Lot to report this time! Here's a video showing it off! (Bear in mind there's still a lot of placeholder visuals in this, the audio is nowhere near final, and all of the dialogue and story is especially subject to change.) (I'm also just now realizing there's a typo in Kitt's dialogue it should say "passed out" not just "passed" lol)

There's a lot new here! Here's a quick summary.

• Our main cast now have full sprite sheets! Mostly just walk animations right now but I'll be adding extra sprites as the need arises.
• Enviornment art has also gotten off the ground! Here's what I said about it when I showed this stuff off initially on Discord:
  I love mixed media and using photographs and video footage in stuff like games and animation. When I was considering what I wanted this game to look like, I kind of considered a million different ideas but I knew I didn't want it to just be a normal tile-based rpg. Since the setting being the real world Midwest is really important, I was thinking about if I could make all of the overworld made up of real photographs of the actual locations I was trying to capture the vibe of. This would also solve the problem of "I'm not an artist" in a way that's also just an interesting stylistic choice.
• More interactivity in dialogue, including an improved prompt selection menu that can handle more than two options and a full keyboard for typing in your name and other stuff.
• Saving and loading the game! You don't get too good of a look at it here, but stuff like the player's name and pronouns are able to be saved.
• A lot of small stuff behind the scenes to make further development faster and easier. The only one of these that's going to be player-facing is the ability to skip through dialogue with the Back button.
• Oh yeah, and this whole opening cutscene! I wanted to start working on things that could actually build towards getting a "vertical slice" of close to finished gameplay done.

My next step is probably going to be programming in a combat tutorial and creating some more of the initial areas. I'm also going to start programming in some more card effects most likely, ideally up to 30 total cards which is the minimum you need for a deck in the game. Outside of the game files I've also been doing a lot of thinking and writing about the game's plot, areas, and general progression, especially in a thematic context in terms of characters' arcs and stuff.

That's all for this dev log! Until next time, you can always check back every Friday for a new Doodle.