Overview
This month will be one of those months where not much is happening in the foreground but significant progress has been made in the background.
I bit the bullet and finally have a dialogue and story planned out for the first few in game days of The Perfect Bowl. Its only something temporary just to give future investors and collaborators an idea of the story and full game loop. This took about half a month.
The remaining half a month I was able to add in some world building elements for better immersion and minor polishing.
Unfortunately no bug busting this time.
Features
New Location Sequence
Welcome to Calor. A country found on the Antarctic planet of Xibalba. What better place to serve a nice warm bowl of Ramen eh?
To help with immersion and storytelling, I have added in some animated sequences to show when the main character has travelled to a new location in Calor. Each location will have its own set characters to meet and local ingredients from which the main character can create special toppings.
New Day Sequence
Games in this genre has a low cost/high effectiveness staple in adding to the world building and that would be the Daily News section. Its an easy way to give players non-essential context but provides an effective illusion that there is a world out there that is very much alive.
I decided to approach this as if the main character was drinking his hot drink and reading the daily on goings both in the country and locally just before he starts his day. Again not essential to the gameplay but helps with the immersion. Plus it provides the player some nice context as to where they are working for the day.
Daily Sepcials
The Daily Specials feature will probably be reworked some time in the future but the general idea is to give the players a variety of ingredients in each location to keep things relatively fresh and something to look forward to.
Improvements
Icons
The buttons are finally no longer just arbitrary colored boxes that don't mean anything to anybody except me.