatic scenes! It's taken a lot of time and effort to write and re-write this scenario, and there's a fair bit left to do still, but I do like the way it's shaping up. I hope you're looking forward to it if you're reading this!

The focus for the next time will be finishing the remaining scenes and dialogue. I was hoping to complete a demo for the next update but that's looking pretty unlikely now, but it's looking good for July.