After getting the Steam page out, I knew it was time to go back into actually making the game.

Since I now have the new character portraits, the next thing on my list was to get the dialogue boxes running again with the new art.

I put some more time into making sure it looks a bit more intentional than the old design, and added more animation to when the dialogue box appears, using the new colors.

Old:

New:

I also extracted all portraits variants (there are six different ones for each character with slight variations), and applied them to the existing moods from Catty & Batty.

For my next trick, I added some red circles into the maw of the creator, right before it spawns a projectile. You can see it in action in this gif:

I still want to try and get some bloom going there, but not sure if it's a good idea. It would require lights and things like that get taxing quickly.

Next, I implemented the "seeker's eye", an idea I've had for a while now. Basically, it's a little light that follows the cursor, or looks towards the target direction that it's going.

This uses the same code from Catty & Batty's eye pupils, but there's another Vector3.Lerp() between the current and target position of the eye, so it moves a bit slower.

Afterwards, I read through the whole dialogue, approximately 600 lines. I changed a few things here and there, but I want to improve it even further later on. Overall, I think it holds up well, even after writing Walter's Deal. The dialogue feels alive and you feel like you need to keep reading. (Of course, that's subjective. :D) There are some sentences that feel like an injected tutorial (because that's what it was) and not something Neek would say, but I have some ideas to improve that.

Next, I decided to import the dialogue of the first cutscene. This time, I used the Google Drive implementation of the I2Localization plugin. It automatically syncs the data to a Google Sheet, in both directions, which saves me a lot of time. For Catty & Batty I didn't do this, but over time I realized it would've been better. After importing the first 13 sentences, I applied them to the new character images, and I was happy to realize it works really well!

I also wanted to quickly mention the work I did on the border (which you can see at the top). I added one for the Steam screenshots, and I used a photo from unsplash as a texture. I quite enjoy using some of these photos as an additional layer, makes things feel a bit better. Here's the photo I used:

Anyway! As you might know, Turnament has a new website now: https://turnament.muddasheep.com

As a patron, you don't really have to sign up for the free demo, since you'll always be the first to know whenever I release new projects or information. But just so you know, with this I'm starting a mailing list called Muddasheep Mastermind. This will be the list that will survive everything, Twitter, Discord, Patreon, and heck, maybe even Steam. 😂 And I'm excited about it!

What's next?

• Keep making cutscenes and levels, one after another.
• Add some indicator for targetting when sending a seeker around
• For "broken" seekers, I want to add a bit of delay between moving, so they are easier to catch.
• Start thinking about the new menus and maybe make a quick draft in Affinity Photo

To be continued...

P.S.: In case you've seen my recent twitter thread, i'm feeling better, i've taken a bit of a break, and as you can see, i'm already back at it (because i just gotta move forward anyway). I will write a longer private status update for you soon.