24-12-2024 - I lived bitch. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Merry Christmas! At long last, I come with a present!

Features

• Two new areas with shops:
  • The Maison Mocha, a coffee shop held by the local mommy barrista Mirabel.
    
  • The Night in the Afternoon, a danceclub held by the local airhead Lorraine.
• New placeholder NPCs: Fillia, Christine and Isabelle. There's not much to them right now, but they exist. Fillia will only show up when a shop owner is unavailable, and her only role is to fill-in for them. The other two will eventually have their own interactions and events.
• NPCs now have proper schedules, and will sometimes come and go to certain places throughout the day.
• Thanks to the help of Fatahlia, Noskin and Nobody, Jenny now has her own dialogue tree! Well, kind of. It could use a bit more polish, but for now honestly it's gonna do.
• First version of the new Customization Tools.
  • This version lets you edit personalities and dialogues. It's still a WIP so expect a lot of scuff, but it's functional enough for me to have made Jenny's entire dialogue tree with it and I'll keep improving on it to add more functionalities and improve the presentation.
  • It's windows only for now, one of the libs I'm using doesn't seem to work super well with Linux... But it works like a charm if you launch the windows version through Proton, so there's a workaround until I fix it.
  • It should support the same alphabets as Debucon.

Graphics/UI

• The Park and Omnimarket have been reworked a bit, art by Ley.
• New debug menu, now a bit more clean.
• Some prep work for the outfits update:
  • Reworked the outfits menu with the help of CB420, should be a bit easier to navigate.
  • The small characters aren't constantly butt-naked anymore.
• New logo, by LuckyHayy!
  • New version of the itch page is coming too. I have it mostly figured out, I just want the game to be a bit more complete before I commit to it so I have more stuff to show off on the front page. But I didn't want to wait for the logo (I've been waiting like a year already god damnit).

Misc

• New pathfinding and collision system, it's still very basic but it should be a bit less wonky now. And much easier to work with on my side.
• Changed the way sound effects are handled to allow modding. In due time I'll let you import your own files through the customization tools, but for now you should already be able to manually put your sound files in the \gamedata\Sounds folder. Only burps and stomach noises are supported right now!
• Reworked the dialogue engine a good bit. Less redundancy, less scuff, less spaghetti code and more functionalities to go with the Customization Tools.
• Probably more, it's been so long I honestly don't remember what I did since the last version.

So here it is. Now that I look at this changelog, it looks like a pretty sizeable update. But it isn't 18 months worth of content, not at all. I sincerely apologize for the time it took me to release this build. A lot of stuff happened, and I had to priorize other stuff over Debucon.

The next update will be focused on character customization! The biggest feature will be the first few outfits. It'll take a bit of time because that's going to be a lot of sprites to make, so don't expect a lot of variety for now. I'll probably also save outfits sizes for a later update, I haven't completely figured out how that would work, so clothes will certainly be one-size-fits-all for a little while. I'll also try to work on other features such as multicolored hairstyles, fatter faces, and maybe start working on extra arm/hand positions. And a new minigame!

Another thing I'd like to do is migrate to a newer version of GMS. Currently, I'm using Game Maker Studio 2.3, which was released waaaay back in 2020. Working on an old version of GMS isn't really an issue in itself ; aside from missing features (sometimes basic ones too - frowning at you, string_split and array_contains), the environment is stable and my work isn't at risk of being broken by a quirky software update. However, there are some new features I'm very interested in, especially the dynamic texture pages. In GMS 2.3, importing external sprites (after the game has been built) is very, very finnicky and can obliterate the performances because of how external sprites are handled. For most projects this isn't a massive issue, most of the time you'll just import your sprites in the IDE as you work on your game. But if you want to give modding options to your users... That's another story, you need to be able to handle adding new sprites at runtime. And apparently, the LTS version (released in September 2022) has this dynamic texture pages feature that makes modding in custom sprites a lot easier, and I want to try this out. I would also like to use a better color swapping solution than the one I've put together with spit and duct tape, and the solution I've been eyeing for a few months now requires some features from a newer GMS version.

Upgrading my GMS version may or may not go well. Some things may break, and I may need to fix some stuff... Or everything may go smoothly. I don't know. But I think it will be worth the extra work, if any, so that's the first thing I'm going to attempt.

And of course, I'll keep working on the customization tools. It's obviously not finished, and there's plenty of stuff I plan to add: a theater mode for easy dialogue debugging, a merging tool to make sharing custom stuff and mods easily, as well as tools to mod and customize a variety of other things like sound effects, NPCs, sprites... And I also need to write some documentation, at least a user guide. From a user perspective, I know some of the options are a bit confusing and could really need some explanation.

So that's the plan. As always make sure to let me know if you run into any bug, I have did spend the last couple days testing this build but I haven't tested it very thoroughly so there's bound to be a few hiccups here and there. And renewed apologies for the 1.5 years delay on this update. A lot has happened, but at last it's here. If you're still planning on giving it a try, thank you for sticking around!