Hey, everyone! It’s about as late as it can get for the month unless I release these on the 30th day, but it’s whatever. These updates get to be a hassle for me to program, render, bug test, optimize, and write after all of the times I get to do these, but I do it for you guys cause you all make it all worthwhile. But here are some of the stuff I’ve been working on for this month:

Short Summary:

• Heavy optimizations to images, animations, effects, etc. (the project size a few weeks ago was around 1.4 GBs; now it's around 560 MB and still growing)

• Massive Overhaul for Buildings and Tilemaps in the Overworld (Fazbear Hills [still more to do!])

• Instant load times with transitions between the World, Fighting, and Customization Scenes (more to follow soon)

• New Effects in the Fight Scenes (Gears and Parts Exploding, Player Confetti)

• Victory Code Finished and WIP Level Up Systems

• Welcoming @wholeaddition and Slushy to the team!

Long Summary:

This month has been a grueling task for me and a few others. With me starting college classes, the month has been hard for me to gain much motivation to work on the game. However, what was on my mind was optimizing the sizing (length-wise and space-wise) on many of the images, animations, and other stuff in the game files. There were even older, larger files that the engine saved that were odd that the engine saved, so it was up to me to do some house-cleaning on the animations. Before August, the game project file was a humongous 1.4GB size! Even I thought it was outrageous reading the size of it. So after many months of re-renders for many, MANY files, the game now stands at a reasonable 560 MB of storage [as of today] (for people unaware, this is nearly half a GB). 

Of course, there will still be more optimizations to these files later if things don’t look great, and so on. Optimization will be needed for the game since there will be a LOT of files for this game (different characters, locals, etc.).

Skipping the boring stuff, I’ve worked extensively on the Overworld for Fazbear Hills! It felt important to make it feel like it was a central hub for this small little town filled with many residents. Of course, the area is still not done. There are still many more houses and buildings to make so that it feels like a small village area. (Not to mention camera changes, the name of the area at the top left, and the area traversal system at the bottom right that I’ll work on when we get more regions).

Overworld so far as of this devlog

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! You also get to see instant load times in action! No more are the loading screens between menuing and the overworld! You get to play the game faster than you could before! However, this will not affect the Main Menu/Save Select Screens because the game does need to read the information and load in all the graphics and scenes. Don’t worry, though, because you will see some new loading screens between the Save Select scene and the Main Scene (including Overworld, Fights, Customizations, and more to come)!

As for the Fight Scenes, I didn’t manage to work on enemy attacks, dodge/parrying, or health. I’m still deciding what to do for healing pools (considering adding overhealing as a mechanic that slowly drains). However, I did manage to learn about Blender physics and emitters! So now we have some cool effects for the enemies getting blown up into smaller parts. Not to mention the Confetti that explodes when teammates level up (just like the OG)!

Oh yeah, leveling up! That’s still in the game! Also, the EXP counts down to 0 as the teammates earn points (just like the OG too).

Finally, I wanted to give a big welcome to @wholeaddition and Slushy into the dev team! @wholeaddition will be making Environment Concepts and Designs, while Slushy will be our Character Modeler (for the super secret part of the game that I don’t want to spoil).

I just want to say that I’ve been drained this month. Dealing with college classes, still job hunting, and still working on the game… It’s been real exhausting. But I know that this fangame is important to a lot of people as much as it is to me. The gameplay ideas and scripting have been a blast for me, and I can’t imagine how much it means to me how you all care about the game. I thank you all so much for it.
I’m unsure what will be finished or ready to be shown for the next devlog, but there is a LOT of behind-the-scenes stuff that is not ready to be shown to the public yet. I’m super excited about what’s come, though!

Goodbye, and see you next month!