What even is going on anymore. I am going insane. I wish I was as unbothered as Dulce.

Tested Second Build

The guys that tried the first build tried it again, and they said it felt a lot more comfortable. That's good!

I got another friend to try it out and they added their vtuber overlay just for the funsies. Now it looks like some twitch streamer was playing the game and I think that's neat.

There weren't too many complains this time, and my way to guide the player worked. As they light up some interactable objects in the environment, they can know whether or not they have explored that part of the level yet. The only problem is that they still got confused and when they were back in the beginning they started going the wrong way. I should probably add a sign that says THIS IS THE BEGINNING PLEASE! DON'T! GO! THIS! WAY!

Interact With The Environment

This part is fun! I already had my base blueprint for the interactable objects, but now they can display some text (and/or images... hehe). I started sprinkling some lore for my beta testers and they were INTRIGUED.

Prettier Environments

I have also been working on the rest of the environment models. I'm so happy to be back in Maya and Substance Painter. It feels so refreshing after spending soooo much time in Unreal. I hate Unreal.

This is the only screenshot I have but trust me that the world looks cool...

I also tried to make my own water material but since I have a tendency of breaking Unreal something something happened and it was Not being water. So I just used the default water material, because I was not about to spend a whole day working on water that just appears in one level.

VFX

The effects are still a work in progress, but I've improved them! The picking up light one looks so much nicer now, and I started working on the attack effects.

There may be a better way to implement them, but right now I add the particle system into the attack montage. It works sometimes, other times it doesn't? I'll find a better way to make it work, or so I hope.

Saving... Again...

Every time I have issues it is with the save/load system. This time I'm trying to make sure the collectibles don't respawn once you have already got them.

Each of them has a unique ID, and when you pick them up you store them in an array of strings that is part of the saveable data. When you save and load, it's supposed to check whether or not every ID is in the array, and if it's there it should destroy itself. But it doesn't happen. It stores the IDs but for whatever reason it says fuck you and they still spawn. I'm not sure why some data is getting all funky.

Overall, things are surely going! Besides the saving, I don't have a lot more to do programming-wise, so I can now make everything look pretty and hopefully that'll distract everyone from my sucky saving system. Also, I have my Dulce stickers and I 3D printed smaller Dulces :)