Update #12 - Testing, and a song

I've gotten some feedback on what I've done so far, which I can use to prioritize my work going forward.

Luckily, it seems the script is in a pretty good state, what's working doesn't have many bugs, and the game thus far has not demonstrated many big problems running on different types of computers. (Except that the default window size is bigger than a fair amount of people's monitors. I went through some effort to make sure it's easy to resize the window, so it's pretty easy to work around, but I need to fix that.) Those were the things I was most worried about.

Most of the problems are in things I've not implemented yet.

For one, as I suspected, the game's current lack of GUI and text log is a bit annoying, so I need to get on that.

For two, the point-and-click parts have some annoying but not deal breaking usability problems, and there are some things I can implement to mitigate that.

Basically, if any of you have played Myst, you can probably imagine the type of problem I'm talking about—clicking on objects to interact with them makes sense, but clickable areas for more abstract things, such as talking to people, making choices, and moving around can be a little counterintuitive.

For moving around, I may add arrows indicating where you can click to change locations. This may be a little blatant, but since moving to different locations is usually how you move the plot forward, that could reduce the frustration factor of the game a lot.

For abstract choices, like whether to lie to Jean or not in the beginning, I've currently assigned each option to a different part of the picture. Like, to tell the truth to her, you click on her head, to lie, you click on her body. I think this is kind of cool, but the testers haven't, so I may experiment with going back to textual menus just for those parts.

After mitigating those problems, the remaining problems with clickable areas will largely affect optional background objects, which is less of a big deal.

So, through this week, I'll be working on those things.

In terms of actual progress this week, I've tried redoing the beach song, which has become quite grating to me through development. That's what the attached video is. I think I could use the new one somewhere else in the game, but I'm not sure it fits the mood where the old song is used.

Hopefully I don't make the music any worse than it is. Music isn't exactly my forte. I often have to make a song and figure out how to use it later—it's rare that I can actually make music that's good for what I want it to be good for :p