A blender render of an extra dark shadow styled character. I was scheming on making little animated shorts and found this style compelling, though a little finicky to work with.

Its been a long week and I hope you are doing well.

This is a WIP dialogue system concept of which testers have semi-joked about it being 'talking but with turn based combat'.

Its fairly basic. You go through a chain of dialogue but you can have an ally NPC give you insight on anything said, which might provide more context, catch someone in a lie, etc. Of course, your allies may also be biased so its something to weigh.

So far the only major layout changes (so far) are moving the NPC 'checks' to be their own pop-up box rather than in the middle of the dialogue chain, and I'm not too pleased with the 'hostility' bar setup next to the NPC name.

... I'm also regretting having to not only write out the dialogue, but NPC's potential insight on a lot of dialogue lines. I will learn nothing from this.

Have you ever found yourself deciding against a game you would otherwise check out because of what game engine it uses?

I think body language would probably help sell the expression a bit.
Some of these probably need a do-over but I'm not a great drawer so it is what it is for now.

This is 75% for vibes, its not fully functional and I got to add more information bits.

Also I forgot how finicky Unreal's 3D widgets are.

This is the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/652770/Zofia/

Some other fun stats:

• The demo had 27,719 downloads (Almost all from Steam with 45 of those being from itch.io)
• ~334 players (demo and game owners combined) played splitscreen at least once
• ~12% of players beat the game
• ~70% of players quit playing when they encounter the first town
• As of today, the game has had ~2 million impressions and ~800k page visits
• I showed the game at three local expos (which made no noticeable impact on wishlists/sales/views)

I've been told the early access release was 'the release' and going to 1.0 was essentially a minor update, though my stats have reflected a little differently. Zofia went into early access almost entirely unnoticed and it wasn't until 1.0 that it got some attention, and more or less bursts here and there since then.

All in all I ran into pretty much every pitfall you could along the way, so I didn't walk away learning what the "correct" answers are, mostly just things to avoid doing - Which was unfortunately a lot.

That's it, thanks for reading.

For those that do creative projects, how do you get past choice paralysis? If you're a writer and have 5 book ideas you feel are pretty good, how do you choose the best one to move forward with?

What did they do?

Also Kenneth Mayfield as a guest

I was recently discussing Farcry 2 with some friends and how cool the fire spread system was - And how it essentially was never used again after that title.

Is there a cool feature or mechanic you've seen in a game and hope to see more of?