This is a long dev log with not many images. Just an update to give info on what we're working on atm, so don't expect anything too exciting.

We recently opened up the Main Hall room in POPGOES Evergreen (Cam 4), removing all of the doors which has subsequently revealed some parts of the adjacent rooms. It looks REALLY cool like this - to contextualise all of these rooms as one building. Feels like a location that could really exist.

Unfortunately, through this change, we noticed something: some rooms have been modelled to be MUCH bigger than their brothers. The Party Room for example, a room that is already meant to be quite big, apparently has a MASSIVE model. When we connected it to the Main Hall, we saw that a "You must be shorter than this" sign in the Party Room, which should be the height of a toddler, was the same size as a ticket eater machine in the Arcade Room. So uh... yeah. Changes need to be made.

No one is to blame for the pizzeria's rooms being so misaligned - we never had any intention of joining the rooms together in this way, and different people work on different props with different sizes all the time. It's only now that we've realised how inconsistent things are, thanks to the ONE prop that we can use as an anchor for consistency: the black and white tiles on the floor.

So I mocked up a pixel-art floor plan of the pizzeria, with each pixel representing a tile. This means that each wall will now also be one tile thick, which is fine. I gave a rendition of this using some of the current dimensions in the pizzeria, but it turns out that in order to make things consistent with the game's minimap, we need to make the whole pizzeria bigger.

Long story short, we're currently planning on "embiggening" the entire pizzeria.

Every room will be adjusted. Most will be enlarged, but some will be shrunk. Props will stay the same size, but the walls, floors, the general area of the environments will be adjusted.

Pros and cons of this:

+ Rooms can now exist as they would in the real world. The cameras will now be seamless and fully consistent.

+ The actual map can now be EXTREMELY accurate to the minimap.

+ Bigger doorways which means more open areas, which we've found is more immersive.

+ Larger rooms means larger animatronics, more intimidating shadows and light fall-off, and just generally more realistic scenes.

+ If we ever need to get back to this location after Evergreen, whether it be for a sequel, for merchandise, or whatever, then this will help a TON.

- Shit is NOT easy to change. It'll take a while.

- It's yet another update on Game Jolt. All of the rooms will need to be re-rendered and uploaded eventually. Though I guess some people find that fun.

Operation Embiggen began less than a week ago, and so far the Art Room, Birthday Room replacement, Main Hall and Party Room have been adjusted with no problems.

The first two were minor changes which required almost no extra work. The Main Hall was already very WIP anyway so we'll get back to that later. The Party Room was shrunk down which meant nothing new had to be created to fill in any newly made gaps.

The first exception to this otherwise smooth-sailing mission, was the Kitchen. The Kitchen is a room that, due to this new floor plan, needed to be embiggened quite a lot... possibly almost double the floor's surface area. So when Garrett initially increased this room, it became immediately apparent that some restructuring and new props were required.

Garrett and MrNobody immediately got on the case, and we're now finished with a bigger, and arguably improved, Kitchen:

So as you can see, quite a lot of extra stuff has been added to this room. So far it seems like the Kitchen and the Server Room will be enlarged the most, the others will hopefully be a little easier to adjust.

Hope you like how this looks! I'll be updating the GJ page as we go through these changes, but it may take a while before I start this.

We've also been busy with other stuff. The backgrounds of the trading cards from the previous dev log (and Dawko's stream) are getting a slight upgrade.

The backgrounds for these cards were originally completely out of focus, but just before Dawko's stream we decided that a tilt-shift effect looked better. This means that the top halfs of the cards will be out of focus, but the bottoms will be in-focus, because those parts are closer to the "camera", right?

Anyway, Turntail (Sian), the artist for the backgrounds, wanted to render out these parts a bit more, because they're now fully in focus, which is fair enough! I think it demonstrates her attention to detail pretty well:

Most people probably wouldn't mind the tilt-shifted original artwork, but Sian can pump out one of these every day. So why not I guess? We always try to go above and beyond, and I appreciate the extra effort.

Big thanks to Garrett Tube, MrNobody and Turntail for their hard work this month, and a Happy Birthday to Ellie / StupidButterfly today, who has also been doing a great job with the cartoon artwork for the trading cards!

I'm going to try doing more of these kinds of dev logs, because I think it's better than you guys thinking we're not doing anything lol.

- Kane