Hello again future curators!
This time we'll be dividing our update into two sections: art and everything else.
On the art side, I finished the initial polish pass on the entire map that I talked about last time, complete with working mirrors! I fleshed out decorations in houses and businesses, added lights indoors and outdoors, added wiggle to wiggle bushes, and redesigned the player house map so that people know exactly where they can decorate since it was a bit unclear before. There are lots of other little random things, but that's the gist. It feels good to finally see some polish bring the game to life.
I am now working on inventory icons. I am getting dangerously close to being able to just make hairstyles, clothes, and furniture.
Now a word from the guy working on everything else.
Howdy. On my side, I've been working on getting most of the final UI pieces into the game to tie all the backend stuff together and make it actually playable. I realize the few people reading this won't really know how far we are along, but the short version of what I'm getting together is all the little pieces that make the game start-to-finish playable. In this case, it's been UI and related systems for getting plants into the Natural History wing of the museum.
Once I finished that up, it's been going through all the start-up pieces of the game from Main Menu to Playing and making sure they are in good shape. There was a lot of backend bits to tidy up, including a sad time (today) where I realized I maybe misunderstood some of Unity's uGUI concepts and have to redo a bit of UI transition work (I was disabling GameObjects instead of disabling canvases, this is very slow), but stuff is coming together. There are a lot of little tiny bits of jank that have been ironed out and it's always satisfying to see those things working smoothly and consistently.
We'll maybe be doing some actual builds for private testing pretty soon and hopefully I'll be able to move on to just outright content (story and music) creation in the not too distant future as well.