Coat of Paint

I've been doing bits and pieces for DBS over the last couple of weeks, mostly small tweaks and reworks.
(Everything I explain here is not confidential or in an uploaded build - so you can talk about it freely AND not be able to play it! Such fun.)

• The GUI/HUD system is one and the same now - as it should have been from the start - some positions got re-jigged, minigame algorithms messed with and some scripts got a fresh going-over. Some now inherit from classes!
• Tasks display a little description when you approach them, thereby explaining what they are and not being vague implications of impeded progress. One player saw you could interact with the bed (a Task to make the bed) and decided not to do that because they "[didn't] want to go back to sleep", had to get that shit out of there so now that Task is not only labelled, it's a completely different one in another room goodbye.
• There's now a tutorial system in the Main Task fights, not just the first one. If you encounter a mechanic you haven't been tutorial'd about, a popup gives you the skinny.
• They're not featured in the demo, but a bunch of new Tools are now integrated, including trading Energy for Motivation and vice-versa (not at a 1:1 equivalence, mind you) and even swapping cards with your opponent. I think I've reached the limit for them, I don't see myself adding any more - unless the soon-to-be-implemented Color system proves to need something.
• There was also an issue that kind of ruined long-running Main Task fights. Due to the mechanic of winning cards getting their values decreased, discarded cards always returned to the 'deck' with their CURRENT values, not original values. This caused the cards the combatants get dealt to decrease in value, eventually turning every single card to zeroes. It's very likely no battle would ever have run long enough see such a case, but the effects would've certainly started to show at some point. Until now!

The coding aspect of gamedev is where I feel most at home so it's where I've holed myself up, refusing to get involved with the rest of the project.
That being said, I did overhaul 98% of the graphical assets.

It's not that the tilesets I was using were bad, they just didn't feel like they had enough variety for what I think I want. Everything's a lot more colorful now, which looks more appealing to me but I'm not 100% certain it meshes with the game's tone and/or themes. I suppose I'm a bit 50/50 on whether the change was good - accepting criticism and/or completely opposing opinions.
Even if I do switch the tilesets back, I'm gonna keep using the new UI graphics. The pixel art works better than the public domain images I was using - though the Kenney resources are good and I love them. I'll probably keep using those in my back pocket project (unlikely to see the light of day for decades).

I'm not a mapper, which makes the notion of building anything beyond the demo chapter not scary, but downright unappealing. This is partially why development is taking a while, the general system of the project is basically done and I could very feasibly start putting together the rest of the locations and planning out the puzzles... but, being a programmer and not a designer (game or set), scrounging up the motivation to work on anything new is hard. It's the driving theme of the game in the first place, and I'm unfortunately at its mercy.
I'm going to be honest, it's even what's holding me back from testing it. There's a crash in the supermarket I haven't debugged because it requires actually playing through the demo to get to it and I'm a baby who's scared to play his own game. It won't beat me, though. I'll get to it, I'm just. Me. And while that's not going away any time soon, it's also not going to stand in my way forever.

I've barely kept track of all the bits and pieces I've changed/fixed/added to the game so this is not an exhaustive post, but it's evidence I'm still working on the project. I'm getting less scared about linking it to friends of mine and from what I've heard some of them have actually played it, and I'm grateful for that. There are also some followers on the GameJolt page I made for it and that's just lovely.
I'd love to update more often and have something significant to show each time, but this is all I can muster for now. Once I've pushed myself to work out the supermarket crash I'll post the next version, and barring any further issues I might have to call this 'demo' version finished. Soon there won't be anything stopping me from starting the actual game but me... who knows how fast or intermittent progress will be after that, but I'm gonna try real hard to keep it alive.

Thanks for reading, have a good day.