Welcome back once more fellow party guests!

This week was a bit slower than last week, but I still worked on a lot of and learned some new big things.

The first of these was adding lighting to each scene. If you've watch me on TikTok, you'll have seen a few bumps in the road to making lighting a thing. I had to rework my "skybox" to work with the universal renderer by attaching a sprite to the main character via parent constraint in Unity. It was a simple fix, but I learned a ton from it, like most of my problems thus far on this project. I am glad I did add in lighting, however, because I was hesitant through a few ugly stages, but I think it really pulled a lot together visually. The colors are perfect and the way the player moves through the scene just feels nicer with some of the layering effects I have going on.

Another major thing I added in this week was the start to my dialogue system. I followed a tutorial online and it worked perfectly! As someone who struggles with understanding code, I was surprised I had no issues during the process of building the system from the ground up. I'm so proud of myself, but the only thing I'm hung up on now is expanding on what I already have. There are features that I would like to include that I understand in basic terms how you might go about implementing them, but when put into practice, I have no clue how to approach it. This is the very reason why I'm so glad and so lucky that I have a variety of very incredible programmers that have offered to help me figure things out if I ever need it.  The community of people, even immediately near you, is one of the reasons why I love game development so much! Shoutout to the people who have helped me so far, even for stupid things!

On top of this, I have been working on more marketing material and possibly stepping this up a bit while I wait to progress enough for more official marketing plans. If you want to see me attempt this as an incredibly awkward person, follow me on TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky with @paperrbirds! I don't remember if I said this last time, but I will be revealing characters on there with the possibility of adding guests to the party if things do well enough, so stay tuned!

Overall, not too much in terms of general amount of things I did, but in terms of prep for the future and work on details, I made a ton of progress! Once more, I will see you next week!

-Paper <3