Hey there, Game Directors! We’ve been hard at work on the full game, but we wanted to get one last demo update before we say goodbye to 2021.
Preview Character Impact:
Previously, when the player made a choice in conversation, there was no option to tell whether this would impact a character negatively or positively. In this update we’ve added this as an option for players who want to see how a character will react before making a choice.
Added ability to preview which characters will be impacted by a choice (based on the difficulty setting in Options)
Minor UI adjustments for all aspect ratios
Preview and Impact (after a decision) values were updated to use the same system
Bug Fixes & other improvements:
Adjusted a Tala conversation impact and character emote to better reflect the intent
Fixed some of the ‘game fail’ ending screens
Some minor text updates & typos
Thanks again for playing our demo. Send us your feedback via the survey, or reach out to us on Twitter or the forums here on Steam. We’d love to hear from you!
We wish you all a fantastic holiday season!
- The GDS team
GDS - Aug Patch Notes & Dev Update
Hey there, Game Directors! We’ve made some big changes to the demo since our last update, and are excited for you to try them out.
You’ll now notice a functional options screen with difficulty settings, and a new tooltip system to provide a greater depth of information on status bars and icons. We’ve also introduced Victor, an entirely new character and another face of the publisher that was concepted live during our LudoNarraCon stream. We hope you enjoy the new changes, and as always, let us know what you think!
Onward with the details of this update:
Options screen:
Functional options screen allowing you to change video, audio and game difficulty settings
Game difficulty settings includes 3 difficulty presets (Easy, Default, Hard)
Game difficulty settings allows for customizing individual elements in presets - including whether to show (or hide) stakeholder preview & impact, character impact, and conversation patience
Show/Hide difficulty settings includes whether this is reflected in the animation (such as stakeholder icon animation showing if the choice will impact this stakeholder positively or negatively), as well as the tooltip data (where relevant, such as showing or hiding the numerical impact to a stakeholder)
Tooltips:
Most game icons and Options screen difficulty settings now have tooltips providing more information on what they do
Where relevant, game icons also include numerical values (such as the value of a stakeholder bar, or the impact a conversation choice will have), unless this was turned off in the Options settings
New character art:
Victor, the character concepted on a live stream has been added to the game, including his emotes. Thanks to everyone that participated in that stream & created this character. If you'd like to see more events like that let us know.
Bug Fixes & other improvements:
Victor's conversation has been updated to suit his personality better & take advantage of his emotes
Fixed an issue where a conversation with Phil could sneak into day 15 and not end up selectable
Fixed an issue where hitting game over as the day was ending would only trigger the game over at start of new day, after the checkpoint save, which meant players could not continue from the start of the day as usual (they'd hit the game over at start of day), and needed to restart completely
With tooltips being a thing, we've removed the stakeholder icon titles text from the UI
Clock advancing rapidly (such as when passing time) now has a subtle clock tick sound to draw attention to it
Fixed a few issues that crept up as part of adding Options/Tooltips, but were promptly squashed
Survey:
The survey link has been updated, allowing players that previously sent feedback to send more feedback again.
Thanks again for playing our demo. Send us your feedback via the survey, or reach out to us on Twitter or the Forums here on Steam. We’d love to hear from you!
- The GDS team
GDS - June Patch Notes & Dev Update
Happy pride month everyone!
As the team continues working on the full game, it's time to bring some of those improvements & bug fixes over to the demo. We were hoping to have this update out earlier this month, but have been wrestling with a few tricky bugs.
In our last update we talked about moving from a static sequence of conversations to our new Systemic Story System. This system is intended to introduce more variability in the types of conversations that the player encounters in each playthrough. It has been huge for us in terms of unlocking narrative flexibility for the full game.
In addition, GDS was part of Wholesome Games Direct this month, as well as in the Wholesome section of the Guerrilla Collective event here on Steam! We hope you had a chance to check out some of the other amazing games. As a reminder, be sure to give them all a Follow & Wishlist - it's a huge help for upcoming games, and a great way to support those devs.
Onward with the changes in this update:
Updates to chat:
Characters now include their pronouns
Fixed an elusive bug with the player choice buttons (see bug fixes below for more info)
Updates to intro/tutorial:
More recent images
Reflects the character impact change from previous update
Based on feedback, removes the fake vertical scrollbar that was confusing some players
Bug Fixes:
Fixed some issues related to the system story system
Fixed a bug where quickly clicking on a choice would make that button not show text on subsequent choices
Fixed a logic issue on Tala's conversation on day 14, where some choices would repeat
Fixed a few typos and minor text tweaks
Thanks again for playing our demo. Please send us your feedback, either through the survey link you can find in the game menus, or reach out to us on Twitter or the Forums here on Steam.
