Posted September 17, 2023 by sitara
GitHub: https://github.com/nebulousmango/When-Yema-Unspooled
Document references:
Yema's narrative structure remains the same. I made some minor corrections in the text here and there.
Art
I redid the backgrounds on all the scenes, and revised the look of the buttons. And switched up the typefaces.
Audio
I made a couple of changes to the audio playing in the title, controls and credits scenes. They were previously set to a recording of dinner table noises. I changed it to recordings of birdsong and the outdoors. And I changed the recording for the page flip (that all the buttons use) because the old one sounded too harsh for something that you hear ever so frequently.
Navigation
I added back and home buttons. The home button was previously a different artefact in each scene, and didn't make a lot of scene (and if you clicked it by accident, it would take you to the title scene and you'd lose your place in the story). I added a back button that takes you to the previous scene (which effectively lets you backtrack throughout Yema's story and see her branching paths without having to start over). The new buttons are more visually explicit about what they're for.
The flowchart I made for this page proved so, so useful to setting up this backtracking system. There are a couple of places where two scenes lead to the same one, and because of issues with my scene system I can't have the player backtrack to the one they actually came from. Fields.2a, Fields.3, Plains.2a, Ruins.2a, Ruins.4 and Docks.1 all have multiple options for the preceding scene (Ruins.4 has three potential scenes that could lead into it!). Rather than make a cello taped system like mine even more complicated, for simplicity's sake these scenes will lead to the one before the scene right before.
Builds
I fixed the game up for a Windows and Android build, and a WebGL build to play on browsers (it had initially been built only for WebGL). The WebGL build uses Sean's Better Minimal WebGL template.