Lots of progress these past month and I'm starting to work on actually promoting the game. As part of that Hearth & Holmes is going to be a part of Telltale’s “Choices Matter Festival” on Steam.
Telltale has a great legacy of making and featuring wonderful, story-driven games and I'm delighted to be a part of it. They'll be posting updates about the festival on their Instagram & TikTok. It starts August 10th.
I'm going to drop a new trailer with more material from the game and very fun voice acting when the festival starts.
In the meantime, here's other stuff that happened:
JUNE
Wrote and implemented 'The Cold 2'.
Fiddled a bunch with how new options are presented. It's better now.
Wrote and implemented 'The Cold 3'. This involved finding sound effects for Watson playing the violin badly.
Wrote and implemented The Cold in nighttime conversations.
Wrote and implemented 'The First Problem'.
Contracted voice actors for new trailer.
Agonized more than I needed to about voice actors for new trailer.
Planned Irene's social sequence.
Wrote Holmes & Irene duet.
Found images for Irene concert scene.
JULY
Remade the trailer. It's funny! It will be released with a festival in August.
Wrote and implemented Irene's concert mystery.
Added downtime socialize action of attending concerts.
Implemented theater shop where you can buy music.
Fixed error where making someone relationship 0 makes the game upset.
(I understand game. It is upsetting when Irene and Sherlock fight. It still needs to happen.)
The Irene social plotline is now complete!
Update end-game logic so that the title screen changes based on your ending.
Wrote and implemented the Confrontation with Moriarty. It is huge.
Adjusted learning page so that Holmes doesn't read when obsessed with hunting Moriarty.
Added difficulties: Immortal Legacy, Durable Detective, and Consulting Detective.
Fixed some issues with the Save/Load display.
I am now running through entire game to see how it hangs together, fix issues, and get sense of how to bring everything together in final case.
Adjusted pattern of when time passes so that it's a buffer between scenes with dramatic tonal differences. (Going right from PTSD nightmare to cozy downtime was weird.)
Added a books inventory you can check at any time.
Started process of upgrading to stable version of Naninovel 1.21. God preserve me.
Wow. That was a lot easier than I expected. Only one 'the game doesn't work anymore' bug that it only took a day to fix.
Moved all of Watson's nightmares to the main background area. No more compartmentalizing for the doctor.
Fixed error where displaying backgrounds sometimes flickers to other backgrounds.
Fixed reference error where executable backgrounds were red blotches.
Fixed error where title screen was loading unevenly.
Fixed error where animation was stuttering. It turned out I was reorganizing Holmes' library once every half second. I don't need to do that.
Oh wow. That made EVERYTHING better.
Hid Quickload more thoroughly.
Went through images and audio, removed everything I wasn't using, and organized and compressed things.
Fixed error where pressing enter kept triggering random buttons.
Fixed error where books weren't refreshing enough. (I overcorrected from twice every second.)
Made sure fast forward stops before we pick books.
Added a note in settings to remind you what difficulty you're in.
Updated emotion logic to make sure the cusps are consistent and adjusted it to make it favor the most recently changed stat.
WOOF. That was a lot.