Good morning, afternoon, evening and night to all of you!

Today is the first of June and that means, it’s time for another post about how little progress I’ve done in the last few weeks.

Gallery Again, most work went into making the gallery work with the new Composite Event System.

The Composite Events already works and now I finally got the gallery working. The data gets saved correctly and now it also gets displayed in the journal.

Here you see my elegant test event I used to test the journal with the new system.

The first image shows the gallery almost the same as you peeps know and love. Now it has the “Fragments” tab. You click on it you get to the overview of the different parts the event is composed of. 3 parts in this case. When selecting one part you get a selection of different event fragments you already unlocked where you again can select different variants, just like the normal events.

Now all this has cost me a lot of sanity as I put the Ren’py Engine to its limits. So I had to tackle some really odd and inconsistent behaviour. But now I hope I got the culprit and and every works as far as I can see.

The gallery only need one thing until it’s finished. It now only needs to transfer its data to the event it wants to replay. That one needs a bit of trickery as it now transfers data for multiple events at once but that is an easy problem to solve.

Other Plans After the gallery I have 3 other things I want to finish before I go over to the event making phase of my development cycle.

For one I want to change the journal layout a little bit. Make it more streamlined. Change it so the bookmarks don’t switch sides. I put that in to create some kind of immersion of a book, but that seemed to confuse a lot of people, so that’s gotta go. Also I plan on adding some kind of icon or marking to make the bookmarks identifiable even without hovering over them.

The other thing I want to do is to add a new page to the journal that shows current goals and tasks. A lot of feedback I got from people is that they don’t know what to do. Now here is the problem I have with that. The game was never supposed to have a clear path or have clear tasks. For those of you that played Ashford Academy Redux, I hope you get what I mean, as I based the mechanic off of that game. The aim for this game was to just play. Just play and with time more things come up, events accumulate, small event chains pop up, new stuff to unlock gets discovered. That’s what I want for this game. No goal (except for the end goal, but you’ll get there anyway), just playing. Just do stuff, walk the premises, enjoy the different events and I want to keep it that way. I know all that doesn’t work very good when there just aren’t enough events, like it is now, but the game is still being developed and will only get more events with time. So to come back to the point I wanted to make: The Task Page. Because of the nature of this game, there are no real goals. There are milestones to reach to elevate the school to the next level but by revealing the chain of tasks that have to be done to get there would greatly impact the feeling of the game. There would always be stuff missed when only working towards the goal and the sensation of discovering stuff would be lost, so I’m a bit lost here on what to do.

So I would really appreciate you feedback and give me ideas on giving the peeps some kind of guidance while still keeping the premise of the game alive. Feel free to talk to me on Discord about that. I read all messages and try to answer all of them.

Now the third addition I want to make in this update is an overhaul of the school map. I talked about it in the previous Private News. You can read about it here if you’ve missed it.

Now I put four maps I generated with AI for vote:

Now here is the result:

As you can see, Image 1 won with quite the lead.

A bit surprised at Image 2 not getting a single vote though.

As Image 1 won (which was also my favorite :D), I worked on getting the image ready to be used in the game. First I had to extend the image to get it in a 16:9-Format. I could have cropped it, but the I would’ve either lost the baths at the top or the the beach at the bottom, and I didn’t want that, so I pulled out Stable Diffusion, linked it with openOutpaint and started extending the image. Now one problem I had, was the four original images have been generated with Midjourney as it just is one of the most powerful models currently but it is a bit limited in it’s usage so I went with Stable Diffusion for adding bits to the sides. But as those are different models and the image is quite complicated, it’s really difficult to tell the ai what you want to have there. So you can see the seam where both models meet quite clearly but I think it is good enough :D

I think I can just say, it is made like that so the main focus wanders more to the center of the image. Well I might say that. You know? I do say it!

Now that is the image I want to go with. I plan to have the baths at the pool where the small pools are, the office building will be the smaller building to the right of the pools. The long building below it will be the school building and the long one to the left will house the labs and other subject-specific rooms. The small complex below it will be the gym. The blue area will be the swimming pool and the sports field next to that will be the sports field (Duh!). The small building to the left of the poll with the red roof will house the kiosk. Now the large green area in the lower half of the image will be the courtyard. The building on it with the red roof will be the cafeteria and one of the others will be the dormitory. No idea what to do with the other buildings though. The small houses you see at the left of the image will be the housings for the teachers. And the at the bottom right we have the beach.

Well I could’ve put all that just in the image with circles and arrows, but yeah no.

If you’ve got feedback for that or ideas, just tell me on Discord.

Now that is all for today. I hope you have a lovely time and enjoy the summer.

I will as far as the weather here in germany allows it. In summer we live in a constant cycle of scorching heat (thanks to global warming. It wasn’t that bad a decade ago…) then crazy thunderstorm, then scorching heat. Thunderstorms. You get the idea.

Alright! Bye!